At first it had appeared an easy enough arrest for the watchmen of the new Dundee Police Force. It was 1825, late at night on the last Saturday before Christmas and a drunken man had been annoying people in the High Street. The watchmen arrested him, discovered he was John Gordon, a plumber’s apprentice, and were escorting him to the police office when he suddenly lay down on the street and refused to move any further. As the watchmen lifted him and began to carry him away, a crowd gathered, shouting and pushing at the officers. Battering through to the police office, the watchmen deposited Gordon in a cell but when they returned to the streets the crowd was waiting, reinforced by others who emerged from the pubs and shebeens.
A shower of stones forced the watchmen back to the police office and some began to grumble that they would be better in a job with more money and less trouble. Mr Hume, the superintendent, gave them a rousing talk and ordered them back out to clear the crowd. Rather than facing them head on, the watchmen slipped out the back door, probably intending to take the rioters by surprise, and moved forward in a compact body. Immediately after the watchmen appeared, the barrage began again, with people hiding in the entrances to closes and leaning out of windows to throw whatever came to hand. This time, however, police watchmen from other parts of the town rallied to aid their comrades and dispelled the crowd.
But not for long. When the police chased the crowd from one street they reassembled in another, so Dundee echoed with the raucous cries of battle, the clatter of stones on cobbles and the crack of police truncheons on the heads of rioters. The trouble continued past twelve o’clock and into the small hours of Sunday morning, with stones weighing as much as three pounds and even a length of iron railing used as weapons. There were casualties on both sides with one police watchman, Daniel Mackay, badly injured by a stone thrown from a window in the Overgate. There were also twenty-six people arrested for rioting or refusing to go home before the police finally restored quiet to the streets.
Although this riot was quite extreme, there was no doubt that a uniformed police force was not universally welcomed in Dundee, or indeed throughout the nation. Many believed that the police had been formed to protect the respectable from the unfortunate, or even to keep the poor under control. Having the police dressed in blue uniforms was a deliberate attempt to avoid any resemblance to the military but they were still a disciplined, uniformed body of men whose duty was to enforce laws that often seemed to victimise the underclass. With their long, tailed greatcoats, top hats and hand-held lanterns, the police were quite distinctive and were soon to be a familiar sight in the streets of Dundee.
For all the hostility of many of the population, Dundee’s early police establishment was not large. In November 1824 there was one superintendant, one lieutenant, six sergeants, six men for the day patrol, six men for the night patrol, thirty-six watchmen, one turnkey to look after those arrested and one office keeper. That was a total of fifty-eight men to look after an expanding industrial city with a population exceeding 34,000. There were also the scavengers who cleared the dung piles and the lamplighters who fought the encroaching dark and who were on the official police establishment, but not involved in upholding the law. At that time the police office was in St Clements Lane and, without a dedicated jail, prisoners were held in the top floors of the Town House.
In those early months attacks on the police seemed to be a hobby amongst certain sections of the community. For example, on Tuesday 16th November 1824 a carter named David Morrison was fined five shillings for insulting the new police. The following week two drunken gentlemen strutted through Dundee bullying everybody in the belief that their genteel birth would protect them from justice. The Dundee police thought differently, despite being threatened with dire vengeance when they arrested the more violent of the two. The Police Court agreed with the officers and fined the drunks two guineas. That same week a man set his mastiff on a policeman walking his beat in the Seagate. In January a policeman was escorting a prisoner to the police office when a youth attacked him hoping to rescue his friend. He ended the night in a cell. Later that week the police had to tie up a man named James Wilson who had attacked them, and a carter was fined five shillings for swearing at Sergeant Thomas Hardy. The following week another gentleman was taken to court and fined for what the Advertiser called ‘abusing the watchmen’ while on Thursday 20th January in Baltic Street a man threw a stone at a watchman named David Leslie, who had to be carried to a surgeon. Also on the 20th a seaman in Seagate attacked the watchman on duty there, breaking some of their lanterns. The following week the police court seemed filled with seamen attacking the police.
And so it continued. Every time the police walked their beats they were liable to receive abuse, insult and assault and when the great Reform Riot of 1831 took place, the police office at St Clements was ransacked by an angry mob. It took a lot of courage to be a policeman on the streets of Dundee in the 1820s and 1830s.
