Authors: Robert Jeffrey
Those who run prisons to this day love to have guidelines and detailed instructions on how to deal with the day-to-day running. Everything from the thickness of a slice of toast or how much tea is in a cuppa is detailed. When it comes to weapons, the wordsmiths who write the rules have a field day. And it was no different when Peterhead came into being. The early governors wanted the use of swords and firearms to be approved under strict rules of engagement, as they say these days. And the use of firearms or other weapons would not come as a surprise to any inmate. Right from the early days one of the rituals on arrival in the grim halls of Peterhead was to make sure the prisoners knew the score as to what would happen to them if they broke the rules. A somewhat fearsome warning was read to them on admission. It takes little imagination to think how offenders must have felt when listening to this little lecture:
Convicts confined in HM Prison Peterhead are hereby warned that they are liable to have swords, bayonets or rifles used against them if they attempt to escape either when inside or outside the prison or if they at any time, either singly or in combination, attack or attempt to attack or forcibly resist a prison officer.
So now they knew! Originally, the then Secretary of State was of the opinion that officers should use firearms with shot cartridges in breakouts and attacks. Later experts deemed this as “useless or dangerous” but when the gate to new equipment officially swung open to other weapons of choice, other than the swords and bayonets, Snider carbines firing buckshot were in the frame. Buckshot wounds tended to be more serious than a single bullet aimed at a vulnerable spot, like a knee, to stop an escaper, and the longer range of a military rifle made escape more difficult, something the prisoners, many of whom had firearm experience, could understand. Rifles were also more useful in the event of an outside attack on the prison. But it was almost thirty years after the prison opened before service rifles became standard. In the 1920s ex-army rifles, which were presumably in good supply after the First World War, were loaned to the prison.
The loan period was by way of a trial but it was not long before these rifles were deemed the proper weapon for the job. It was said that: “Experience in the war (1914–1918) shows that the modern rifle with small bore bullets of high velocity is less likely to endanger life than a carbine loaded with buckshot.” Interestingly, the authorities were also taking account of “the possibility of attack from the outside.” In the early 1920s both Barlinnie and Peterhead had relied on extra borrowed weapons from the military in case of this contingency. The fear was that Sinn Fein would attack prisons where their men were held. Indeed, they had made threats that they would do just that. The authorities in Edinburgh gave thought to adding revolvers to the weaponry in addition to the rifles, swords and bayonets. But there was a training problem here – the warders had no experience of revolvers – the early four Enfield Mk2s seemed to be largely there to impress prisoners rather than gun them down – and this proposal was sidelined.
The weapons issue made headlines in July 1932 when a prisoner was shot dead running away from a work party and this started a legal argument on whether or not the action taken by Whyte, the guard who fired the fatal shot, was appropriate or not. An inquiry found that the officer used his rifle “in the ordinary execution of his duties and in accordance with prison regulations.” The said regulations ran along these lines: “A prison officer who sees any suspicious movement on the part of any convict, or who feels doubtful about the intention of any convict, will immediately challenge the convict concerned, load his rifle, and, as may be necessary, communicate with any other prison officer within hearing, blow his whistle and give the alarm signal. If the officer is armed with a bayonet in addition to a rifle, or armed with a sword only, he will fix the bayonet or draw his sword if in his opinion it is necessary and advantageous to do so, after he has given the necessary signals.” The instructions were clear: if attacked, fix bayonet, load rifle, draw sword. The weapons were only to be used inside the Admiralty yard or the prison yard if a convict tried to scale a wall or escape through an opening. Warders were instructed in using the sword or bayonet to inflict minimum damage consistent with stopping the escape. If the rifle was to be used, one or two warning shots were to be fired before taking aim.
The reference to the alarm signal is interesting. This was, of course, in the days before mobile phones or personal radios and the cons could be in the prison yard, working down at the harbour or at the quarries. And only a few officers had to keep control of work parties made up of desperate men well used to violence in their lives inside and outside the prison. The conditions in the prison, the food, the toilet facilities and the occasional cruel and conscienceless guard, the bitter North-East weather, all combined to make the prisoners gather in surly groups. Even the threat of a lick or two from the cat wielded by a sadistic officer was not a complete deterrent.
