The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Bobbies box clever in bid to tame city’s unruly youths
Ingenious ways were explored to tame the wild young men of Victorian Dundee.
Sheriff Campbell Smith, who sat on the bench in the city, urged police to devise some sort of lasso to rein in the excesses of youth.
His comments came as Dundee’s youth devised a new form of football which they played in the city centre.
The response from police was that they already had a secret weapon to deploy against the most obstreperous drunks.
This was a ventilated coffin-shaped box on wheels. It would be wheeled into the middle of riots and the most unruly thugs would be popped inside and trundled along to Bell Street.
The intervention of Sheriff Campbell came in 1888 in the case George McIntosh, who had been working on the Forth Bridge.
Young McIntosh celebrated his return to Dundee from the bridge with more drink than was good for him.
He then fell in with a crowd of “blackguards” playing a modified form of football on Murraygate and Commercial Street.
It seems the game was played out at full pelt ... to the terror of shoppers.
Police waded in to halt the game and made a dash for McIntosh. His team-mates tried to free him and it eventually took eight officers to subdue a kicking and punching McIntosh. When he woke up in the cells, McIntosh claimed he could remember nothing of the incident.
In court, Sheriff Smith questioned the wisdom of police risking injury breaking up riots and suggested a mechanised solution.
“I do not think a policeman is bound to risk his shins or his limbs in holding a mad man with drink any more than he was bound to hold a wolf, for the one was practically as little responsible as the other.
“Police ought to get some kind of machinery or apparatus like a lasso, which is used in some parts of the world for catching wild horses.”
Although this was the 23-year-old’s 10th court appearance, the sheriff showed him some leniency by fining him £5 rather than sending him to jail.
“The game was played out at full pelt ... to the terror of shoppers