Rare pictures of infamous Victorian Highland hotel robbers released

Rare pictures of a trio of infamous Victorian robbers, who robbed guests at high-end hotels across the Highlands, have been released.

Scotland’s People, the official Scottish Government site for searching government records and archives, has published details of more than 100,000 people who were jailed at Ayr and Inveraray prisons.

Among them were American James Edward Lyon and his 20-year-old accomplice, Eliza Thorpe.

They travelled as a husband and wife, robbing hotel guests of cash, jewellery and other valuables from Argyll to Aberdeenshire in the summer of 1883, and garnered the nickname the ‘Highland Hotel Robbers’.

The pair were arrested at a hotel in Edinburgh, while their associate, Joseph Dowling, was also arrested after he was caught with some of the stolen goods.

The men were convicted and sent to Inveraray prison, with Lyon getting seven years, but the case against Thorpe was found not proven.

Photographs of the trio were kept in an album of interesting cases by the local procurator fiscal, and the duo’s entry in the register for Inveraray prison is among 4,600 released.

Among those to also call the prison home in the 19th century were seven-year-old James McCulloch, who was caught stealing, and 82-year-old Ann Kerr, who was found guilty of “vagrancy”.

Vagrancy was the crime of having no fixed home or job.

Among the newly published 98,000 entries of Ayr Prison from 1841 to 1911 were murderers Joseph Calabrese, Thomas Bone and Mary Boyd. All of them were sentenced to death, and all were spared.

Archivist Veronica Schreuder said: “Prison registers are a rich source of information for social researchers and family historians alike.

“While it can be a shock to find an ancestor in prison, it can sometimes lead to details that are unlikely to have been preserved for most people.

“Finding out the colour of their hair, details of their health or whether they could read or write can turn a name and some dates into a much more rounded person.

“And of course, if they have committed a serious crime, it can explain a lot about the decisions of other relatives, such as moving area, changing a name or simply never talking about them.”