Читать книгу Collins Tracing Your Family History - Ryan Tubridy, Anthony Adolph - Страница 78

The Shetland Islands Council has the records of the Lerwick Police Commissioners (see here), who invited James, then a member of the Aberdeen Police Establishment, to become their police constable on 6 April 1852. He had asked for 20s a week but accepted their offer of 18s and a suit of clothes yearly, provided he could act as sheriff officer as well. In June they agreed to pay him an extra £2 ‘for the freight of himself and his family and furniture from Aberdeen to Lerwick’.

On 15 July the next year he was granted leave of absence to take his sick child to Aberdeen. But in March 1854 we find that ‘objections had been made by many people to [Wilson’s] leaving the town on the fiscal business of the county, he stated he would engage not leave town for any greater distance than such as he might be able to return from in the course of the following night’. Reading between the lines, the criminally inclined part of the populace had been rubbing their hands with delight whenever they saw the policeman departing on a boat, and the law-abiding section of the population had had enough of it!

Wilson appears in the archives giving lengthy statements about various crimes, thefts and breaches of the peace he had to deal with. But then, in December 1854, Wilson, James Angus a joiner and Andrew Nicholson, spirit dealer, were attacked by two sailors from a ship from Boston and Angus and Nicholson were knifed. Wilson had probably saved their lives, but he had had enough. In May 1855 he asked the commissioners for a certificate of good character and leave to ‘go south with the view of looking after some situation’. The commissioners regretfully obliged, commending his work in ‘repressing breaches of the peace’ and off he went, to work in Edinburgh first as a policeman and then as a cooper, leaving it to his wife to write to the commissioners chasing them for his arrears in salary. It seems that anything by then seemed preferable to being policeman in Lerwick.