A ripping good tale but one of blood and violence

Amost atrocious assault in the depth of winter more than a century ago left a Dundee night watchman with his beard ripped off. The assailant, drunken sailor Edward Carey, was found by police stuffing the old man’s whiskers in his pocket.

Carey, from England, found himself stranded in the city in January 1902 and looking for a place to sleep.

At midnight on a bitterly cold night of gales, he came across the watchman who had left his lodge outside a factory for a smoke and to give his dog fresh air.

The old man took pity on the sailor, invited him into the warmth of lodge and sat him by the fire.

It was then the visitor asked the watchman to pen a letter to his mother back home. The old man dipped his pen in ink but instead of writing “dear madam”, he wrote “dear adam” by mistake.

This provoked the fury of the sailor who took it as a slight against his mother.

He threw the old man to the floor and lay on top of him. Next he battered his victim’s head off the floor. It was then that the sailor grabbed either side of the beard and tore it clean off.

A passing police officer who heard the commotion peered through the letter box and saw the terrible struggle.

He tried and failed to break down the door with a hatchet. By chance another officer arrived and rushed to the nearest police station for a crow bar.

By the time they broke in, the fight had been going on for more than half an hour and the old man was utterly exhausted.

The room looked like a barber’s shop. The floor was stained with blood and clumps of beard hair were scattered around.

When the officers arrested Carey he was surprised to see his foe had been an old man. He thought he had been fighting a dog because kept hearing barking throughout the tussle.

Carey, a ship’s stoker, appeared at Dundee Police Court and was jailed for 60 days.

The sailor grabbed either side of the beard and tore it clean off