Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

and engaged by the Council in making the roads round the Calton Hill and the Salisbury Crags; impossible to imagine Davy Haggart as one of such a work-gang. In his own words, `to work and be a slave to mankind. I could never think of’.
    So, now that he was unemployed, he records that, `in less than three months I found myself plunged in such a state of vice and wickedness that my mind could not suffer reflection’. Perhaps so; more likely he thoroughly enjoyed it. His headlong gallop of a career had begun, as bitter-sweet- as John Gay’s Newgate Pastoral.
    David Haggart had entered a world, `where stealing was an activity so common as to be nothing less than banal’. The opportunities were legion, the pickings considerable and the chances of detection at least sufficiently long for the practitioner to discount them. David took to the streets, to casual shop-lifting and pickpocketing first. Probably nothing indicates the prevalence of theft so clearly as the extent of the thieves’ cant in which they conversed. Whole paragraphs of Haggart’s autobiography are completely incomprehensible without the aid of a glossary. `Picking a suck’ for instance, `is a kittle job’; on the other hand `the keek cloy is easily picked’, and `if blunt gets shy’ you can always take to the `boys and coreing’. A `prig’ should keep an eye open for `a coneish cove’ and if he is `well-budged’, the job’s easy. If you see a `cove’ with a ‘lil’ in his `fam’, then it should be yours, unless the `topers’ are to hand. Even readers steeped in the romances of Georgette Heyer will be baffled by the rich argot.
    There was then a criminal underworld into which it was easy to sink. There were boozing-kens where a prig could lie up or houses of ill-fame where he would be hailed, Macheathlike, as a hero; and as for fencing the stuff, why Haggart sometimes found the choice embarrassing. He notes on one occasion that he couldn’t recall where he had fenced some stolen goods, being drunk at the time. It must have seemed sometimes as if almost everything invited the young man to take up the sporting life. It was in those terms that he thought of it. Combe reports that, `when we alluded to his crimes in common language, he became sullen and ceased to converse. He, however, used the phrase “the sporting line of life” himself; and we found that, on our employing it, he again became communicative.’ It offered easy money, excitement and good living; `the love of dress and company was my motive’, he said. When the alternative was a choice between long laborious toil and starvation, it is not difficult to understand how a bright young spark like Davy Haggart should adopt the sporting line of life.
    The first weeks of his new career are worth following in detail. They set the pattern for the rest of his short life. He was quickly established as a pickpocket, for which calling he showed a natural aptitude. `I had the ill-luck to be born lefthanded, and with thieves’ fingers,’ he remarks with the utmost complacency, `for my forks were equally long, and they never failed me.’ For one with these talents, racemeetings and country fairs, where people were free with their money, and often well-liquored, proved the natural habitat. Davy soon met with a young Irishman, Barney MacGuire, a few years older than himself, and experienced in the business. Barney and he became fast friends and partners.
    In August they went together to Portobello Races, where they made £11. Determination of comparative money values is always difficult and frequently futile; both difficulty and futility are exacerbated when the society being considered shows very marked gradations in personal wealth. In the early nineteenth century the Earl of Durham could say, `a man can jog along on £40,000 a year’, while an agricultural labourer counted his week’s wage in shillings. Captain Gronow in his incomparable Reminiscences and Recollections notes that, in the only