Whisky, Wars, Riots and Murder Read online

  FOR CATHY

  ‘The north of Scotland is in a state of virtual insurrection against the local authorities on account of the attempted intrusion of unpopular Ministers upon reclaiming congregations’

  The Belfast News Letter, 10 Oct 1843

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the following people and institutions for their help in creating this book. The staff at Inverness Library; the staff at the Highland Archive Centre at Inverness; the staff at North Highland Archives in Wick; the staff at Inveraray Jail, Inveraray, Argyll, the staff at the A. K. Bell Library, Perth; my editor, Kristen Susienka; and finally and mostly, my wife, Cathy, who has endured me writing and talking of nothing but Highland crime for some months.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 The Geographical and Historical Background

  Chapter 2 The Whisky Wars

  Chapter 3 Theft and Robbery

  Chapter 4 Riots

  Chapter 5 The Highland Police

  Chapter 6 Nautical Crime

  Chapter 7 A Maelstrom of Murder

  Chapter 8 The Land Wars

  Chapter 9 Troubled Relationships

  Chapter 10 Savage Assaults

  Chapter 11 Crime and Religion

  Chapter 12 Poaching

  Chapter 13 Children and Crime

  Chapter 14 Women and Crime

  Chapter 15 A Mixed Bag of Crime

  Chapter 16 The Arran Murder

  Chapter 17 The Ardlamont Mystery

  Epilogue

  Selected Bibliography

  Selected Websites

  Also by Malcolm Archibald

  Copyright

  Introduction

  A few years ago I was on the ferry from Uig in Skye to Tarbert in the Isle of Harris. As we approached the island, a young man standing near me was enthusing about everything to his girl while his fellow passengers were listening and smiling. The man obviously belonged to Harris, but despite his exhilaration at returning home, as I looked at the low cloud that smeared the rocky hills and the breaking grey sea, I wondered what sort of place I was coming to. Within a few hours I realised I was somewhere special. I knew most of Scotland fairly well but the atmosphere of the Outer Isles was something I had never experienced before. It was autumn: wet, windy and wild, yet strangely beautiful.

  While I was there, I toured the twin islands of Harris and Lewis and came across a memorial to the land struggles of the 1880s. Now, the Clearances are well known and justly condemned, but outside the Highlands less is known about the resistance of the later nineteenth century. The subject intrigued me and I planned to investigate further, but life intervened and the intention was pushed onto the back burner. I began to work on other projects, including some study on crime in Dundee. That led to a book on Dundee crime in the nineteenth century, which in turn led to a similar volume about Glasgow and then another about nineteenth-century crime in the Highlands and Islands.

  Landscape of the Highlands

  © Author’s Collection

  The wheel had turned full circle and at last I could look into the Land Wars of the 1880s, but that also led to a dispute of conscience: the men and women who took part in that struggle had broken the law, but was it a crime to fight for what many people believed had been illegally taken from them? In the bigger picture of things, how should crime be defined? Certainly the landowners saw the actions of crofters and cottars in occupying land as a crime, but history is more lenient in its view. Crime seemed to be period, culture and even class-specific in some respects. For example, those people who attempted to prevent grain from being exported from a starving countryside were viewed as criminal by the authorities, while others may view them as desperate people attempting to keep body and soul together.

  In this book, crime will be defined as much as possible in line with the view of the law in the period. Some actions were reckoned as criminal in 1813 as they are in 2013, others are less frowned on now and the sentences handed out by a possibly biased judge could be viewed as excessive or even appalling. The young man from Wick who got sentenced to eight months in jail in 1847 for merely being on the street after the Riot Act was read was one case in point. Even at that time there were those who protested the sentence, but sometimes Scottish courts were perceived as being heavy-handed when dealing with those who threatened the status quo. The rule of Law, and particularly the rule of the establishment, had to be seen as unchallengeable in a period when the French Revolution was still remembered and there was always fear that European republicanism could spread to Britain.

