The Short Arm of Law (updated)
As preparation for some future writing, I’ve been researching 1930s Edinburgh. Edinburgh at that time was pretty lively with dance halls everywhere and an ever-present underbelly of crime and corruption. As part of my research I tracked down a cheap copy of the autobiography of William Merrilees who became Chief Constable of what is now Lothian and Borders. In the 1930s and early 40s, he was a pugnacious police inspector on the make, who made his name prosecuting dance hall proprietors and putting down ‘immorality’.
Merrilees’s first major public ‘success’ was his campaign against the Kosmo Club and alleged prostitution linked to the premises. His allegations in that case were distinctly suspect, as council for the defence made clear and a little research establishes. However, in his autobiography, he makes much of a prosecution of the managing director of Maximes dance hall at Tollcross, Edinburgh on various charges of gross indecency and other offences together with a co-accused. He does not name the accused but a search of the Scotsman for the period turned up the names of Ewan Cameron King and Peter Allan Ogg in the public domain. Yesterday, I read through the proceedings of the trial at the National Records of Scotland, to which I gained access after a freedom of Information request.
Two things emerged from reading the case papers (from 1938): first, the account that Merrilees gives in his autobiography is close to complete fiction. At the conclusion of the account, Merrilees says that the accused were both sentenced to long terms of imprisonment when in fact the principal defendant, Ogg, was acquitted on most charges and two that he was convicted on were overturned on appeal. His sentence was reduced from two years to nine months. Secondly, it is my view that Ogg was fitted up: there was compelling medical evidence given that it was highly improbable that he could physically behave as alleged. One of the witnesses, from Morpeth, Northumberland, gave the court an account of his initial interview by Wee Willie Merrilees and the ‘foul language’ and threats uttered by the inspector.
King pled guilty to two charges and I don’t know what sentence he was given – but he got married in November 1938 (eight months after the court case) at Leith Baptist Church, and he is stated to be a hotel proprietor in Royal Circus, Edinburgh, as he was described in the court proceedings.
Ogg died in 1954 of a brain tumour, aged 59. His death certificate describes him as a restaurateur. King died a widower in 1965, aged 62 of a heart attack. He is described on his death certificate as a wine and spirit merchant in Leith.
More to come, I think, and all grist to the fiction mill. It also causes me to doubt everything in Merrilees’s autobiography – my starting presumption henceforth is that it is self-aggrandising nonsense unless capable of independent corroboration (which, ironically enough, formed part of Ogg’s successful appeal.)
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