A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee Read Online Free

A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee
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Dundee was to wade through smoke, avoid assorted unpleasantness and grow used to the varieties of smells that assailed the nostrils and noise that battered the ears.
    So that was Dundee in the opening decades of the nineteenth century: a hard-working, hard-living town rapidly changing into an industrial city. It was a town at the heart of an international trading network. It was a place of startling contrasts, of sickening deprivation close to some of the most luxurious trade-created mansions in Britain, a place of cramped tenement living and of mobs that could attack the police at the skiff of a broken bottle, a place of rattling mills and men often numbed by unemployment. Perhaps it was this terrible contrast that created the criminal element, for Dundee was also home to just about every kind of crime known to the nineteenth-century man and woman. Murder and petty theft, smuggling and Resurrection, child stripping and thimble rigging, rape and prostitution, housebreaking and hen stealing, riot and child exposure – Dundee knew them all.
    As the century rolled on, some of the types of crimes became less familiar, while others were as well known to the Bobbies of the late 1890s as they had been to the Charlies of the 1820s. It has often been said that people do not change, only circumstances and technology. That is certainly true of Dundee’s nineteenth-century crime, and the blackguards and footpads of Peter Wallace’s gang in the 1820s would have fit easily into the garrotters of the 1860s or even the teenage thugs of the present age.
    This book does not pretend to cover the entire story of Dundee’s nineteenth-century crime. It has been selective, leaving out far more than was included, but it aims to give a flavour of life in Dundee at a time when Scotland was in the forefront of the world of industry and trade. It shows Dundee through a period of major change, when shipping advanced from sail power to steam, when the iron juggernaut of the railway cleaved through the centre of town and life moved at an ever faster pace. It brings the reader to the claustrophobic closes and unhygienic tenements of the city and eases through the smoke-swirled streets. Was Dundee such a sink of atrocity? Enter the gas-lit confusion of the nineteenth century and make a judgement, but be aware: the pitiless eyes of the criminals are watching.

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The Body Snatchers: ‘Bury Them Alive!’
Body on the Coach
    On 9th of February 1825 the Commercial Traveller coach rumbled on its usual route through the small towns of Fife. Crammed together, with their feet shuffling in the straw, the passengers would normally have stared at the dismal winter weather outside or spoken to the people within, but not this time. Instead they sat in some discomfort, very aware of the man in their midst. He was young, well-mannered and respectably dressed, but they were still wary of him; he had boarded the coach in Dundee and had behaved perfectly politely, but they were highly suspicious of his luggage.
    Rather than the usual selection of bundles and bags, the young man carried a single but extremely large box, which aroused great curiosity in the rocking coach. Naturally, if not exactly politely, the other passengers had asked him what it contained, but the man had been evasive with his replies. By the time the coach stopped at Kinghorn for the ferry across the Forth, the other passengers were restless on their leather seats. Without a word, the young man left the coach, hefted the huge box on his back and fled, but by then the curiosity of the passengers was too strong.
    Bundling out of the coach, they followed. When the young man tried to run, the weight of the box slowed him down and the other passengers caught him, held him secure and wrenched open the huge box. They peered inside, with some recoiling in horror and others nodding as their suspicions were confirmed. The dead eyes of an old woman stared sightlessly up at them. There was only one reason for
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