On this day in 1823

Mary McKinnon stabbed William Howat with a table knife on 8 February, and he died, 12 days later, at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. On 14 March, Mary was tried for his murder, which had taken place at the inn (and brothel) she ran.

She pleaded not guilty, claiming that she’d been away from the inn when a riot had broken out, and that a drunken Howat had broken into her home there and assaulted the women present. She claimed that she was knocked out upon her return, and had no recollection of what had happened thereafter, and certainly not of stabbing the murdered man.

Evidence given

A land surveyor called Henry Ker was called to give evidence at the trial, and he told the court that Howat had been somewhat drunk after the two had shared a boozy dinner with friends. They had gone back to McKinnon’s inn and ordered a single drink each but, Ker said, the women serving there had locked the doors and insisted that Howat, Ker and their friends ordered more drink and, when they didn’t, started grabbing at them.

Hearing the noise they were making, McKinnon came into the kitchen where Howat was standing and, according to his testimony reproduced in the Inverness Courier of 20 March, “went deliberately to the dresser table, at the back of the door, put both hands into a knife case and took one out… sprang towards [Ker] who parried her hand with his arm and she was instantly seized by several women”. A few seconds later, Ker “saw [McKinnon] strike a blow with the knife at Howat and… immediately sprung forward, seized her by the back of the neck, and knocked her feet from her, and she fell on her back on the floor”.

Howat lived long enough to give testimony from his hospital bed. This was read to the court, which also heard from witnesses who had been there on the night.

Guilty verdict

The jury was unconvinced of McKinnon’s innocence. It returned a majority verdict of guilty, but also recommended leniency when it came to sentencing her. Alas, it was not to be. McKinnon was convicted on the 15th and sentenced to death, after which her body would be given up for dissection, as later happened to William Burke after his execution in 1829. Upon hearing this, she fainted.

McKinnon was executed between eight and nine o’clock on the morning of 23 April after two failed appeals for clemency. The night before her execution, she cut some lockets of her hair so they could be presented to her friends as memories of her.

Mary McKinnon’s execution

Again, the Inverness Courier reported what happened in its edition of the following day. She was led from the lock-up “to the platform at the head of Libberton’s Wynd, about half-past eight o’clock. On the way, Mrs McKinnon recognised some of her acquaintances, to whom she beckoned with her hand, and bade farewell to the bystanders”.

She prayed beside the scaffold, once again protested her innocence, and asked if she could keep her hat on. The executioner refused to allow this, explaining that the crowd of between 20,000 and 30,000 that had assembled to watch her die would want to see her face. A few moments later, she was dead, having dropped through the hole in the scaffold and been killed all but instantaneously. As per her sentence, once her body had been removed, it was taken to a lecture room and presented to the professor of anatomy for dissection.

But, even in death, McKinnon had one last surprise to deliver, as it was discovered that she was not called McKinnon at all, but McInness. McKinnon had been a mix-up that she had chosen not to correct almost until the very end.

 

...and on this day in 1941

Scotland, particularly around the Clyde, was an important source of shipping and munitions during the Second World War. Thus, on the nights of 13 and 14 March 1941, German forces attempted to stall Allied progress by mounting a blitzkrieg raid on Clydebank.

More than 1000 people were injured, more than 500 were killed (some sources claim a lot more) and thousands were made homeless when the Luftwaffe dropped 272 tonnes of bombs on the town. Although the primary targets were the shipyard and Singer sewing machine factory, the close proximity of housing to the industrial areas would have contributed to the destruction and heavy loss of life.

Temporary accommodation

The homeless were put into temporary rest shelters and, according to a report in The Scotsman of 21 March, the Corporation of Glasgow had “received permission to requisition houses of eight rooms and over” to accommodate them when they left the shelters. By then, a relief fund had been accepting public donations for three days and already exceeded £10,000 – of a £50,000 target – from which £250 had already been granted for the purchase of furniture and bedding.

Understandably, given wartime reporting restrictions, news of the raid wasn’t exactly splashed across the papers. The Derry Journal reported on 19 March that 500 had been killed in the raid, and an equal number killed in Liverpool, following an official announcement the previous day. Two days earlier, news had emerged, in the Lancashire Evening Post and dozens of other papers, that the chief Salvation Army officer for Clydebank had been killed, making him the seventh such officer killed in raids over the previous three months.

Tales of heroism

Over the next several weeks, tales of heroism emerged, including of ambulance attendant Mary Haldane who received an OBE after the ambulance she was in was blown on its side by the force of a blast. Keeping her head, she rescued the still living and took them to a shelter for treatment. Another recipient of the OBE was ambulance driver Hugh Campbell. The Belfast Telegraph reported on 4 April that “when his ambulance was wrecked by a bomb and two patients [were] killed, [he] clambered out, went on foot through a heavy bombardment to the depot three quarters of a mile away and got another ambulance, loaded the remaining cases into it and took them to a hospital”.

James Craig, of the Clydebank Air Raid Precautions rescue party, “was on duty almost continuously for 72 hours,” reported the Dundee Courier of 5 April. “At one demolished tenement a young woman was trapped in the basement. Craig tunnelled through the debris, although fire twice broke out, jacked up joists, and after working continuously for nine hours rescued the woman alive.”

 

...and on this day in 2002

In the face of competition from Ayr, Dumfries and Paisley, Stirling was granted city status in 2002 to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee. Reporting the announcement, the BBC explained that the criteria against which the applicants were judged were primarily their “notable features, including regional or national significance, historical and Royal features and a ‘forward-looking attitude’.”