Read Online A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee by Malcolm Archibald - Free Book Online Page A

another millworker named Margaret Page, it is not surprising that Sullivan was a little upset.
    In such a case it would be expected for Sullivan to confront her man and tell him exactly what she thought of him. She might also have tried to win him back or challenged her rival for his affections, but instead she took more direct and more drastic action. Gathering a bundle of waste paper and a piece of a discarded willow basket, Mary Sullivan soaked them in paraffin. Sometime after dark on the night of Wednesday 29th July, she placed her bundle against the door of Page’s house in Lilybank Road, scratched a Lucifer match and set it alight. Within a few minutes the flames had spread to the door, burning through the wood and spiralling blue smoke inside the house. Fortunately for the occupants, and probably for Mary Sullivan, the flames spread only as far as the surrounding woodwork and nobody was hurt.
    Sullivan never denied the act and within days she was in the Police Court, charged with wilful fire-raising. Bailie Doig thought a higher court would be more appropriate for such a serious accusation and in mid-September Sullivan appeared before Lord Craighall at the Circuit Court. Once again she pleaded guilty, so there was no need for a trial. Lord Craighall listened to the reasons for Sullivan’s actions and pointed out that the fire might have spread from Page’s house to others around, so putting others in great danger. He reminded her that the law considered fire-raising as a serious crime and sentenced her to twelve months’ imprisonment. He also said that Sullivan had ‘done it under the influence of passion’. That same passion was evident in some of the worst crimes in nineteenth-century Dundee.
Lock Me Up
    However they are depicted on the television, murders are sordid affairs with nothing of romance or excitement about them. There is usually a lot of sympathy for the victim and occasionally a twinge for the perpetrator, but there was one case in Dundee where the murderer was viewed with pity by just about everybody. Even stranger, this was a domestic murder, where a husband killed his wife, but the murder of Margaret Balfour was unusual right from the start.
    On the morning of 22nd December 1825 David Balfour, a seaman, and Thomas Houston, who worked for the Dundee & Perth Shipping Company, walked into Mr Dalgairny’s spirit shop at the Shore. After he had knocked back half a gill of whisky, Balfour told Houston he was determined to end things; he said he would put his wife away because he could not take any more, and he did not care if he hanged for it. With that the men parted and Balfour headed to the Fleshmarket. He may have intended to buy meat, but instead he borrowed a knife from one of the butchers, ‘to kill a lamb’. When the butcher asked him where the lamb was, Balfour told him it was in the Murraygate.
    With the knife in his jacket, Balfour walked to his father-in-law’s house in the Murraygate. According to his own account, his wife, Margaret, was standing alone beside the kitchen fireside.
    ‘Margaret,’ Balfour said, ‘will you give me the shirt?’
    ‘Yes, yes you blackguard,’ Margaret replied.‘Do you want anything else?’ As she fetched a shirt from another room, she asked again, ‘Do you want anything else, you blackguard?’
    ‘Oh Margaret,’ Balfour said. ‘Margaret …’
    Grabbing him by the shoulders, Margaret tried to push him out of the door, but Balfour drew the knife from within his jacket and stabbed her, there and then. Even as Margaret crumpled to the ground, Balfour left the house, but rather than try to escape from justice, he ran straight toward it. He walked the few dozen yards from his father-in-law’s house to the Town House, knocked politely at the door and when Charles Watson, the turnkey, answered, Balfour confessed he should be locked up; he had murdered his wife.
    Even faced with such a confession, Charles Watson did not welcome Balfour into jail with