Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (2 page)

Chesterton saw all this more than half a century ago:

`The secret is,’ Father Brown said, `that it was I who killed all those people…. I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders. I didn’t actually kill the men by material means, but that’s not important. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material means; but that’s not the point. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action…. What do these men mean, nine times out of ten … when they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a dry impartial light, in what I should call a dead and dehumanized light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his “criminal skull” as if it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros’s nose. When a scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour - I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer … no man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about “criminals”, as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat….’

I wish I could claim to have risen consistently to this high seriousness; irony and complacency keep breaking in to prevent it. Still Chesterton seems to me preferable to Roughead. He feels with the murderer and realises that the murderer’s denial of the claims of humanity is all too human. It may be objected, justly enough, that to attack Roughead and his attitude to crime, is superfluous; no more than flogging a dead donkey; that indeed we have gone too far in the other direction; moral relativism is all the mode; criminals are ‘understood’, their crimes explained away, their victims ignored; that sociologists of our day, far from talking about criminal types, are only too ready to talk away the existence of crime itself. Treating it merely or at most as a manifestation of antisocial feeling, they demoralise it; and, inasmuch as they are themselves frequently hostile to society as it is presently constituted, they sympathise only too completely with the criminal. In polysyllabic jargon they blur issues and render all actions, except those of the civil authority, morally neutral.

Chesterton would have had no time for this sort of talk either; nor do I. Murder is not to be diminished, and civil society has to be defended. It is right to reprobate the murderer whose ‘ victim has suffered an unspeakable wrong. Those who talk fulsomely of social deprivation can hardly be trusted if they are blind to the fact of a more vital deprivation. There is such a thing as evil, and it rejects the claims of humanity. The untrammelled ego will prove destructive, while the Good in Man, the highest Good of which he is capable, is creative.

Yet at the same time it is true that the forms, habits and ideologies of civil society contribute at any time to the formation of the characters of those who murder. So, of my subjects, David Haggart was led into a world of professional criminals that seemed to offer, did indeed offer, that bourgeois desideratum, the career open to talents; it promised a way of life that accorded with his notions of style - the criminal fraternity aped the aristocracy in manners and morals; but it was a way of life which made it very likely that one day, in rage, desperation or in liquor, he would strike and kill. William Bennison, his ego fostered by the balm of his Evangelical religion, was taught erroneously to think that all things were permitted to the Redeemed who had been washed in the Blood of the Lamb. Eugene Marie Chantrelle, embittered by failure, slew his wife, who had only remained tied to him because she feared to lose her children and dreaded the obloquy that separation or divorce would bring her. Jessie King, the Stockbridge baby-farmer, was given her opportunity by a code of morality and social behaviour which ensured that one Edinburgh child in fourteen was born illegitimate. Donald Merrett, voracious as the pike he resembled, was an early modernist, a precursor of the affluent society, intent on selfgratification, dull to obligation. Intensely selfish, he alone swam free to continue destroying….

David Haggart

Or the Coneish Cove

From the Castle Rock at Edinburgh you look across the Forth to Fife. Today the foreground of the view is covered by buildings that stretch, intermingled with parks, gardens and playing-fields, all the way to the Firth. At the time of Waterloo, however, only the beginnings of Edinburgh’s New Town had been built, and a gazer from the Rock would soon have overlooked them. The open Lothian countryside stretched down to Cramond and the sea. It was on the Rock in that year that the young George Borrow, author of Lavengro and The Bible in Spain, came one day on a lad a few years older than himself, perched on a promontory and gazing into that watery distance:

`A lad of some fifteen years; he is bare-headed, and his red uncombed hair stands on end like a hedgehog’s bristles; his frame is lithy, like that of an antelope, but he has prodigous breadth of chest; he wears a military undress, that of the regiment, even of a drummer, for it is Wild Davy, whom a month before I had seen enlisted on Leith Links to serve King George with drum and drumstick as long as his services were required, and who, ere a week had elapsed, had smitten with his fist Drum-Major Elzigood who, incensed at his own inaptitude, had threatened him with his cane.’ Wild Davy was David Haggart, who was to be hanged a few hundred yards from that Rock eight years later. Borrow, in the full flood of the Romantic imagination, went on to couple him with Marlowe’s Tamburlaine:

`Tamerlane and Haggart. Haggart and Tamerlane. Both these men were robbers, and of low birth, yet one perished on an ignoble scaffold, and the other died emperor of the world.’

The association, wild, even absurd, though it is, suggests Haggart’s fascination for those connected with him. More heartfelt perhaps, though clumsy in expression, was to be the lament of a young girl who had been at school with him:

Oh, woe is me! What shall I say? Young David Haggart’s gone.

I did not think when at the school, He’d die a tree upon.

Hail sober dullness! Ever hail! Young Haggart’s at his rest.

I hope he is enthron’d above And is for ever blest.

With its echo of the metrical Psalms this doggerel gives Haggart his due as the folk-hero he would have liked to be, and certainly sober dullness had little part in his brief life.

A less generous view was taken by his counsel, Henry Cockburn. Admitting that Haggart was `young, goodlooking, gay and amiable to the eye’, he yet dismissed him with patrician contempt: `there never was a riper scoundrel’. Even though there may be a certain indulgence in these words, they place Haggart firmly enough. He is set aside, shoved under; the Athenian balance is maintained, and Tamerlane is hardly a comparison likely to seem just to the judicious Whig. Any attempt to seek social significance in his short career would, we may suspect, receive even shorter shrift from his counsel. Professional criminals exist to be despatched, though the Law of course properly requires that they be adequately defended.

Tamerlane, the schoolboy fondly remembered, a ripe scoundrel: three views of young Haggart.

