Dunbar's Forgotten Tower

Very little of Bishop Elphinstone’s original Kings College quadrangle still stands in Old Aberdeen, bar the Chapel, dating from 1500.  The façade we see today was completed in 1832.  About the time of its construction, architect Alexander Fraser was dreaming up the fairytale towers of Powis Gate for his client, Leslie of Powis.  It is said Fraser was inspired by the old towers of Kings College, which were topped by lead-covered spires, and stood at either end of the south elevation, containing some of the student dormitories. 

Katherine Trail, whose father, Professor Milligan taught Biblical Criticism from 1860, recalls that the medieval student “halls” were named after planets, the south-east being ‘Jupiter’ or ‘Jove’s’ Tower.  The sometime Jupiter tower was originally called the Ivy Tower, and is now the only other survivor from the sixteenth century. 

Jove's Tower to the right - Parson Gordon's Map 1661

Hidden around the back of the current Divinity and Moral Philosophy classrooms, the tower is a four-storey, rubble-built circular structure with a conical roof. Elphinstone’s successor, William Dunbar had it built in 1525, thus it is also known as Dunbar’s Tower.  The leaden spire was destroyed in a storm in 1715, resulting in the change to the roof. 

Kings escaped much damage during the Reformation due to the bravery of Principal Alexander Anderson, who armed the students against a mob of “reformers” intent on sacking the Catholic university.   Thus much of the changes to the College were due to the need to modernise and expand.  Dr William Guild, Principal from 1640, had no qualms about knocking down the old Snow Kirk and the ruinous Bishop’s Palace in order to provide building materials for new walls.  17 years later, Cromwell’s preferred man, John Row, replaced Guild, and constructed new residences in the “Square Tower” or Cromwell Tower as it is known today.  Dunbar’s Tower remained only because of the increased need for classrooms in the 1830s.

Slezer's Etching of Old Aberdeen

Dunbar’s Tower links with a time when all students were male, aged 14-20, and were not allowed to leave campus without the express permission of their tutors.  Expected to rise at 5am, undergraduates also had to attend several church services throughout the day as well as their lectures, all of which were conducted in Latin.  Yet the story of Sacrist Downie — which follows next time — illustrates that even in the Middle Ages, students were not adverse to mischief!        

Burn the Burkin' Hoose!

“Beware the burkers!” was a cry associated with eminent surgeons and medical students across Britain between 1810 and 1831.  To learn the human anatomy, such men had to dissect human specimens, but superstition and intolerance meant these were in short supply.  The medics paid for bodies, torn from their graves by professionals or the students themselves.  One teaching surgeon in particular, Dr Andrew Moir, would happily accompany his students on raiding excursions.

‘Clever, dirty Andrew Moir’ as he was disparagingly called by his rivals, was born in Aberdeen in 1806.  It was his dream to have his own anatomy school in order to improve the dire state of medical knowledge in Aberdeen. Due to the donations from rich supporters, Dr Moir was able to turn the dream to reality when his new school opened in 1831 on an old bleach green called ‘Hospital Row’ off St Andrew’s Street, near Woolmanhill.

Today the site of Dr Moir’s school is approximately at the corner of St Andrew’s Street and Blackfriars Street, where RGU’s property stands.  The latter was originally the Demonstration School, built around 1906.

An inquisitive dog proved the surgeon’s undoing as it dug in the school’s back yard a month into its existence.  Apprentices from the nearby tannery found the mongrel pulling at a bone, and immediately declared that it was human.  The cry went up ‘Burn the Burkin’ Hoose!’ and the quickly assembled crowd burst into the middle of a dissection lesson.  The students and Dr Moir were chased into another room, which they locked behind them and then escaped by the rear exit.

The angry citizens turned their attentions to the building; with sheer force of numbers, they literally tore the school apart.  It is said that in only four hours, Dr Moir’s dreams went up in smoke, the hated ‘Burkin’ Hoose’ now a raging inferno.  He and his supporters criticised the police and the local militia for standing by and allowing the mob to run amok, but there was little sympathy outside the medical profession for his predicament.

Dr Moir was determined to continue, and almost a decade later, he was appointed the first official lecturer in anatomy at Kings College.  Sadly he died in 1844 at the age of 38, having contracted typhoid from a patient.  His gravestone, shown above, is in St Nicholas kirkyard.

The Gallows Hill

If you were standing on this anonymous hillock next to Trinity Cemetery Lodge at the foot of Errol Street about twenty years ago, you would have had a free view into Pittodrie stadium, hence the name ‘Miser’s Hillie’.  However, standing here three hundred years ago, you would have been a condemned criminal, as this was the site of the Gallows Hill from the fourteenth century until 1776.  Gallows Hill is not to be confused with Gallowgate, which led to another gibbet on the Porthill, but was reached by an old road (now Park Road) from the Justice Port at Castlegate.  Indeed, Old Aberdeen and Ruthrieston had their own gallows at Tillydrone and the Brig of Dee respectively.

Once led to the gallows, the condemned person’s view would have been of open grassland and the distant North Sea, not the cemetery, football ground and local housing as today.  Hangings always attracted a large crowd, as with the very last hanging which took place in 1776, of Alexander Morison who slew his wife with an axe.  It was a cold, stormy day, yet the people came, ghoulishly keen to observe the killer’s final moments.

The real problem with hanging was ensuring the pull of the noose broke the neck of the condemned individual otherwise they would die slowly of strangulation.  By the nineteenth century however, the ‘long drop’, between four and six feet, snapped the second or third vertebra of the spine and caused rapid brain death.  Not so for Morison, he was brought to the Gallows Hill on a cart, bound hand and foot with the rope around his neck.  City executioner Robert Welsh whipped the pony pulling the cart and Morison slowly and painfully choked to death as the cart was yanked from beneath his feet.  His body later hung in chains on the gibbet until it rotted as a warning to others.

Fifty years later the hill was partly excavated to create a gunpowder magazine for use by the King Street Militia barracks;  the soldiers made a gruesome discovery — piles of human bones, the remains of the condemned who had been buried under the hill, excluded from sacred ground because of their sins.  Stand on the Gallows Hill today just as the sun sinks below the horizon and you might imagine the sounds of the baying crowd and the executioner’s final words… ‘May God have mercy on your soul!’