A unique Tayside museum will open with a gallery of rogues behind bars next month — including Oor Wullie.
The story of more than a century of local policing has been locked away since the advent of Police Scotland in 2013, with the former Tayside Police museum in Dundee mothballing its displays soon after.
Kirriemuir Heritage Trust took on the job of preserving and adding to the archive at the town’s former police office and are looking for volunteers to help keep open the doors with a fanfare.
Visitors are promised a look back into the history of three local forces — Perth and Kinross Constabulary, Angus Constabulary and City of Dundee Police — before they merged to become the Tayside Force in 1975.
The Courier was given a preview of Tayside’s link to the world’s most infamous murderer, and one of the characters in the cells who is always in trouble with his local bobby.
One of the volunteers, retired local Inspector Hamish Gray, said: “It’s a large exhibition that records what local policing used to be like.
“In some ways they were simpler times, but when you look at how crime was dealt with, and some of the things police used to confiscate, maybe they weren’t.”
Among the more grisly exhibits are an early 20th Century bench used for corporal punishment, home-made weapons including a golf ball filled with nails, and a display of items seized at football matches with the introduction of new police powers at games in 1978.
“One item is a scimitar used for beheadings in China — no one knows how that came into the possession of police,” said Mr Gray.
“There’s a birching bench with a terminal that has pages of notebooks from the mid 1920s and lists of people who were birched between 1912 and 1917.
“And we have a section on William Bury, the last man hanged at Dundee, who was linked with being Jack the Ripper.”
Bury was executed in 1889 for killing his wife and chopping up her corpse.
At the height of media fever about the Ripper killings in Whitechapel, London, Bury was treated as a suspect but has since been discounted by experts.
Mr Gray said the attraction will open in the third week of June as volunteers are in place, and the museum needs a few more helpers to work as envisaged — but no one will be handcuffed to the job.
“We are looking for volunteers to come forward and give us just a couple of hours a week,” he added.
Heidi Findlay, chairwoman of the trust, said the museum is “completely reliant” on volunteers and does not receive funding.
Those interested in volunteering should email Heidi on kirriemuirheritagetrust@yahoo.com or visit the office in 5 Bank Street.