With few men to guard the streets and no military garrison nearer than Perth to call upon, the police were very vulnerable. At the Police Court on 24th March 1825, a number of men were fined for assaulting the police watchmen, including a Chapelshade manufacturer who bit a watchman’s hand. A typical case occurred in December 1829 when Alexander Gall, a man with a long record of violence, was in the company of a prostitute at the back of the Wards at about midnight on a Saturday. When James Matthews, the watchman, shone his lantern on them, Gall immediately swore and threatened to knock out his brains. Naturally Matthews answered back, but Gall grabbed his truncheon and battered him to the ground; when Matthews called for help Gall and his woman fled. Gall was later fined £2 at the Police Court.
In April of that year a man named Alexander Meldrum was accused of assaulting Sergeant Alexander Taws, who was so injured he could not work. Taws was one of the best-known of the early police, whom J.M. Beatts, in his book Reminiscences of an Old Dundonian, described as being ‘portly’. In 1827, while still a constable, Taws was involved in an incident in Union Street when rival gangs of boys from the Grammar School and the English School were throwing stones at each other. Alexander Taws led a body of police straight into the heart of the scramash, arrested the ringleaders and marched them to the St Clements Lane Police Office.
Despite the high hopes of the magistrates, not all the early police proved up to the job. At the beginning of March 1825 a watchman named William Stephen was fined 1/4d and dismissed the service for banging at the door of a pub in his Seagate beat and demanding drink for himself and his two companions. The following month in the Witchknowe a watchman named Raffins helped put down a disturbance by a group of weavers, but in doing so he beat one of the men so severely that Mr Dick, the police surgeon, had to dress the wound. The weaver was still bloody and bruised when he stood in front of the Police Court. In May the superintendent dismissed Raffin but took no further action. Including Raffin, ten policemen were dismissed in the four weeks between 11th April and 11th May 1825. These were David Taylor, Alexander Lesslie and James Shearer for being drunk while on their beat, William Gordon and William Middleton for being drunk and asleep on their beat, Alexander Robertson, Thomas McEvoy and Thomas Abbott for falling asleep on their beat, David Sharp for being in a pub while on duty and finally Alexander Raffin for improper conduct. In August a policeman was jailed for the terrible crime of picking berries from somebody’s garden when he was on duty. In November 1826 there was another case of police brutality when John Sharp, a Nethergate night watchman, used his staff to attack a young man, without apparent reason. With the other police as witnesses, the superintendent warned him that any further examples of violence would mean instant dismissal. The rules for police were plain: abide by every letter of the law or lose the position.
Despite these blips, the police force became established. By the middle of May 1825 there were six sergeants, four night patrols, six day patrols, thirty-six watchmen and a man who was paid the princely sum of five shillings a week to trim the watchman’s lanterns. Even more significantly, the presence of uniformed police in Dundee seemed to have pushed at least some of the criminal element out of the town. In April the people of Lochee met to discuss forming their own police force as the number of undesirables coming to the village had increased. The people decided to create twenty-four constables from local men, with a six-month term of office.
Thomas Abbott, who had been dismissed from the police for falling asleep, became a weaver but was soon accused of stealing twenty spindles of yarn. He claimed he bought it from Mr Peat, the foreman of the bleach field of Turnbull and Company. Peat had conveniently disappeared but Messenger-at-Arms Patrick Mackay arrested William Stewart for buying the yarn.
In the meantime, the new force and its associates tried to prove their worth. On 12th June 1825 the Scouringburn watchman, helped by the day patrol, put out a lodging house fire. When they forced their way into the two-roomed house they found forty people inside, with piles of straw the only beds on the earth floors. It was a reminder of the conditions in which some people in Dundee had to live. In September that same year Constable John Chaplain chased and arrested a notorious bad character named Scott, who had returned to Dundee after being banished. The uniformed men were beginning to show their teeth.
