A Peculiar Man: The Ratho Murder of 1864

Scottish crime records can reveal fascinating insights not only into horrific events, but also the communities that had to deal with them, and the onus placed on families to look after members with obvious psychological or mental health issues. By looking at records from the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, and Scottish newspaper reports, a picture can be built of

In 1864, a murder took place near Edinburgh that horrified not just the local population, but people across Scotland and even into northern England. It had been a Saturday morning – 16 April, and early, about 7am. A man named George Bryce went into a house at Ratho, a rural village in what was then Midlothian, and asked “for Jeanie’.

The house belonged to grain merchant Robert Tod and his wife Margaret, and Jeanie Seaton – also known as Jane or Janie Watt – was one of their young servants, helping to look after their children.

35-year-old Bryce was told by the cook that she was in the nursery, but that he couldn’t see her. He ignored the speaker, and rushed into the nursery, where he immediately assaulted the girl, ‘brutally and savagely’. Jeanie’s shrieks were heard by the cook and also by Mrs Tod, both of whom rushed to her aid; two other servants, Margaret Gibson and Catharine Binnie, had also been in the room, but were unable to assist further. The cook was bitten by Bryce as she tried to rescue the poor girl.

She managed to flee the house, and ran to the next door neighbour’s house, owned by Catharine Binnie’s father. He was away from home, however, and Mrs Binnie was out milking. As she was undertaking this task, she heard screaming coming from her house.

By the time she reached the house, Mrs Tod was also there. She too had heard the new set of screams, but when she reached their source, she found Jeanie’s body lying lifeless on the ground. Bryce had followed the girl, and on reaching her had slit her throat. He had then jumped on her body and trampled it, stamping again and again on her, even though she was already dead.

The sight was so awful that Mrs Tod fainted and had to be carried home. Meanwhile, Bryce had coolly made his escape, even noting, to a farmer he passed on the lane, “What a beautiful morning!” However, he later asked an acquaintance named Davidson to cut his throat for him, having tried himself to do so but only making a scratch.

Davidson refused, and Bryce ran off, closely pursued by Davidson – who had heard of the murder and suspected Bruce – and a group of local quarrymen. Bryce reached the railway line used by the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway, near the Ratho station, and leaped over a wall – straight into the path of a group of railway navvies, who stopped him. Despite threatening them, he was secured and taken to the Ratho police station.

Jeanie’s mother, on being told the fate of her daughter, was said to have become mad with the shock, and had to be taken to an asylum. When George Bryce’s case was heard at Edinburgh’s High Court of Justiciary in June 1864, a special defence was pleaded in case – he was said to be insane as well.

He was found guilty, but the jury recommended him to mercy ‘on account of the low organisation of his mental faculties’; it had been reported that one local boy, Adam Lawrie, had heard Bryce referred to locally as ‘Daft Geordie Bryce’. However, when he had been interviewed at the police station on being arrested, it was noted that ‘he was aware that killing another person was a crime, and that the person who committed it would be punished.’ He was sentenced to be executed at Edinburgh on 21 June.

Bryce had known two of the Tod family servants – Jeanie, and the cook, Isabella Brown, for around two years, having met them at a ball in the village. He had started ‘walking out’ with Isabella about a year earlier, and had subsequently proposed to her, although she rejected him. He worked delivering coal to the villagers, and also took charge of Mr Tod’s horse on an occasional basis.

However, he clearly had an ugly side. On one occasion, he had taken Isabella to Edinburgh to see an illumination, or display of lights. They had then returned back to Ratho on the back of a cart driven by Walter Gibson. By the time they travelled back, Bryce was drunk, and was so rude to Isabella on the journey that she called their relationship off.

He later said that, in response to his behaviour, Janie had referred to him as a ‘drunken blackguard’, and he had taken offence; he also thought that Janie had set Isabella against him, a charge that Isabella strongly denied. A couple of days before the murder, Bryce had broken a window at the house, later admitting to Isabella that he had ‘knocked his head through it’. No more was seen of him until the morning of the murder.

Jeanie’s fellow servant Margaret Gibson said that she had never heard Jeanie saying anything unpleasant about George Bryce – or even mention him at all. However, Mrs Tod – who described Bryce as very quiet, and either shy or sulky – knew that he had been angry at Jeanie because he thought she had criticised him, and had warned Jeanie about his resentment.

“I said to her that if he said a rude word to her, she was to tell my husband, and he would put a stop to any rudeness,” she later said.

However, Jeanie smiled, and said that she had never said the words that Bryce had accused her of – she believed that as she hadn’t said anything, Bryce could not be angry with her.

