The Wife O’ Denside We’ve stepped out of Dundee a wee bit to bring you the tale of the Wife O’ Denside – a tale of love and passion with disastrous consequences. David Smith, was a busy and prosperous farmer at West Denside, a large farm estate in the parish of Monikie. He lived there […]
Thorter Row, August 1838 As watchman Duncan MacNab patrolled the Thorter Row area of Dundee on the night of Saturday 4th August 1838, he happened to see what he believed to be a drunken man propped up against the stairwell close to some properties. Upon closer investigation, MacNab realised that the man in question was […]
Kirriemuir, 1890 In August 1890, the wife of a Kirriemuir landlord, John Webster, fell ill. The local doctor attended the ailing woman and diagnosed gastroenteritis. Within 3 days, Mrs Webster had died, but this did not conclude the matter. Suspicions were rife that something sinister lurked beneath the surface of this cut-and-dried case. John had […]
Dundee is no stranger to a brawl – a reputation that has preceded the city for generations. Petty crime in Dundee, Scotland in the 1920’s was unsurprisingly, not much different to as it is now. The men, and, perhaps more importantly, the women, have proven to be a fearsome populace, and continue to fight and […]
The following is a collection of extracts of Dundee Crime Statistics from the Dundee criminal returns of 1898 to 1902 inclusive, read, in part, by us on one of our forays in the archives. A very informative and insightful glimpse into the lives and crimes of this era, it’s also hard sometimes to see where […]
In Dundee, body snatchers, graverobbers, or “Resurrection Men” turned over a considerable amount of business. When Cholera struck in 1832, the memories of Burke and Hare’s atrocities were still very much at the forefront of people’s minds. Even though Burke had been executed in 1829 (whilst Hare spent the rest of his years in relative […]
Diseases and plagues have rocked world history, causing untold damage and claiming countless lives. Although still prevalent in the world today, modern advances in medicine and detection have made life a lot easier for those living today.
Dundee recently earned itself the notorious title of “Murder Capital of Scotland”, based on it’s percentage of murders to overall population. It’s certainly not something we as a city should be proud of.
Surprisingly little in the way of research has been undertaken into the history of sex, gambling and drunkenness in Dundee. There is a lot of information from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century about the lives of the mass female workforce in Jute Mills
The Howff is an iconic landmark in Dundee’s city centre, a calm oasis and a peaceful resting spot to sit in the shade of the well kept trees and shrubs. But as well as housing the graves and crypts of Dundee’s great and the good, the land itself also has a dark history.