The police were not well paid. In June Superintendent Home had suggested that the most efficient of the day patrol had earned a pay rise from 11/1d to 14/- a week. That was still not great money for men who were in the firing line the moment they stepped out the door and whose every move was watched by a critical and suspicious public. Even so, they were still allowed their idiosyncrasies. As late as August 1828, four years after the establishment of a professional, uniformed force, the Castle Street watchman took his collie dog with him as he walked his beat. It was still the watchman’s job to shout the hour, and the dog helped, barking along with his master. The people of Castle Street must have wondered if it was worth the money to have a dog yapping every hour from ten at night until four in the morning.
However, the Dundee sheriff officers were equally fallible. In August, Thomas Anderson and Thomas Marshall were sent to bring in a woman who had illegally left her position in service. It was a routine task, but they took a pair of handcuffs, and fortified themselves with a few refreshments before rapping at the woman’s door. Quicker witted than both the Sheriff ’s men, she dodged Anderson, grabbed the handcuffs and locked them around Marshall’s wrists before running way, holding the keys in triumph. Two policemen carried the discomfited Marshall to the cells and left him there, still handcuffed. Presumably he was released when he sobered up.
Even so, by 1828 the Dundee police were more professional. At the beginning of December three furtive-looking men were drifting around the shops in the town centre, probing and looking but not actually buying. When they walked into Provost Brown’s shop in Castle Street, he sent a message to Superintendent Home. The superintendent ordered Sergeants Hardy and Strachan to bring them in. The provost’s instincts were correct, for when the sergeants dragged the men to the police office they found nine India silk handkerchiefs and a fur cap hidden in their clothes, all stolen from shops in Castle Street. As the men were searched, one, an Edinburgh cabinetmaker named John Smith, stuffed something in his mouth and tried to swallow it. Seizing Smith by the throat, Sergeant Hardy recovered a half-chewed letter.
The letter was from Smith’s father, and spoke of the ‘infernal police’, but the name may have been an alias, as the man who chewed letters also called himself John Brown. One of his companions, known as Charles MacDonald, had an alias of Peter Jack. MacDonald was a notorious man. His father was long dead but his mother had moved in with one of the more unsavoury characters who wandered the northern counties of Scotland, living by his wits, his fists and his light fingers. Termed the ‘Cock of the North’, this man was well known to the authorities. The relationship between MacDonald’s mother and the Cock of the North ended when he murdered her, and the Glasgow Circuit Court sentenced the Cock to be hanged. Their son continued the family tradition of lawlessness. The third man was William Cammuince and he seemed to be out of his depth among such characters.
This incident, perhaps minor in itself, demonstrates not only the sort of people the Dundee police had to deal with, but their efficiency in arresting them, and some of their methods. Perhaps they were crude by twenty-first century standards, but they were also relatively efficient. As they notched up successes, the police might have become more acceptable to the Dundee public.
The Dundee Directory of 1829 records the names of some of these early police. It states that John Home was Superintendent of Police and the Procurator Fiscal of Court; William Dick was Surgeon and the sergeants included Alexander Dow, Thomas Hardy, John Low and William McRoberts; Alexander Donaldson was the Harbour Sergeant and James McDougal was the keeper of the magazine. Sometimes a name reaches through the murk of time to afford brief illumination to a period. One such name was Sergeant Jack, who looms out of obscurity in a few cases in the late 1820s and early 1830s, only to fade back into the murk of history.
In January 1829 Sergeant Jack arrested a man named Alexander MacDonald, a flax dresser in Monifieth, who had stolen a silver watch. Jack also retrieved the watch. Nearly exactly a year later he arrested an Aberdeen man who had come to try his luck in Dundee, and in February 1830 he searched through the Overgate for a well-known law breaker called George Keith who had already been banished from Forfarshire. Although no details have survived, Sergeant Jack found Keith hidden in a house in Rodger’s Close, Overgate, so there was either a tip-off or a thorough house-to-house search of that warren of narrow lanes and crowded houses. Either way, Sergeant Jack was doing his job in preserving the respectable of Dundee from the underworld.
Only a few months later Jack was again making the news when on one Friday in May he arrested three people under sentence of banishment. Jean Mitchell and Francis Wright were well-known as petty thieves, but Christina Scott had made her name as a hen stealer, a crime that would perhaps go unnoticed today. With nineteenth-century Dundonians far closer to their rural ancestors and rural roots than is often credited, hen keeping was quite common, both as a source of income and a dietary supplement, so hen stealing was a fairly widespread crime.