Keeping such men in line was no occupation for softies. The guards used a primitive sort of body semaphore to keep in touch with each other. Standing erect with hands above their head was the signal for a general alarm; a sort of “T” shape meant stop work; another signal meant take cover; and yet another, one arm moved up and down slowly, gave the all clear.
The prisoner who was shot by Officer Whyte was George Kynoch. As pointed out earlier, the prison officer was largely cleared, as what he had done was “not unreasonable in a serious emergency.” He was deemed to have been doing his duty and it was thought by the prison and legal establishment that if proceedings had been taken against him it would have been detrimental to discipline in the prison. But it was acknowledged that the regulations were too vague, hence the guidance given above to all officers after this incident. Mind you, back in 1888 the first governor, S. A. Dodd, had said it was justified to shoot to stop an escape but not to kill. Although perhaps that’s easier said than done.
Most folk these days if asked about Peterhead inmates will mention Jimmy Boyle, Oscar Slater or Paddy Meehan. Maybe Johnny Ramensky or Glasgow Godfathers Walter Norval and Arthur Thompson would also come to the forefront of popular memory. Or TC Campbell and Joe Steele of the Ice Cream War miscarriage of justice. But in the early years the prison held a now largely forgotten murderer with a very interesting story. This prisoner had been convicted of murder, though he may well have been innocent.
Around the turn of the last century a name linked with Peterhead and often in the headlines was that of “The Arran Murderer,” as John Watson Laurie became known. Writers of fictional mystery tales often look for the perfect method of committing a murder and some turn their pens to stories of mountaineering. Imagine two men disappearing into the cloud high on a mountain where the ground is slippery and dangerous. No one sees them enter the swirling mists and no one is there when only one man emerges to begin his descent. Back in civilisation, the lone climber says that his companion fell to his death. But did he slip or was he pushed? Who is to say? And that was roughly the scenario at the heart of the mystery of the Arran Murderer.
In July 1889, in the heyday of holidays down the coast to the Firth of Clyde resorts from Glasgow, a young London clerk called Edwin Rose boarded a steamer heading from Rothesay to the island of Arran on holiday. On board he met Laurie, then twenty-five, and they chummed up with another couple of young passengers. Laurie and Rose shared the same lodgings on the island and with the others went on boating and walking trips to sample the delights of the island that is known as “Scotland in miniature” since it has all the attributes of the beautiful mountainous West coast and some areas that resemble good Lowland farming land – all in one reasonably-sized island.
One of the main attractions of the place was, and still is, the mountain known as Goatfell. Laurie wanted Rose to go climbing on it with him. Oddly one of the other young men – who were at the end of their holiday and going home the next day – warned Rose not to go. But the warning was ignored. Laurie and Rose left their lodgings without saying where they were going and the landlady suspected they were doing a “runner” to avoid paying their bill. Rose never made it back home, and not long after, Rose’s brother arrived on the island and could not find him anywhere. A search was started involving around 200 people, a massive exercise in such a place. Rose was eventually found under a bush, or some say, stuffed into a stone crypt. He appeared to have been beaten to death with stones. After the discovery of the body a shepherd came forward to say he had seen Laurie coming off the hill alone, looking tired out. And Laurie had also been seen leaving the island by steamer.
Back on the mainland Laurie moved about a lot and after a while settled in Liverpool, where he dismissed with a laugh stories that he was about to be arrested and charged with a murder in faraway Arran. But he returned to Scotland and was spotted on a train by a policeman and chased to a wood where he made a half-hearted attempt to cut his own throat. Taken to Edinburgh for trial he admitted in court to robbing Rose but denied killing him, claiming his companion had fallen to his death. The story was that he had simply robbed his new friend and hidden the body and fled. Laurie was sentenced to hang but was reprieved and given a life sentence. He could have been sent to a hospital for the criminally insane but was instead sent to Peterhead, where he was a difficult prisoner and like many another convict before him, he endlessly claimed to anyone who would listen that he was innocent of the killing, if not the theft, from Rose.
