Bill McAllister: Anniversary is a reminder of grim chapter in city’s history
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This month is the 210th anniversary of Robert Ferguson publicly addressing a huge crowd in Inverness before they watched him being executed.
The Inverness Journal, predecessor of this newspaper, reported that “so uncommon a spectacle attracted a great concourse of spectators who appeared deeply affected at the melancholy occasion”.
Ferguson was a cartwright at George Thomson’s smithy in Resolis when around 5pm one June day, in came Captain Charles Munro, of the 42nd Regiment of Foot, a Highland regiment which later became the Black Watch.
Words were exchanged, the captain, taking exception to being sworn at, pushed Ferguson out of the smithy. An account at the time stated: “Ferguson got in to a violent passion and soon returned, armed with a large knife, with which he ran at the captain, who only had a switch in his hand to defend himself.
“Ferguson, however, soon closed with him and gave the captain a mortal wound in the left side of the belly, which caused his death the following day.”
The officer is reputed to have said, in his last moments, that “he wished he had died on the field of battle”.
Ferguson was taken to Inverness and imprisoned in a jail which, with a sheriff court, had been built in 1788 beside the Steeple, on the site of the original tolbooth. After trial that September, he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
At one o’clock on Friday, November 13, 1812, he was taken from the prison to the place of execution.
The venue is not specified but it is likely to have been at the Longman, where several hangings took place, including that of the last man to be publicly hanged in Inverness, John Adam, known as the “Mulbuie Murderer’” in 1835.
It is said by some that the Longman takes its name from “the long man”, or stretched corpse. The gibbet was located near what is now the extremely busy Harbour Road roundabout. No “hanging about” there these days!
After prayer at the scene, the Inverness Journal reports that: “Ferguson addressed the surrounding multitude in the Gaelic language for a considerable time.
“He acknowledged himself worthy of death for the crime he had committed. He particularly regretted his intemperance which was the immediate cause of the murder of Captain Munro.”
After his speech was over, the Inverness Journal, rather spectacularly reports: “He mounted the drop without the least intimidation and after delivering a most impressive prayer, he was launched into eternity without a struggle.
“The body, having hung the usual time, was carried back to the prison and given over for dissection, in terms of his sentence.”
Some 23 years later, John Adam’s execution further underlined a Highland hanging as a free entertainment, with several thousand people jamming the Longman.
Adam was going with two women at the same time and had set up his wife Jane in lodgings in Inverness, promising to have a house ready for her.
Instead, they crossed on the Kessock Ferry, walked for some miles and then Adam crushed her skull with a rock. Her body was found a week later.
His body was buried beneath Inverness police station and was later moved to the site of police HQ at Old Perth Road before finally being buried in a cemetery.
Though Adam was the last public hanging, the final execution in Inverness was in 1908, inside the walls of Porterfield Prison, which had been built six years earlier.
Joseph Hume, aged 25, was hanged for the murder of elderly Lhanbryde man John Smith.
Inverness clergymen drew up a petition calling for the sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment and it was signed by more than 7000 local people.
There was, however, to be no reprieve.
The legendary executioner Henry Pierrepoint travelled to Inverness in order to hang Hume.
The UK abolished the death penalty in 1964. Inverness is well rid of executions, public or private…
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