Even with such men, the early Dundee police could occasionally slip back to their old wayward ways. In early January 1830 an unnamed young flesher was working in Greenmarket Square when two sheriff officers and a posse of police officers grabbed him. Considering he was innocent of any crime, the flesher made a determined resistance, and the arrival of some burly shore porters to assist the forces of law and order did not make things any better. The flesher punched and wrestled and raked his boots down the shins of the porters, but eventually they dragged him to St Clements Lane and shoved him in a cell.
It was not until later that the prisoner was informed he had been arrested for being the father of an illegitimate child, a charge he denied. When the flesher’s father arrived and gave his name, the police realised they had the wrong man and released him, but it was a reminder that the police were still not perfect.
Sometimes it was either inexperience or naivety that let the police down. About two o’clock on a Sunday morning in February 1831, the constable on the West Port beat came across a makeshift ladder leaning against a wall in Young’s Close. The wall was one side of a small cul-de-sac with a single-storey house at the other side and no exit at the top, while the ladder consisted of a six-foot-long plank of wood with a rope attached in place of rungs. There was nothing in the close but a single water cask that stood in a corner. Realising that there was something wrong, the policeman returned to the West Port and summoned help, but re-entered Young’s Close before anybody arrived. Climbing the ladder, he saw a man in the close below and called out to him.
‘I’m coming up,’ the man said at once, but as the policeman waited, the man jumped onto the water cask, scrambled onto the roof of the house on the opposite side of the close and vanished. Rather than arrest a burglar, the policeman found only a set of housebreaking tools, but within a day or so he had been sacked for inefficiency.
At other times, the police were very successful. In the beginning of December 1830 the watchman at the Wards found a cattle drover sleeping in an outhouse and took him to the police office. When he was questioned, the drover claimed he had spent the night with a girl who had subsequently robbed him. Drovers were good targets for thieves, for they would take a drove of cattle to market, sell them and carry the money back to their employer. They were a hardy bunch, sleeping outside beside their cattle whatever the weather, but in common with many people from the country, they were not always wise to the tricks of the town.
Making a few enquiries, the police superintendent learned that three suspicious-looking people had caught the mail coach for Aberdeen. They had given false names and sat on the roof, the cheapest, most exposed and coldest seats. The superintendent knew the mother of one of the suspects lived in Arbroath, twenty miles up the coast. Accordingly he sent the redoubtable Sergeant Dow along with the drover on the next coach. Arbroath was a small place and strangers were easily seen, so it did not take Dow long to track down the three people who had recently arrived in the town. Arresting Gersham Elder, Barbara Elder and the local bad character Alison Watt, Sergeant Dow found £2 9/- in a drawer in the Elders’ house and another 20/- in Watt’s. Only ten shillings had been spent, and that on women’s clothing. What Watt learned next makes one wish for a time machine, or a nineteenth-century tape recorder as Gersham Elder said he had been the woman with whom the drover spent the evening. He had a very feminine voice and looks, dressed in women’s clothing and confessed he was in the habit of prowling Dundee in women’s clothing and performing acts that were well beyond decency. We will never know the full story.
Even with the police on the streets, there were times when the Dundee public took the law into their own hands, often in indignation at some act of cruelty to a vulnerable person. As in every period, crowds of idle youths tended to congregate at certain places, and in Dundee during the early 1830s they chose the piazzas of the Town House. As this building was where much of the official business of the town was conducted, many people would feel uncomfortable passing so many youths. In February 1832 the jailer, Colin MacEwan, took matters upon himself and whipped a fourteen-year-old boy who refused to leave. Not surprisingly, people objected to a child being attacked and gathered against the jailer. For a while the situation looked ugly for MacEwan, but some police commissioners rescued him, although he was taken to court and fined £2 2/-.
