It was mid-afternoon when they heard the shots out on the Rue End.  A ragged volley and then, as her attention focussed, screams and shouting.  Mr. Niccol was not long back from the boatyard.  They had had their lunch and Jessie was hoping he would doze before the fire  for the rest of the afternoon then go out to meet his cronies at the Tontine Hotel.  But, at the sound of uproar, he started from his chair and went through the house to his private room.  By the time Jessie caught up with him in the lobby he was struggling into his top coat.  A pair of pistols lay on the side-table in the hall.

That Saturday there had been a fierceness to him that exceeded all his past discourtesies[i]. 

“Thomas?  Should you not bide here?” she said.

He looked so angry, his mutton chop whiskers and thick shock of white hair framing his grimace.  He shook his head in disgust then unlocked the door.  It slammed behind him.  Out on the wharfsides, the tumult continued.  From the shoreward window, she could see the mob edge tentatively East along Rue End as the militia backed away towards Port Glasgow, muskets levelled and bayonets fixed.

Jessie and Thomas were finally married 6 months ago, though Jessie has known Mr. Niccol, the successful Greenock boat-builder, since she was a girl. 

Helen, his daughter by his previous marriage, attended the same school in Alloa that her Dad sent Jessie to.  Helen’s mother and sister died of the plague and, widowed, Mr Niccol sent Helen back to the care of his mother and father.  Jessie and Helen were pupils together until they were 14. Mr. Niccol took Helen back to live with him, in this very house on East Stewart Street in Greenock.  Four years ago, Helen invited Jessie to her wedding. It was such an excitement: travelling across Scotland in the new canal then down the Clyde from Glasgow.  Helen’s fiancé, Rob Henderson, seemed a fine enough chiel.  Soon after that, Mr. Niccol came to call on her father. 

Her own father was a disappointed man.  His father and grandfather had long leases of good carse land near Gargunnock but they lost their tenancy to bad luck and bad weather.  For all of her life, Jessie’s dad was a carter, hauling coal from the pits to the quayside at Alloa.   He and her mother did their best to keep Jessie and her brother and sister.  They sent Jessie and her brother to the school until they were in their early teens.  That was still possible while the country thrived: earnings were high during the long years they struggled to defeat the upstart emperor of France and his Jacobin hordes. Then Wellington defeated Bony and money proved difficult to come by.

Thomas – Mr. Niccol – was older than her father when he came to court.  He brought generous gifts, fine fare for the table and pretty dresses for Jessie.  She kept the table and its fine fare between herself and Mr. Niccol’s suit, but her mother knew it was inevitable and her younger brother, Bobby, insisted that she should.  She was 24 and still unmarried.  Mr. Niccol smelled of pipe-tobacco and, too often, whisky. 

It wasn’t till the night of their wedding[ii]  that she became aware of other odours and that the whisky and tobacco had their own sour tastes, mixed with his bodily effluvia.  He was coarse and hairy, grey and balding, drunk.  But still he pinned her to the mattress, wrenched up her night-dress, assaulted her.  The sensation was clawing, painful, desperate.

He left her aching, bleeding, shivering: serviced like any mare.  For all of his 51 years, he didn’t lack vigour, even in his cups and, optimistically, she encouraged more and more cups in the weeks and months that followed their wedding.

Pregnancy evaded him.   She wondered if she became with-child it might moderate the violence of his assaults.  Job done, might she be used up? His first wife only gave her daughters and only one of those, Helen, survived.  Might giving him a son satisfy him.  One, at least, and one more?

And then, one Wednesday afternoon when Mr. Niccol was at the boatyard, the bastard and his whore turned up.  It was after Hogmanay.  A cold January day.

The whore’s name was Bella McWhistan.  The bastard’s name was Henry Niccol.

“Henry McWhistan,” Jessie said. 

They were standing on the threshold.  Bella was a redheaded mare, a few years older than Jessie but hard darg and circumstances had aged her more.  The boy was barely 12 weeks old.

“Niccol,” the woman said.  “It says so in the parish record.”

“Some other Niccol then?  No relative of Mr. Niccol here.”

“I was Tam’s maid of all work, Mrs. Niccol.  Three years.  Since Miss Helen left the house.  No other Niccol.”

Jessie had been engaged to Mr. Niccol in the Spring of 1819.  The baby was barely 12 weeks old.  Jessie calculated that Bella was three months gone at the time Mr. Niccol proposed.  Miss Austen never conceived (or at least expressed) so vile a predicament.

“What do you want, Mrs. McWhistan?”

“Miss.  I’m Miss McWhistan[iii].  I wanted you to meet my Henry.  Our Henry,” she said.

“Is this blackmail, Miss McQuistan?”

“Not a bit,” she said. “Tam has provided his remittances.  So far.  I just wanted you to know. How is his business going, Mrs. Niccol.”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Business of both of us, Mrs. Niccol.  D’you not think?”

“I never ask.”

“More fool you.  Half the shipwrights are without work[iv] and Tam’s wee racket with the fly-boats?  The Comet and its like[v]  have put John Fairlie and Andrew Rennie out of business.  Why run the risk of having to push when you can warm yourself behind the lum and sleep all the way to the Broomielaw?”