He was born in 1800 at Goldenacre, half-a-mile north of the old monastic mills on the Water of Leith. Within twenty years substantial bourgeois villas were being built there, but at that time it was still open country, and Haggart’s father was a gamekeeper. Later he was to move to the south side of the Canongate, a district already in decline as the magnet of the New Town drew the middle classes away; there, declining himself, he set up as a dog-trainer. Haggart’s own experience therefore was characteristic of the strongest trend in contemporary society, the move of the poor from country districts to the city.

Nevertheless he stands very much at this point of transition. He was a child of the Regency, and his world was a rumbustious one of race-meetings, stage-coaches, prizefights, wayside inns, gambling and flash coves. It was a world unsettled by twenty years of almost continuous war, a period of violent economic fluctuation, of an unprecedented movement of population, of sudden growth and equally sudden decline; a decade of booms and bankruptcies. Discharged soldiers wandered the countryside, the police were few and badly organised - in London the Metropolitan Police Force was not created till 1829, while in Edinburgh it was only in 1805 that a proper police force had superseded the old City Guard; whose picturesque appearance with their Lochaber axes was only surpassed by their total ineffectiveness.

The upper classes lived a life in which a polite formality strove to control innate exuberance. A strict code of manners was necessary because fierce passions were not far below the surface. The ultimate expression of this code was the duel, as it must be in a society where only fear of death will make people behave. Even politicians duelled; Castlereagh exchanged shots with Canning - and they were both Cabinet Ministers - while even Wellington called out a man who had libelled him. Such duels were rarely sanguinary; but you could never tell whether your opponent would be as restrained as you yourself intended to be. And duels were fought over trivial matters, the casual insult or the accusation of card-sharping, for example, at a time when gambling was the national passion. The purpose of the duel was clear: it preserved civil intercourse among equals. A savage penal code did the same thing for society as a whole. It existed to preserve property and to keep the lower classes in order.

It was necessary. We are too easily deceived by architecture and dress. As a result, admiring, for example, the dignity of Edinburgh’s New Town, it is possible to forget social and political conditions, to forget the fragility of the Augustan social order. It was a violent and turbulent time. Edinburgh was growing fast - the population in 1811 was just over 100,000; ten years later it had increased to 138,235. This was a people ill to order, and the move of the middle classes away from the Old Town widened and deepened the gulf between rich and poor. In 1812, for example, there were riots on Hogmanay, which went some way beyond the traditional seasonal high spirits of Scotland’s Saturnalia.

Towards midnight, the principal streets were taken possession of by gangs of young roughs from the lower parts of the town. They ran riot, armed with bludgeons. They attacked the police and overcame them for a time, and they knocked down and robbed many respectable citizens, taking their money, watches and hats. Two people were killed. Three youths, all under eighteen, were arrested and tried in March for their part in the affray. All were hanged in April. And all had Highland names - Hugh MacDonald, Hugh MacIntosh and Neil Sutherland.

Poor harvests could set the mob off. There were meal riots in the same year, and over six hundred people were also charged as professional beggars under the Vagrancy Acts. In 1813 a police constable was killed in a High Street riot, The turmoil and violence persisted for a good many years. Ian Campbell in his Thomas Carlyle (London, 1974) describes Edinburgh of the eighteen-twenties as being `infested with hordes of mendicants’ and quotes from a schoolboy’s diary that there were `crowds of thugs running after the people on the pavement, and striking them with their sticks and making a great noise.’ As late as 1831 Lord Provost Allan was mobbed, stoned and forced to take refuge in a shop whence he had to be rescued by a company of dragoons despatched from the Castle. No doubt such events served to keep the authorities in touch with public opinion.

The most spectacular riot took place in 1818 and nothing more surely displays the fragility of the social order than this outbreak which was sparked off by the botched execution of Robert Johnstone. It was a shocking affair which provoked angry denunciations of the magistrates and the police. One onlooker, a student called William Macbean, described it in a letter to his mother as `a second outbreak of the Porteous mob’; which mob Walter Scott described so powerfully in the same year in his novel The Heart ofMidlothian.

Johnstone, an ignorant and stupid carter (these two qualities, ignorance and stupidity, not necessarily of course being found together) took to crime when thrown out of work by the depression that followed the end of the wars against Napoleon. His attempt at robbery was clumsy - his victim was easily able to make a confident identification, since Johnstone had obligingly elected to stage the assault immediately under a street-lamp. Although a case could be made for the unfortunate man - one defender wrote that he had associated with those, `who were disposed to steal rather than to starve’he was condemned to death, the Lord justice-Clerk observing that, `It was most lamentable that the severe example made, a few years back, of two young men of the same profession, for a crime exactly similar, should have had so little effect’. Doubtless he hoped that the repetition of the example would be more successful.

The execution, despite being attended, as was the custom, with all the pomp of civic dignity, was sadly bungled. It took place just outside St Giles, in the little open square formed by the church, the front of the Signet Library, the County Hall (described by a jaundiced onlooker as `a wretched caricature of an Athenian temple’) and the line of the High Street. Unfortunately the executioner was a novice and the drop had been miscalculated. Accordingly the miserable Johnstone hung there, being slowly strangled, with his toes still touching the table. Remedy was slow. The crowd, already sympathetic to Johnstone, whose colleagues in crime had escaped more easily, became restive. They realised that the man was still alive. `Good God, the man’s feet are not off the scaffold,’ cried one. An attempt was made at rescue. The crowd rushed the platform, stones were thrown, and a young man, prompted, as Mr Macbean observed, ‘by the impulse of humanity’, cut down the body. The magistrate took prudent refuge in the church; the police likewise. Stones were now hurled at the windows. It was later claimed that as many as two hundred panes of glass were shattered.