  Types of crime have also undergone some alteration. Some, such as theft, assault, murder and rape, still darken the Highlands, but others, such as infanticide, breach of a promise of marriage, and bigamy, are less common. All of these were known in the reign of Queen Victoria, possibly because of the stigma attached to illegitimacy and the expense and difficulty of divorce. History has thrown a cloak of romance over other crimes that were undoubtedly traumatic at the time, so that highway robbers are viewed as romantic, poachers have achieved the status of folk heroes and smugglers are seen as laughing desperados rather than the dangerous if daring men they undoubtedly were. Perhaps in a Highland or Hebridean context, nineteenth-century poachers and smugglers wore a different plaid to the cloak that concealed the truth elsewhere.

  Certainly crime in the Highlands has certain aspects unique to the area. Where else would second sight help solve a murder? Where else would a piper lead hundreds of poachers in a two-day raid? Where else would men sound a horn so they could break the law? Highland crime could be tragic, such as the triple family murder in Benbecula; violent, such as the assault on the Excisemen near Dufftown; or poignant, such as the doomed protests against the Clearances. But whatever it was, it also helped define the culture and attitude of a people and place. For that alone it is worth examining. Although there were the usual suspects of murder, assault, robbery and theft, Highland crime had many unique aspects that this work intends to reveal.

  This book is split into a number of thematic chapters. It starts with a brief look at the geographical and historical background of the Highlands and Islands, then moves on to the whisky wars, where the Excisemen tried to control the huge number of illicit stills. Next is a look at some of the more interesting robbery cases of the century, followed by a view of some of the rioting that was periodically endemic. The nineteenth-century police forces that tried to look after the area have their own short chapter, and then there is crime at sea and some of the murders of the century. Chapter 8 focuses on crimes committed during the Land Wars when the crofters struggled to gain security of tenure. Chapter 9 looks at relationship problems that were as relatively common in the Highlands as anywhere else. Chapter 10 features assaults, Chapter 11 some of the difficulties that religion caused and Chapter 12 the widespread problem of poaching. Chapters 13 and 14 are about children and women respectively, while Chapter 15 looks at a whole medley of disparate crime. The book finishes with two of the major murder mysteries of the century, the Goatfell murder in Arran and the death at Ardlamont.

  In common with the sister volumes on Dundee and Glasgow, this is not an academic work that attempts to analyse or explain the crimes; it is a book that hopefully portrays something of the realities of criminal life in Highland and Island Scotland during a volatile and traumatic century.

  1

  The Geographical and

  Historical Background

  Geographers know it as the Highland Boundary Fault as it bisects Scotland from Helensburgh in the west to Stonehaven in t
he north-east, but historically this division was as much linguistic and cultural as geographical. To the south and east lay the Lowlands, the home of Robert Burns and James Hogg, of Edinburgh with its court and trade links with Continental Europe. The Lowlands were cultivated, with neat farms, and were dotted with cities such as Dundee and Aberdeen, as well as market and cathedral towns. Foreign visitors commented on the breadth of Edinburgh’s High Street and the neatness of the town of Glasgow, but few ventured north of Perth, for here rose the mountains of the Highlands.

  Today the Scottish Highlands are synonymous with beautiful scenery, tourism, wildlife and outdoor sports. In past times, mountains were considered ugly and the Highlands were thought inaccessible, with terrible roads, rivers that could be crossed only by oar-powered ferries, low ground that was liable to flood and hill passes that were often choked with snow. The very name ‘Highlands’ gives a clue to the most essential part of the geography of the area, the granite heartland of mountains that acted as both barrier and guardian to the people. These were the highest mountains in Britain, and the oldest. The Ice Age scoured them to great mounds of grey granite unable to hold a decent soil, with Arctic conditions prevailing on the howling plateau of the Cairngorms, while in the north-west the mountains are dropped like giants’ playthings from a bitter winter sky. In between the hills were glens and straths, some deep as the cut of a hero’s claymore, others broad and wide, home to countless generations of Gaelic-speaking people. Most had thin acidic soil, but some were fertile and bright, sweetened by the dung of thousands of rough-haired cattle, and much contested by land-hungry clans.