While older youths congregated at street corners and outside the Town House, gangs of younger children tended to annoy the street porters. They liked to jump on the handcarts the porters trundled around the streets and get a free lift, depending on the porter’s good nature and mighty muscles. However, not every porter was inclined to act as a free taxi service and in August Duncan Barland lost his temper with a girl who had jumped on his cart when he pushed it along the Murraygate. Grabbing the girl, he pulled her over his knee, lifted her skirt and spanked her soundly. When he released her, the girl ran away, howling. An indignant crowd complained and the case reached the court, where witnesses spoke of Barland’s quiet character and said the girl got no more than she deserved, but the porter was fined 5/- nonetheless.
In January 1835, eleven years after they were formed, the Dundee police were given better uniforms and equipment. A lot of thought had gone into the improvements, and the experiences of the watchmen were taken into account. Off came the long tails of the night watchmen’s greatcoat, to be replaced by a shorter coat that was less cumbersome when they had to chase a law breaker. The hand-held lantern was also discarded in favour of one that was strapped to the body and equipped with a shutter, so enabling the watchman to approach a culprit without announcing his presence in a blaze of light.
The watchmen’s hat was also improved, so it was stronger and more waterproof, with a strap that fastened under the chin. Until these alterations there had been a set pattern to attacking the watchmen. First the attacker would break his lantern or knock it out of his hand, and when the watchmen tried to pick it up, the attacker would throw the long tails of his coat over his head and thump him on the back of the head or any other vulnerable part. Now, with more efficient lanterns and stouter hats, the watchmen were slightly better protected. It was a start.
Although the population of Dundee grew year on year, the numbers of the police establishment were remarkably constant. The 1837 Dundee Directory states there were eleven day patrols, six night patrols and just thirty-six watchmen that year; while the 1841 issue of the same publication says that with the population around 62,000 there was one lieutenant, one sergeant major, four sergeants, one turnkey for the cells, twelve day patrols, four night patrols and thirty watchmen. According to the record of 1850, there were 70,000 people in Dundee in that year, and the police establishment had altered into something more recognisable. Under the superintendence of Donald Mackay, there was John Cameron, the lieutenant of police, two criminal officers, six police sergeants, two street sergeants, forty-three constables and one female turnkey to care for those women who were under arrest.
The criminal officer was what we now term a detective, a policeman working in civilian clothing whose primary function was to solve crimes after they had been committed, rather than the uniformed officer whose duty was more crime prevention or on-the-spot arrest. Although the British Criminal Investigation Department began in 1844 when Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, allowed a dozen police sergeants to shed their uniforms, local superintendents throughout the country had already used plain clothed police. These men had been known as ‘active officers’ and were probably disliked with even greater fervour than the uniformed men. In March 1842 the superintendent had recommended Dundee should have two criminal officers. He had already experimented with two active officers, George Reid and Hope Ramsay, and was so satisfied with the results he was prepared to do without an orderly to pay them their eighteen shillings a week wages.
The early police superintendents were not always successful. According to historian J.M. Beatts, the first was a tailor called John Low, who only lasted a few months. Then came Alexander Downie, who reigned from 1824 to 1825. He was an old military man who had fought in the Peninsular War under Wellington but was now retired on half pay. John Home was next, and he restored some of the faith in the police as he lasted in the job for some nine years until 1834 and had a good reputation. James Drummond followed, and then the position again became vacant.
In October 1839 the Dundee Advertiser placed a notice looking for a new Superintendent of Police in 1839. The town sought a man of ‘superior qualifications’ and offered a salary of £120 a year with a free house with coal and gas light. As well as policing, the job included inspecting the lighting and cleaning and acting as public prosecutor in the police court. Of the fifty men who came forward, David Corstorphan was selected. He was a fair choice and during his tenure there are some traces of humanity within the service. When John Ker, a policeman of four years’ service, died in early 1841, David Corstorphan handed over £4 11/- to his widow. It was hardly a pension, but still a nice token for the time. Corstorphan died in late 1841.
As for his successor, Joseph Maddison, his term of office is mercifully forgotten. In 1842 there was a surge in crime in York and Maddison became superintendent of a local police force. Unfortunately he used the position to embezzle police funds, but by the time he was found out he had already been appointed superintendent of the Dundee police.
The next appointee was a Caithness man, Donald Mackay, and proved probably the most successful of the early superintendents. He had been working in Dunfermline and when he left, fifty of his friends entertained him to a farewell dinner and presented him with a gold watch and chain, so he had made an impression in Fife. Mackay remained in the position
until 1876, when David Dewar took over until 1909.