In fact, none of the other servants had heard Janie say anything about Bryce, either rude or otherwise; he seemed to barely register in her consciousness. There were various rumours of other servants telling local men that Janie had criticised Bryce, but all strongly denied it. There were, however, various stories about Bryce’s liking for drink.

Despite the evidence of George’s erratic behaviour, and the jury’s appeal for mercy in his case, George was a dead man standing. On Tuesday 21 June 1864, he was executed at Edinburgh.

His execution was met with jollity from the crowds, many of whom had turned up the night before to ensure a prime spot to watch the execution the next morning. In fact, it was reported that there was ‘one dense mass of people’ from the County Prison and the High Street to the George IV Bridge, and:

‘their behaviour, we regret to state, was most unseemly and disorderly, not at all befitting the solemn and painful occasion. Here and there at every corner ballad singers and itinerant musicians filled the air with their discordant sounds, which, mingling with the shouts and rough ribaldry, the curses and oaths of the motley multitude, gave to the scene more of the resemblance of a Donnybrook Fair than that which should have been witnessed on the eve of an execution.’

There were ‘thieves, prostitutes and vagabonds’ standing in groups; ‘oaths and curses were frequent, peals of laughter and cheering rent the morning air’. At midnight, the local workmen appeared, to build the gallows (‘an operation which was proceeded with shortly after twelve and finished about two’), watched by the eager crowds.

The scaffold was placed at the top of Liberton’s Wynd, so that people watching in the streets around – in four different directions – could all get a good view of the place from where Bryce would undergo a ‘long drop’ execution, where his body would fall so far that his head would end up below the black screen that surrounded the scaffold.

This was a fact that the crowd found disappointing, and made this fact clear from 4pm, as the executioner, Askern, prepared for his task in front of them, arguing that it was a ‘farce’, a ‘public execution being made private after all’.

There was such a wait for the crowd, who had been there for hours, that they devised ways to entertain themselves. Groups of boys – who attended without their parents – told jokes, swore, and tried to steal tobacco off unsuspecting adults. Some of the prostitutes present started to run races with each other down the pavements, in-between soliciting other onlookers for trade.

One group of ‘wan and haggard’ women were different, however, trying to hand out religious tracts, whilst being laughed at by ‘flash’ men for their apparent earnestness. At around 5am, the sound of music could be heard: a pathetic kind of music, wafting down the High Street from Melbourne Place. This was a missionary, singing a song about martyrdom.

George Bryce had spent hours in his cell listening to similar psalms and hymns being sung to him, at his request: he had even joined in with some. He admitted his guilt, and ‘acknowledged the justice of his sentence’. At 8.08, he was pinioned by Askern in a room more commonly used to detain prisoners while they waited to be examined, having a glass of wine as the executioner got his straps ready. He was then led out in a procession to the scaffold.

His death was quick, taking place at 8.20, with everything being over in 90 seconds. The crowd immediately began to disperse, disappointed at not being able to see the body swinging above the black fabric of the scaffold’s surround. At 9am, the body, purple and stiff, was cut down; it was said that George’s face showed signs of ‘physical agony’.

Despite having watched him die, the crowd – which had become more ‘decorous’ as the time of the execution approached – was said to have been sympathetic towards Bryce’s parents and siblings.

However, ‘little feeling seemed to prevail in favour of the culprit’, and the onlookers strongly believed that only his hanging would be a suitable punishment for a man who had killed an innocent girl in such a brutal manner on that Saturday morning in Ratho.

Dealing with mental illness in the Ratho community George’s mother knew her family had a history of mental health issues: ‘My mother Catherine Nimmo had a brother, John. He was not right in his mind. My grandmother had a brother whose name was Taylor. He was not right in his mind.’ From an early age, she also knew that George – one of her at least 12 children – was different to his siblings. She said that when George was young, he had had a bad fever, and was never strong afterwards – but ‘he was always different from the rest of my children. When he was at school he did not learn well.’ His brother, Willie, shared a room with him, but complained to his mother that his brother was so restless at night, that he wanted to stop sharing. George spoke to himself; he refused to undertake basic personal hygiene, and four years earlier had run into the canal naked. George’s father, John, added that George had been in the militia in his 20s, but that had not made him any less ‘peculiar’ than he had been before. He kept himself isolated from the rest of his family, and just two glasses of whiskey would make him behave ‘mad’. In October 1863, he had behaved so badly after drinking, that his family had to put him in handcuffs; despite this, he still managed to grab a razor and try and cut his throat. Another time, he tried to jump out of a third-storey window, and he had a tendency to sleep in the byre used by the family to keep their animals. His local community obviously accepted him for who he was, and his parents saw him as ‘different’ or ‘peculiar’, but still their son, to live with them the same as his siblings. His behaviour, though, was to reach beyond ‘peculiar’ and into the realms of murderous.