So Mr. Niccol had a son, in his back pocket so to speak: though, of course, there is such pestilence on Greenock’s filthy streets that one child is no surety.   What was Jessie then: insurance?  And what was Bella to Mr. Niccol?

She could not think what else to say. “Will you come in for tea?”

“In my own kitchen?”

“Well, in the parlour.”

“We can’t do that, Mrs. Niccol.  Get a grip!…But thank you for the offer.  Don’t tell Thomas I called.  Not yet at least.  And you take care, Mrs. Niccol.  You stay safe.”

The door remained ajar as Bella carried the boy back down the stairs and out of the close.

As a hard winter eased into a wet Spring, there were rumours of sedition and rebellion.  Common artisans were associating, demanding voting rights and annual elections.  There was word that these common folk were drilling in the hills between Paisley and Greenock, forging pikes and stashing musketry, conspiring to overthrow the order of property and preaching the Rights of Man. 

Mr. Niccol said they had defeated French Jacobinism in Europe and, look, it festered here!  Soldiers and sailors returning from the wars.   Driving down wages or begging, mutilated, on street corners.  Drunkards wallowing in filth.  Holy Willies demanding property that they had not earned. Exhorting decent workmen to lay down their tools.  Scum of the Earth, the Duke of Wellington had called them.

One of Mr. Niccol’s cronies brought word to the boatyard that the rebellion in Paisley had been crushed.  The Port Glasgow volunteers were escorting 5 of the Paisley ringleaders to the Brideswell to await justice. 

Mr. Niccol shut down the boatyard at mid-day. Advised his carpenters and labourers to go back to their homes.  A few hours later, they heard the volunteers fire their volley and retreat.  Mr. Niccol left with his pistols.  Jessie waited, alone, for hours, wondering if the mob would ransack the town and loot the better properties.

Mr. Niccol smelled of smoke and whisky when he returned.  He did not ask her to undress.

Next morning, hussars arrived on steam-boats but it was too late: Jessie was already pregnant.

[i] On Saturday 8th April, Paisley gaol was full so five prisoners were sent to Greenock to be imprisoned here.  The Port Glasgow Militia escorted five Radical prisoners from Paisley to the Greenock Jail with a fife and drum playing.  Rumours about this soon got out and a mob gathered in the streets around the Bridewell behind the Mid Kirk.  A woman stepped in front of Adam McLeish, telling him he and his fellow volunteers were all ‘ill-looking blackguards. If there is any spirit in Greenock not one of you will return home this night.’ He told her to get out of his way. The prisoners were put in jail and the Volunteers prepared to return to Port Glasgow.  The crowd turned on them.  One of the local magistrates tried to calm things down but to no avail.  Just at the Tontine Hotel, the people began throwing stones and bottles.  Several of the Volunteers were hurt and fired shots in the air.

At Rue End, the Volunteers open fired on the crowd, injuring and killing 18 of them. The crowd advanced as far as Garvel Park when they heard that more militia were being sent to Port Glasgow to help the local Volunteers.  At this, the crowd dispersed.  Meanwhile, some had broken into the prison and released the radicals (but none of the other prisoners). Only one was subsequently re-arrested.

A detachment of hussars and guards were sent from Glasgow by steamboat to Port Glasgow in case of any trouble.  By the time they arrived the next day all was quiet.

The Greenock dead and wounded ranged from eight year old James MacGilp to sixty-five year old John MacWhinnie.

Adam Clephane (48 years) dead
James Kerr (17 years) dead
William Lindsay (15 years) dead
James MacGilp (8 years) dead
Archibald Drummond (20 years) dead
John Mac Whinnie (65 years) dead
John Boyce (33 years) dead
Archibald McKinnon (17 years) dead
(Died of his wounds on 5th May 1820)

Mrs Catherine Turner (65 years) leg amputated
Hugh Paterson (14 Years) leg amputated
Peter Cameron (14 years) flesh wound
John Gunn (24 years) flesh wound
John Turner (22 years) flesh wound
Gilbert MacArthur (18 years) slight wound
Robert Spence (11 years) slight wound
David MacBride (14 years) slight wound
John Patrick (30 years) slight wound
George Tillery (25 years) slight wound

No disciplinary action was taken against members of the volunteers.

[ii] 16 November 1816

[iii] Isabella eventually married a man called Allan Moodie in 1845.  She was 50 at that time.

[iv] Whilst business in Greenock  boomed during the Napoleonic Wars, shipping trades slumped in the aftermath – due to the ‘use of transports thrown into trade after the war’.  A decline in shipping meant a decline in ship-building and, though Thomas’ business was on a smaller scale than Scotts or Cairds, it was inevitable that his business would have been affected. 

In 1810 the contract price to build a vessel was £29 per ton.  By 1817 it had dropped to £19 10/-  per ton and rates continued to decline.  A Greenock  shipyard worker at the end of the Napoleonic Wars ( 1810-14) could earn  20/- to 27/- per week.  In the period 1815-29 wages had declined to  15/- to 21/- per week.  In 1830, employed ship carpenters wages were as low as 4/- wk : they were the lucky ones!  80% of ships carpenters were idle.

[v] The Fly Boat trade, in which Thomas seems to have had a virtual monopoly, collapsed in the late 1810s, unable to compete with the new, faster and more reliable steamers such as The Comet  for  passenger trade between Greenock and Glasgow.  The last fly-boat ran in 1813.