Regardless of who was in command, December seemed to be a bad month for attacks on the police, and 1833 was no exception. On the night of Saturday 1st December, Constable Peter Mackenzie was on his beat when somebody called for assistance. He hurried to the Witchknowe, where a man named Alexander Farquharson had been causing trouble. Mackenzie knew Farquharson had a bad reputation, so arrested him there and then. That should have been the end of the matter, but as he headed for the police office, some of the crowd moved forward. Outnumbered, Mackenzie had little chance and the mob released his prisoner, but when police reinforcements arrived they succeeded in driving a wedge into the crowd and grabbing Farquharson back.
Rather than withdraw, the crowd became more threatening, chanting, ‘Kill the buggers! Kill the buggers!’ There were more skirmishes; the crowd overpowered an officer and grabbed his staff and from then onward it was a running battle, with a chanting crowd around 300 strong threatening and fighting with the police. They reached the Overgate at one o’clock on Sunday morning and people stared from windows lit and unlit as the police and the mob battled for possession of the prisoner. The crowd pressed hard, knocking down the police like ninepins, and the arrival of more police only aggravated the situation.
Eventually the police gave up. With most of them walking wounded, they released Farquharson. As the crowd began to drift home, job done, the police, battered and bleeding, picked up a few they believed had been most prominent in the riot. These men appeared before Baillies Kidd and Christie at the Police Court on Monday morning and denied all the charges. They had apparently been innocently walking along the Overgate and were surprised to be arrested. The court thought otherwise: the flax dressers Peter Drysdale, John Wynd and Martin Watson, together with the weaver Colin Gallagher, were found guilty. Drysdale, Gallagher and Watson were fined the maximum £5 with an alternative of sixty days, with Wynd fined £2 or thirty days.
Incidents where the crowd interfered to rescue a prisoner were all too common. On 17th November 1835, the arrest of James Gibson, a drunken shoemaker and hawker, started another riot. When the police reached Barrack Street, Gibson bellowed for help and a crowd swarmed across. The resulting stramash saw one policeman with minor injuries, three seriously hurt, a flax dresser named John Mackay arrested and a ten-guinea reward offered for the names of the rioters.
There was another anti-police riot in June 1836 when a well-known Hilltown troublemaker named James Storier led a mob who rescued a prisoner. The police arrested Storier not long afterward. At the beginning of November 1843 a Dundee mob again rose against the police. This time the trouble started when William McCrae, an Irish weaver at Easson’s Factory in Victoria Street, had attacked one of his colleagues. A policeman arrested McCrae, but as they left the factory, William’s brother Samuel launched a furious attack, freed the prisoner and ran away. Picking himself off the ground and dusting himself down, the policeman sought help. The policeman guessed the McCraes would be in their father’s house, and so he went there, booting open the front door, only to see the brothers escape out a skylight and onto the roof, where they danced and jeered at their pursuers. Unwilling to follow through the skylight, the police borrowed ladders from the men who worked Dundee’s fire engines, captured the McCraes and brought them back in handcuffs. As usual, a crowd had gathered to see what all the commotion was about, and now attacked the police. There was the usual barrage of missiles as the police eased through Hilltown. Forced to take refuge in a shop until reinforcements arrived, the police lost control of Samuel McCrae, but grabbed a brace of bakers named Bogue and Reid in exchange. By the time they reached St Clements Lane all the police were more or less injured, one seriously, and they must have wondered if their job was worth all the fuss.
By the mid-nineteenth century there was an army garrison in Dudhope Castle. Strangely, given the bad reputation soldiers carried, they rarely bothered the police although there were occasional incidents. One occurred in February 1844 when Private William Maxwell of the 92nd Highlanders was on sentry duty at the barrack gates. Two drunken men, Moses Taggart, a weaver from the Scouringburn, and Robert Tasker, a seaman from Chapelshade, began to antagonise, insult and assault him, but Maxwell retained his discipline and his position as sentinel. When two officers passed, Tasker turned on them, but this time Maxwell did act, fending off Tasker’s punches and kicks. The police arrested both drunks and after a spell in the Dudhope’s Black Hole, took them to the Police Court where they were awarded a further ten days in jail.
