Combinations Murder and the Primordial Lump

On the 22nd of July 1837, at about ten o'clock in the evening in Glasgow, Scotland, John Smith, a native of Ireland and a cotton spinner by trade, left home accompanied by his wife. They went to a shop at the head of Clyde Street where they got some tea and then to a second shop where they bought oatmeal. They then proceeded down Clyde Street.

Opposite Marshall's wood-yard, Smith was shot from behind, under the right shoulder. The bullet severed the spinal chord and lodged in the first dorsal vertebra. At the moment of being struck, he called out that he was shot, fell forward on the street and became insensible of what was going on around him.

Smith recovered consciousness in the Glasgow Infirmary where he swore a disposition before the Sheriff Substitute of the County of Lanark, Walter Moir, before dying from his injuries on the morning of July 24.

Apprehension

From "Old Glasgow Pubs: Black Boy Tavern"

The masters met and offered a reward of £500 for the discovery of the persons implicated in the murder, and three days afterwards 2 informers met sheriff Alison by appointment in a Vault under the Old College, to which the informers were admitted by a back door through the College green. They disclosed to the sheriff a plot "to assassinate the new hands and masters, manufacturers in Glasgow, one after another, till the demand of the combined workmen were complied with" that the men shot three days before had been selected at the first victim and that Mr Arthur, master-manufacturer, was to be the next victim. The informers told the sheriff that the next meeting of committee would be held on the evening of Saturday 29th July, in the Black Boy Tavern, Gallowgate, Glasgow.

At 9 o'clock that night the sheriff left his office, with no arms but his walking stick, accompanied by Mr Salmond the procurator fiscal, and Mr Nish, the principal sheriff- officer. They met Captain Miller of the Police Force, with 20 constables, at the mouth of the Gallowgate, near to the Cross. Four constables were stationed at the entrance of the close, with instructions to let no one out or in; 12 others were stationed round the tavern at the front, and 4 at the back, with orders to seize anyone attempting to escape...

From "The Rights of Labour Defended or The Trial of the Glasgow Cotton Spinners"

Five months are now nearly gone, since the Committee of the Associated Cotton Spinners of Glasgow were ruthlessly seized, in the lawful discharge of their duty, by a band of Police, dragged to prison as felons, and there treated in a manner unparalleled in the annals of the history of the worst days of a Sidmouth or Castlereagh.

Every thing was done by those in power, who committed the brutal assault, to pervert facts, and prejudice public opinion against their victims, through the means of the press, till public indignation was roused to its highest pitch, and scarce a voice dared to be raised, even to throw a doubt on the Spinners' alleged guilt; and far less attempt a vindication of their character from the foul charges of which they had so unsparingly been accused. Time, however, rolled on, and public clamour began to subside into something like a calm. The Glasgow Assises for criminal cases was near at hand, and the public expected then to have developed to them a system of conspiracy, fire-raising, and murder, hitherto unknown in the annals of crime.