  There were various passes that penetrated these fastnesses and which connected the areas of lower ground. Of these Drumochter – Bealach Druim Uachdair – was the main pass that snaked across the Cairngorms between Inverness and Perth. At 1,508 feet [460 metres] high, it was and is subject to closure through snow. There are many others such as the Cairnwell in Glen Shee between Blairgowrie and Braemar, Bealach na Bà in Applecross, Corrieyairack south of Fort Augustus, the lonely Lecht on the borders of Moray, or Killiecrankie in Perthshire. Before the days of motorised transport and metalled roads, each was a place to be respected and feared.

  In the Highlands of the eighteenth century, wheeled vehicles were scarce. People moved along tracks rather than roads, and kept to the hill flanks above the often-flooded bottom of the glens. There were many tracks, and sometimes the traveller needed a guide to show him [or more rarely, her] the way.

  Augmenting the high altitude difficulties were rivers and lochs. The rain in Scotland has been known to ease from time to time, but it can be persistent. The west coast in particular can be a damp place, and all that water has to go somewhere. The result is a plethora of burns, waters and rivers, each of which acted as a barrier to travel. Some had fords, some had ferries and a few even had bridges. It was not until October 1733 that the first road was built over the River Tay, at the historic town of Aberfeldy. This bridge was the crowning achievement of General Wade, who built over 250 miles of road in the Highlands in the 1720s and 1730s. As one allegedly contemporary rhyme put it:

  If you’d seen these roads before they were made

  You’d lift up your hands and bless General Wade

  William Cauldfield completed much of Wade’s work in constructing a Highland road network that eventually extended to around 1,000 miles. But these roads were not created to assist the indigenous Gaelic-speaking population; rather they were military roads, built in the wake of the 1715 Jacobite Rising with the intention of providing the military with easy access to the heartland of the clans. It is ironic that the first army to properly utilise them was that of Charles Edward Stuart, the enemy of the contemporary king.

  But even when the roads were built, there was little transport on them, and the first coach service to Inverness did not start until 1811. The local people were delighted with this innovation, and probably even more so when, in 1819, a coach ran daily from Perth to Inverness and even further north. Inverness was no longer on the edge of civilisation; by the second decade of the nineteenth century there were coaches and mail gigs as far north as Wick.

  If anything, the west coast is even more difficult to access than the Central Highlands. Here sea lochs hack into the mainland like the teeth of an irregular saw, with each one forcing the earlier traveller to a detour that could be scores of miles long, or to venture on a perilous ferry journey across a loch whose waters could be anything but calm. Travel here was arduous, slow and plagued by morose rain that could slither from the sea like an ever-present depression. Add a lack of accommodation, save for a scarce number of King’s Houses or government inns, and only the fabled hospitality of the Highlanders remained as a salve for utter frustration.

  To the west of the mainland, stretching like a shield that protected Scotland from the worst of the Atlantic gales, were the Hebrides. The island names have the golden ring of glamour about them: mystical Skye; Benbecula; Uist; Barra, where the piratical MacNeils once held sway; Lewis and Harris, along whose western coast stretched a fertile belt of arable machair land; Tiree that was famed for its grain. However, access depended on the often-fickle weather – mostly their soil was acidic and bogland provided only bog cotton and hazards. Life was hard. These islands are famed in song and story, but only since the magic quill of Sir Walter Scott turned bleakness into romance and remoteness into a virtue with tales and poetry, such as his ‘Lord of the Isles’:

  Tis known amidst the pathless wastes of Reay

  In Harries known and in Iona’s piles

  Where rest from mortal coil the Mighty of the Isles

  When winter clanged shut its iron door on the Isles, they could be cut off for weeks at a time. Mist smothered the seascape, gales lashed the coasts and the inhabitants turned inward for solace and survival. For much of the eighteenth century people saw nothing romantic about rugged terrain, a plethora of rain, wind and the black houses with floors of mud and walls of unmortared stone. When the autumn gales blew, or the bitter winds of winter howled, the Hebrides were as inaccessible to the sail-powered ships of the period as was the moon, and the lives of the inhabitants as little understood as those in Africa. The advent of steam power in the nineteenth century opened up the Isles.

