Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders Read online

  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.

  Civis Edinesis took up the story in a letter to The Scotsman:

  `A spectacle now presented itself which equalled in horror anything ever witnessed in Paris during the Revolution. The unhappy Johnstone, half-alive, stript of part
of his clothes, and his shirt turned up, so that the whole of his naked back and upper part of his body was exhibited, lay extended on the ground in the middle of the street, in front of the police office. At last after some considerable interval, some of the police officers laying hold of the unhappy man, dragged him trailing along the ground, for about twenty paces into their den, which is also in the Old Cathedral…’

  His ordeal had hardly run half its course. A surgeon bled him - to ascertain of course whether the wretch was still sufficiently alive to be hanged again. Reassured on this point, they prepared to resume. Meanwhile a magistrate had made his way to the Castle and called out the troops - the 88th Foot or Connaught Rangers under Major Grahame. When these had surrounded the scaffold and stood there with loaded muskets, it was considered safe to return to the hanging.

  The half-naked Johnstone was led out. `While a number of men were about him,’ wrote Civis Edinesis, `holding him on the table and fastening the rope about his neck, his clothes fell down in such a manner that decency would have been shocked had it been a spectacle of entertainment instead of an execution.’

  Nor was this all. Johnstone next worked his hand free and tugged at the noose …

  `The butchery continued until twenty-three minutes past four o’clock, long after the street lamps were lighted for the night, and the moon and stars distinctly visible…’

  O Athens of the North.

  Naturally there was criticism of the magistrates. It was splendidly said that they had shown `contempt for the arbitrium popularis aurae.’ Fortunately that noble body of men remained undisturbed in their complacency. They issued a statement superb in its bland self-exculpation:

  `The magistrates’, said the magistrates, `not only employed a skilful tradesman to prepare the gibbet, but gave orders to the superintendent of Public Works to inspect it. Mr Bonnar did examine it, and reported to them that it was fit and suitable for the purpose intended. The charge that the Magistrates ought to have called out the city constables is ridiculous. Though there could be no anticipation of any attempt to interfere with the execution of the sentence of the law, no fewer than one hundred police officers were put upon actual duty and one hundred and thirty were in reserve. Thus every step that human prudence could devise was taken and the sentence of the law would have been executed in the usual manner, if a lawless mob had not stepped forward to prevent it, under pretence, as is now said, of showing humanity towards the criminal. The state of the fact is that notwithstanding the pains that had been taken to have the apparatus perfect, the rope was found to be too long, a fault alone imputable to the executioner, who had since been dismissed on that account.’

  (It is interesting to observe that the simple action of checking the length of a rope evidently exceeds the limits of human prudence.)

  `Hence, upon the criminal being thrown off, his toes touched slightly the drop below. This however was capable of being remedied in a few seconds; and the carpenters in attendance were immediately put upon that duty; and while in the act of removing the drop, the mob threw in a shower of stones and wounded several of them. The criminal also was wounded by one of the stones, to the effusion of his blood. The police officers endeavoured to preserve order, but after-several of them had been severely wounded, they were driven in upon the magistrates by the pressure of the very great and unusual multitude that had assembled; and the whole party was then forced into the adjoining church. Meantime part of the mob continued to throw stones and destroyed nearly two hundred panes of glass of the churches, while another party carried off the body of the criminal. The police officers in reserve, having now come forward, cleared the streets and got possession of the body, which was carried into the Police Office, where a surgeon, without any order from a magistrate, opened a vein … By this time one of the magistrates had gone to the castle, and had brought down a party of the military, and, the apparatus having been put up, it became the duty of the magistrates to carry the sentence into effect, and accordingly, within the period mentioned in the sentence, the criminal was again suspended, and hung till he was dead. Had the mob remained quiet, instead of offering a most daring outrage to the laws of their country, the criminal would have been dead in a few minutes after he was turned off. If therefore he has suffered more pain than the law intended, or if decency was in any way shocked by the appearance of the criminal when carried to and from the gibbet (and none can regret it more than the magistrates of the city) the blame alone rests with those who offered violence to the magistrates and their attendants.’

  So, in tones that were to be familiar to succeeding generations of the Edinburgh citizenry, the magistrates recorded their entire satisfaction with their own performance; conscious virtue granted them a complete protection against any obloquy they might have attracted. And to cap it all, they offered a reward of fifty guineas for the apprehension of the young man who had cut down the body, though young Mr Macbean found it, `difficult to say what crime he could be guilty of’; and they paid the Chief of Police, Captain Brown £100, `for his great exertions at the execution’, though Civis Edinesis denied that he had performed any such, alleging instead that he stayed `sitting in his own room, in his own office, and though he had a reserve of between eighty and ninety of the best policemen in reserve in the Court Room, he remained inactive for between twenty and twenty five minutes, and never ventured to show his face till he was certain the military were on the ground….’

  The question of course, as always in such cases, suggests itself was the riot in fact unpremeditated? The quantity of stones found ready to hand makes one wonder. At any rate, a city where the authorities were so unpopular and so supine could hardly be unhealthy or infertile for the criminal; as young David Haggart was to discover with delight.

  Our main source of information about Haggart is inevitably suspect, for it is the autobiography he composed while under sentence of death in the Calton Jail. The sceptical Cockburn said that `the confessions and the whole book were a tissue of absolute lies - and they had all one object - to make him appear a greater villain than he was’. Perhaps so; Cockburn had some direct knowledge of Haggart and rather more indirect knowledge of the world he had frequented. Perhaps, on the other hand, not; the Augustan contempt may here be a little too sweeping. Certainly Haggart’s confession, though probably exaggerated in places and undoubtedly arranged to his advantage (but then whose autobiography isn’t - even Cockburn’s own Memorials?) yet paints a picture of the underworld that corresponds well enough with what we know from other sources. Haggart’s own exploits may be exaggerated, but his world rings true enough. If he wasn’t an honest autobiographer, then he was at least a novelist with something of the documentary authority of Defoe; and it would be in effect more remarkable to find this little book a work of the imagination than if it is what it purports to be, a memoir; albeit dressed up and improved in the telling.

  The book deserves another comment too, before we pass to an account of Haggart’s career, an account that will perforce continue to draw heavily on the autobiography, accepting it as by and large authentic. It is addressed to his solicitor and its purpose is plain enough; but there is no suggestion that he, or any other educated man, had a hand in the writing of it. Not even Cockburn seems to doubt Haggart’s authorship, or find it surprising Yet surely it is strange enough. Haggart had no real schooling after the age of twelve or thirteen, and while he boasts that in his schooldays he was always dux in his class, one might expect that it was an achievement for one of his background to struggle into literacy. At the least one would expect his style to be clumsy and shapeless, but it is in fact admirably clear, direct, and sometimes even elegant. For example, his reflections on the effect of prison on young offenders are not only still to the point, but excellently expressed: