When the crematorium was a hotbed of rumour
August 2006
by Norman Mackenzie
Aberdeen was a hotbed of rumour and excitement. It was April 1944 and James Dewar, a town councillor and also managing director of Kaimhill crematorium, was awaiting trial for various malpractices. It was rumoured that a woman had noticed a unique ring – one which had belonged to her mother and which should have been cremated with her body – being worn at a local dance by a close relative of Councillor Dewar. When the police visited the crematorium to investigate, a number of offences came to light.
Whatever the truth about robbing the dead, this charge was dropped, but James Dewar was charged with the theft of 1,044 coffin lids, seven coffins and two shrouds. Alick George Forbes of Forbes & Son, undertakers in Woodside, was charged with the reset of 100 coffin lids and two coffins.
It will be appreciated that towards the end of the war good wood was in very short supply and eagerly sought after. Some of the coffin lids had been sent to the National Fire Service premises in Aberdeen where fire crews, in their spare time, turned them into writing bureaux, radio cabinets, tea trays and rabbit hutches.
The case aroused what the defence counsel called, “such an amount of gossip and idle and avid and ghoulish curiosity” that the court decided to move the trial to Edinburgh because of the improbability of the accused getting a fair trial in Aberdeen. The trial took place over several days in October 1944, during which it emerged that sometimes the contents of one coffin were tipped into another and two bodies were burned at the same time.
The prosecuting counsel, in an obvious attempt to play on the prejudices of the jury, enquired whether the bodies involved might have been of different genders – although what nefarious activities might have taken place in the furnace room were not made clear.
Both accused were found guilty, by a unanimous verdict, of slightly reduced charges. Dewar was sentenced to three years penal servitude and Forbes to six months imprisonment. Penal Servitude was the proper name for hard labour – a more severe sentence than ordinary imprisonment. We don’t have an equivalent today
Dewar later appealed against his sentence, but his appeal was dismissed and the sentence upheld. Immediately after the trial Dewar resigned from the Town Council.
The whole event attracted a great deal of local interest and caused much consternation. Local poets had a field day and everyone with any poetic talent, and a few who hadn’t, wrote outrageous verses which circulated quickly in the local community.
I was a young man at the time, having recently left school, but I remember the pieces of paper being circulated, some hand-written and others typed, and often barely legible having emerged from the bottom of too thick a layer of carbon copies – for these were the days long before photocopying had been invented.
Wondering whether anyone could remember any of the verses, I started asking around. Soon e-mails and letters started arriving and acquaintances stopped me in the street to share their recollections, like these verses:
People talk, as people will,
And some who’ve never seen Kaimhill
Tell gruesome tales with bated breath
Of what takes place there after death.
Our Fire Force Master never tires
Of fighting local city fires
Nor will he see the coffins burn
If there is cash for their return.
Aberdeen’s Crematorium chief,
Not yet convicted as a thief,
Will find himself in Peterhead [prison]
If it is proved he robbed the dead.
The event also gave rise to some children’s street songs. About that time there was a song entitled Pistol Packin’ Mamma, made popular by Bing Crosby and the Andrews sisters. One of my correspondents remembered two little ragamuffins in St Andrews Street yelling at the pitch of their voices to the same tune.
Lay that coffin down, Dewar
Lay that coffin down
Coffin-pinchin’ Dewar
Lay that coffin down
And, of course, the incident gave rise to a great deal of typical Aberdeen humour, such as:
Q. Why have Aberdonians stopped drinking Dewar’s whisky
A. Because there’s no body in it!
The name of the head of the local Fire Service at the time was Coleman and this gave rise to the following prescription for a cough cure:
One teaspoonful of Coleman’s mustard and your coughin’s gone!
On the day the trial started, Patsy Gallacher, the doyen of newspaper sellers at the time, proclaimed the following message on his Union Street news stand:
Two Great Events:
Churchill in Moscow
Dewar in Edinburgh
I spoke recently with a man who was brought up in the Woodside area of Aberdeen who, as a boy, was given a sledge made by Forbes & Son. He told me he always felt a little uneasy about the handles along the side. I hope Leopard readers will share their memories with me.
Norman Mackenzie completed a PhD in Chemistry at Aberdeen University in 1953. After a career in ICI and Robert Gordon’s Institute of Technology he took early retirement, but has recently returned to Aberdeen University as a very mature student.
This is an article from the August 2006 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.