Scarcely a matter of honour
Jane Ridley
DUEL by James Landale Canongate, £14.99, pp. 304 ISBN 1841956473 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Early one morning in August 1826 two men stood facing each other 12 paces apart in a sodden field a few miles outside Kirkcaldy in Fife. One man was a linen merchant named David Landale, the other was George Morgan, his banker. At the words ‘Gentlemen are you ready? — Fire!’ two pistol shots went off instantaneously. As the smoke cleared it was plain that Morgan had fallen to the ground. He was shot through the chest and died at once. Landale escaped unharmed.
This was the last duel ever fought in Scotland (the last duel to be fought in England was in 1845) and the wonder is that it happened at all. As James Landale shows in this enjoyable book, the quarrel between David Landale and George Morgan was not a matter of honour in the aristocratic sense of the word at all. Both were canny Scots, men of business from the small town of Kirkcaldy, then the hub of Scotland’s linen industry. David Landale was a prosperous and respectable merchant, a strong man with a firm jaw and a hint of a smile. George Morgan, who had served as an officer in the Napoleonic wars, acted with his brother as agent for the Bank of Scotland in the town.
1826 was a year of economic recession, the linen industry slumped, and David Landale had serious cash flow problems. He applied to his bank to smooth him through hard times and help pay his creditors, but the Morgans refused to give credit. Landale believed, with reason, that the bank was trying to force him into liquidation. Even worse, George Morgan went round Kirkcaldy gossiping about Landale’s debts, with the result that his friends starting calling in their loans. So Landale fired off a letter to the Bank of Scotland head office in Edinburgh, complaining about George Morgan and his brother. The bank investigated the Morgans’ agency, and declared them OK, but this was not good enough for George Morgan, who was a vindictive bully. He wanted revenge, so he provoked David Landale into fighting a duel. All the evidence is that Morgan went about this deliberately. He encountered Landale one day in a shop, and hit him hard with his umbrella. This was an insult which no gentleman could forgive. Landale issued a challenge, even though he had never fired a shot in his life before. That afternoon he dashed into Edinburgh and bought himself a pair of state-of-theart percussion pistols which were far better than the old flintlocks used by George Morgan, and this may explain his lucky shot.
Why such a quarrel, which was essentially a business dispute, should have been resolved by pistols at dawn rather than litigation is hard to understand. James Landale explains that the Napoleonic war years saw an extraordinary increase in duelling. Not only were more men trained in the officer’s code of honour than ever before, but for middleclass men such as George Morgan fighting a duel was itself a token of high social status. Even so, Morgan’s behaviour does seem pretty dysfunctional. He had an anger problem, and a record of assault and violence. Today the diagnosis would no doubt be posttraumatic stress, but Morgan was not so lucky.
Most extraordinary of all is the leniency of the law. David Landale stood trial for murder, and hired the stars of the Edinburgh bar, Henry Cockburn and Francis Jeffrey. They succeeded in proving to the satisfaction of both judge and jury that Landale had been unreasonably provoked and he walked free from the court.
James Landale, the author, is a kinsman of David, and he has skilfully pieced together the story of the duel from the court notes of the trial, interspersing his fast-moving narrative of the Kirkcaldy quarrel with the wider history of duelling. The result is an entertaining book which would make an excellent TV drama doc.
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