  At the same time as Scott was praising the historical Highlanders and Dorothy Wordsworth made her 1803 Romantic tour in search of ‘wild’ scenery, at the same time as tens of thousands of Gaels donned the scarlet jacket of courage and marched to fight the French, industry was changing the face of Scotland and the Highlanders faced a harsh economic and social future. The tall chimneys and ugly bulk of factories mushroomed in Lowland towns and cities, canals and railways thrust across the countryside and old methods of agriculture vanished before mechanisation and modernisation. Highland chiefs donned the mantle of mere landlords and many lost interest in the people who scraped a living from their marginal lands. Sheep farms and sporting estates became more important than kelp farming and cattle raising; the people were seen as a burden and many were swept away to Lowland slums or across the cold emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean. The hills may have wept for them, but that was little consolation to broken families and the destruction of a culture that had endured for centuries.

  These then were the legendary wild lands, the home of the untamed. Historically, these were the lands the Romans failed to conquer. Here was the Gaeltacht, the land of the Gaelic-speaking men and women whose allegiance to the authority of Edinburgh was marginal at best and non-existent at worst. Secure behind range after range of granite peaks, the Gaels developed their own culture and lived their own lives. While the Lowlands had dukes, earls and lords, the Highlands had chiefs and chieftains; while feudalism evolved into industrial capitalism in the Lowlands, the clan system controlled the glens and while the Lowlands bred inventors, philosophers and mathematicians, the Highlands produced poets and scholars and warrior men. The two halves of Scotland could sometimes combine in time of war and English in
vasion, but the major power of the Gaeltacht, MacDonald of the Isles, was as likely to support one side as the other. In the far north, clan Mackay survived by hiring out its active young men to Continental wars. The Hebridean chiefs sent generation after generation of young men to fight for Irish potentates; many settled in Ireland, for the land was more fertile and life easier than among the rocks of the Outer Isles.

  Rocky terrain in the Highlands

  © Author’s Collection

  Those Highlanders whose home was closer to the Lowlands had other methods of survival. The men of MacGregor and MacFarlane or the clans of Glenshee would raid south, lifting cattle and sheep and sometimes women, so the Highland frontier was as dangerous a place to live as was the border with England. In 1493 King James IV had begun a long process to curtail the power and majesty of the Isles, and over the next two and a half centuries Gaelic culture was gradually eroded, as much by trickery, deceit and suggestion as by martial prowess and Lowland logic.

  The sixteenth century saw some ferocious feuds as clans competed for land at a time of severe climate change. Cattle raiding was endemic; the youth proving their manhood in the old, traditional manner. The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were times of heroic warfare as a succession of Stuart kings recruited clansmen as warriors in their dynastic squabbles. Although many clans supported the rival Williamite and Hanoverian monarchs, when the British government decided to finally demolish the Gaelic culture there was no differentiation made between loyal and rebel. All suffered under the Disarmament Acts, and the old loyalties lost their importance as clan chiefs transformed into faceless landlords at the stroke of a politician’s pen.

  Throughout the later eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century there was terrible social upheaval in the Highlands and Hebrides. With the demise of the clan system and the sale of clan lands that were now merely huge estates, the indigenous population became largely expendable as the glens and hills were exploited for sheep farming and for sport. This was the time of the infamous Clearances when landlords, both native and incomer, removed the indigenous population, who were forced to learn new skills on the coast, relocate to the cities or emigrate.