The next incident was potentially more serious. At midnight on 6th October 1844 a group from the 60th Rifles were causing trouble at the bottom of Crichton Street. The Fish Street watchman hurried over to quieten things down, but the soldiers turned on him. Either the 60th were unpopular or the manhood of Dundee were feeling brave that night, for several came running to help the police, whereupon the soldiers drew their swords – the Rifles’ name for their bayonets. A general melee started, with the police pitting their truncheons against the swords of the soldiers, and the end result was one soldier arrested and given a week in jail. Even when they were alone, soldiers could sometimes be trouble. In October 1853, two men of the 82nd Regiment wandered along Dudhope Crescent, drunk as lords and insulting everybody they met. For some reason they took a strong dislike to a mill overseer named James McLeod. Private James Moran took off his broad belt and attacked McLeod with the buckle end, treating a policeman to the same treatment a moment later. He was rewarded with thirty days in jail.
By the 1850s the police were based at Bell Street, where their headquarters still are. According to the 1853 Dundee Directory, Donald Mackay now had Alexander McQueen as First Lieutenant, Alex Mackay as Second Lieutenant and Alexander Webster as Surgeon. There were two criminal officers, one police sergeant, four street sergeants, four night patrols and a force of ninety constables, with one male and one female turnkey. The growing numbers correspond to the expanding city, but each year the police were becoming more proficient. On the last Sunday of February 1853 there was a daylight break-in at a shop in the Seagate. The owner, Mrs Wilson, was at church, and when she returned two hours later she found thieves had forced open a back window that overlooked a small court and taken her cash box.
The active officers Smith and James were put on the case. Both were experienced men and they traced and arrested the thief and found most of the money buried underground. The case was wrapped up by ten that same night. Smith and James had another success the following day when they saw three young men, McInally, Balmer and Holland, waddling around the town looking very bulky. Taking them to the police office, Smith and James had them strip-searched, to find each with several layers of clothing, all stolen from houses in Dundee’s west end. Further investigation also found some pirns that had been removed from a Blackness Road factory. The three men were arrested.
By the late 1850s the Dundee police were becoming more sophisticated in crime detection. Early on a Saturday afternoon in September 1858 the manager of the Seafield Works sent a clerk named George Thomson to the bank with over £400. The temptation of such a huge sum proved too much and Thomson absconded with the money. At two o’clock the same afternoon the Seafield Works informed the police, who immediately telegraphed the police offices in the major urban centres in Scotland and England and wrote letters to the smaller towns. They also sent copies of Thomson’s photograph to the main police offices around the country.
As soon as Superintendent Charles of the Arbroath Police read the letter he alerted his own officers and within an hour they found Thomson and two young women in the White Hart Hotel. A quick search found only £2, but Charles knew his own area and dug out £300 in a house in Applegate and a £100 bank note with a High Street merchant. Travelling on the midnight train, Lieutenant Neil Gunn was in Arbroath before one in the morning, took hold of Thomson and brought him back to Dundee in time for the Monday morning court sitting. As an example of the efficiency of the mid-Victorian police, the case of George Thomason would be hard to best.
The ordinary beat constable was also becoming professional. Just after midnight on Sunday 18th July 1857 the High Street constable noticed that the door to George Scott’s warehouse in Tyndall’s Wynd was flapping open. Gathering reinforcements, the officer forced the door and arrested a man they found inside. When they questioned their prisoner, the police found he was a ticket of leave convict called James Brown, who kept a legal grocery in the Scouringburn. He was armed with a knife and wore rubber overshoes to deaden his footsteps when engaged on his night-time activities. A search of his house found piles of stolen property, over 200 skeleton keys, carpenter’s tools, hinges, hammer heads, a jemmy and keys that fit Mr Scott’s warehouse. Even more incriminating were the German silver chains and single gold chain that had been stolen from Alston’s jewellery shop in the High Street and a number of cheques stolen from Smith’s china shop in Castle Street. That single observant police constable had brought a notable career thief to justice, and he stands as an example of the growing professionalism of the Dundee police. However, there was still plenty crime in Dundee.