As we have seen earlier, conditions in the jail at that time were horrendous but nonetheless the victim’s brother declaimed in letters to the press that Laurie had got off lightly. He would have much preferred the Glasgow man to swing – which might have been a real miscarriage of justice. No blood was found on Laurie’s clothes and there was medical evidence that a fall could have killed Rose. The evidence was mainly circumstantial but he still had to listen to a judge in a black cap initially pronounce his doom.
In reporting the sensational trial of Laurie, the
Scotsman
said: “It was held with every manifestation of public interest.” Queues formed each day to hear at first-hand the gruesome nature of the crime. The public fury at Laurie was fuelled by the revelation that on the evening of the death of Rose he was seen drinking in the Corrie Bar, and later he carried around a striped blazer belonging to Rose. But if it had been carefully planned crime rather than an opportunistic theft Laurie was remarkably careless, leaving several obvious clues that showed he had been beside the body. And other climbers had seen them at the summit of Goatfell. What really happened will never be known. But that trip north to Peterhead got Laurie a place in the jail’s history. He was one of the first men to escape from it.
The story was told in the local press under the, to these days, tame headline: EXCITING INCIDENT AT PETERHEAD PRISON – THE ESCAPE AND CAPTURE OF LAURIE. Not quite how
The Sun
or the
Daily Record
would put it today. But the story was, as one news editor of mine liked to say, a belter. The first escaper had been an Aberdeenshire burglar, much lower down the pecking order of infamy than Laurie. This hapless fellow had barely gone half a mile when he stumbled into the arms of a policeman. However, the paper noted that on this occasion, “fleet of foot as he was”, Laurie never got out of sight of the prison either.
By the time of his escape he had been in the prison for a couple of years or so and despite being difficult early in his term he had been of such good behaviour latterly that he had become a prisoner of the “first class” and had privileges not given to the normal con. He was said to be of surly disposition and a regular in making groundless complaints about conditions in the prison but he was a first-class workman entrusted with valuable tasks in the carpenters’ shop. This facilitated his escape, as he was in a gang erecting scaffolding used during work on warders’ houses when he made a break for freedom. It seemed the perfect opportunity on a foggy morning to leap over some of the planking used in the scaffolding and leg it away from the prison.
Once over the wall, however, there was no real cover for an escaper to hide in the days before the prison was surrounded by houses, and despite crossing a hayfield and leaping over a few dry stane dykes, one of the prison civil guards caught him almost immediately. Not much of an escape compared to the feats of those who later managed to get out of cells and over the walls and stay on the run for days at a time, but an escape nonetheless. Back in the prison his mental condition was reassessed and he was sent to Perth Criminal Asylum for the Insane and he died in 1930.
Laurie had originally arrived in Peterhead after some months of probation in Perth prison immediately after his trial and when he was taken north his status as a “lifer” was marked with a black crêpe band on his arm. A newspaper of the day wrote about his life in jail after escaping the noose. Despite the somewhat archaic language, this was a feature that would have graced any tabloid today. The writer answered the questions about the Arran Murderer’s life in jail. It was said that his work in the prison was not hard but irksome – teasing piles of hessian into oakum, tarred fibres used in wooden ships. On his arrival in Peterhead in 1890 he wore Perth prison clothes: “a moleskin jacket and vest and a stock of the same for the neck, stamped all over with broad arrows.” He was also provided with a moleskin bonnet with his prison number on it. His underclothes were said to be a “pair of drawers, cotton or plaiding, the latter in winter.” His shirt was of unbleached cotton in summer and plaiding in winter. The uniform in Peterhead was similar though a coat was provided and a red shirt.
The diet in Perth was described in some detail and it was said that in Peterhead the food was slightly better. For breakfast in Perth there was 8oz of oatmeal made into porridge and three-fourths of a pint of milk. For dinner there was two pints of barley broth, which “is made of ox heads and haugh, suet and vegetables,” and three-fourths of a pound of wheaten bread. Supper was 2lb of potatoes, or porridge in lieu. The Peterhead
table d’hote
was similar except with – not surprisingly considering the location – an occasional helping of fresh fish.