Mystery of Murray Hall, Scot whose death rocked New York

Once the news reached the press, it triggered a flurry of articles, at first in New York, but later rippling out to other states and parts of the world. It was a wave that gathered, and never quite dissipated so that even now, more than a century later, we find ourselves still intrigued by this historical figure whose only written word left to us is a signature on a census sheet. 

Search for the name “Murray Hall” in 1901 on www.newspaperarchive.com, and over 800 entries are listed, some of them published by relayed wire services. These were sensational articles like the New York World’s “Known As A Man For Sixty years, She Died A Woman”, or the same paper’s “‘He Was A Lady’, Says Jury’, which chimed with the hunger in an era of so-called “yellow-journalism”, the times of Citizen Kane type newspaper moguls like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, with a hunger for scandal and mystery. 

One of these stories is mentioned in a scene at the start of Murray Hall, a historical novel I co-wrote with the writer and film curator Milo Clenshaw. Sitting in a newspaper office, our central character, Samuel Clellan, reads a headline.  'Voted Tammany for thirty years. Died a woman.'  He recognises the figure, the distinctive Murray Hall, a small man, fine-featured, often sporting a vastly over-sized coat and carrying a terrorising blackthorn cane, and is drawn into an investigative trail which ultimately leads to Scotland, and a similar 19th century scandal that blew up around an itinerant labourer from the central belt.

It's a thread of connection that stretches from Manhattan to Paisley, Renfrew, Govan, Duddingston, Tranent.

The character of our journalist is fictional, but the stories he comes across are heavily based on testimonies of the time. Ours is a book of multiple voices: not just those of the many people who told their stories about Hall after his death, but we two authors, each with very different lives and identities, one a trans man, the other a cis woman, peering at the same documents. 

Murray Hall article in the New York World (Image: New York World)

A lover and a fighter

In the weeks and months following Murray Hall’s death, many told their tales about his life. "Clairvoyant" neighbour, Mrs Porter, described how he told tales about his time in goldrush California as a forty-niner. A labourer said that he had seen a dead body in a box in Hall’s basement. Others related how Murray had whipped a big policeman and left with a “storm cloud draping” beneath the eye. A female journalist described how he had threatened her with his blackthorn cane.

Tammany Hall and sporting friends related anecdotes from Murray’s gambling and political life: his trips to see fights, games of poker, and a visit to Coney Island. Senator Barney Martin, a  high-profile and colourful Tammany political mover,  declared, “She’s dead, the poor fellow. My old friend Murray Hall is dead.” 

But also what emerged was that Hall was a complex, multi-faced character, who had a life amongst women, and had been married to at least two wives, not always happily. 

There were tales of kindness, but also cruelty. Ellen Elba Hobbs, sister of Hall’s wife, Celia Lowe, interviewed in the Boston Sunday Globe, declared how amazed the family had been at the revelation and described a manipulative character who exerted “power” over Celia, kept her jewels and clothes locked away and even threatened her with a gun when she attempted to leave. His defining characteristic, she said, was “supreme meanness”. On Celia’s death, also from cancer, Murray shipped her body back to her home village of Shawmut.

Strikingly few of Murray Hall’s close acquaintances expressed anything other than shock at the revelation, though a bartender related how he got into a scrap when he asked, "And what will you have, little old woman?", and one domestic said she spotted her sex and believed she had even had a baby, now grown up and living on the West coast.

But those closest were resolute about his maleness. At the coroner’s inquest, for instance, his adopted daughter, refused to call him she, saying, "I shall never think of him as a woman."

In this piece, I have chiefly employed the pronoun ‘he’, since this was what Murray used throughout life and to which his daughter adhered - yet, throughout our book pronouns slip and slide according to who is speaking.

Murray Hall full-length sketch (Image: Commercial Tribune)

The Scottish connection

Out of this cacophony, one story did emerge about Hall's past which tantalised the public and would become a dominant narrative. An old Scottish nurse living in Brooklyn, came forward claiming in an article titled “Sure Murray Hall Was Mary Anderson” that she had known him in Scotland, and he was the person at the centre of another older story that had gripped Scotland, that of John Anderson, also known as John Campbell (believed to be his mother's maiden name).

We know a fair amount about the story of John Campbell since it was widely covered in the Scottish and UK press towards the end of 1871 and in the early months of 1872. Particularly detailed was a story in the  North British Daily Mail titled, ‘Unhappy Termination of an Extraordinary Career’.

“During the latter part of last summer,” the article began, “there was working in the shipbuilding yard of Messrs Henderson, Coulborn & Co at Renfrew, a person who was known to their workmen as John Campbell. He was engaged at the forge in company with three others, and won the esteem of all around him by the handy and intelligent manner in which he executed any task alloted to him.”

But, in November 1871 this worker, John Campbell, ‘around 32 years old’, became sick while staying lodging in the home of Thomas Early.  The country was in the grip of a smallpox epidemic of such scale that it triggered the kind of regular reports on hospital admissions and deaths we have seen in recent Covid times. 

Campbell had taken on the care of his landlord's wife, Mrs Early, when she had succumbed to the disease, catching it himself and a doctor was summoned. This Dr Allison on diagnosing smallpox advised he be taken to Paisley Infirmary. To this, Campbell resisted, saying that he wished to be clothed and to leave town. 

This aroused curiosity in the doctor, who, according to the article, “at once put the question, ‘Was it because of sex?’

"The reply," says the article, "was the affirmative.... The supposed ‘Johnnie’ was a lassie and had worn male attire since she was 13 years old for no other reason than keeping ‘clear o’ the blackguard men.’”

That attire, however, would be forcibly shed when the doctor insisted he be admitted to the infirmary, “as none other than Marie Campbell”,  and only in women’s clothing. 

Campbell would soon recover from smallpox, but his troubles were not over.  Whilst at the hospital, possibly in Lauriston, not Paisley,  he was served with a letter from  Kirknewton, advising  that he had been wanted by the parish since May 1870. Soon after, he received a visit by the inspector of the village in the company of Mary Ann McKennan, his wife. 

The story went that the pair had married in 1869, when John was working locally as a labourer, and had lived together until May 1870 when he suddenly disappeared.

Murray Hall article (Image: New York World) At that time, the article relates, McKennan had raised the cry that her husband was a woman, but her testimony was not credited and she, "having had two illegitmate children" before the marriage with Campbell, became “chargeable to the parish”.

“Campbell," we are told, "maintained that McKennan knew her sex before the marriage, and there was a mutual understanding on the matter; but the latter declared that she was not aware of the truth until some days after the ceremony.”

A 1901 article in the Dundee Evening Post gave more detail about this marriage. “The arrangement," it says, "was a profitable one for both. The ‘wife’ had her home just as if she had a real husband and the ‘husband’ had one who would look after the house, keep ‘his’ clothes clean and ward of suspicions. But the best of friends are sure to quarrel and ‘Johnnie’ and Mrs Campbell proved no exception to the rule. The ‘wife' threatened to ‘spout’ and ‘Johnnie’ was in terror."

There are other details we learn about Campbell from newspaper reports; that he worked in numerous locations, including as a farm labourer at Howden-o’-the-Brig near Tranent, and slept in a bed with a male lodger at the Early residence; that, like Murray Hall, he seemed quite the charmer of women and fell in love with a Highland Lassie named Kate Martin, whom he courted “with all the usual ardency of an affectionate beau”.

“In Renfrew,” the North British Daily Mail article  states, he still adhered to “the old habit of loving and associationg with the lassies”. There were even a few “unkind” stories about the care he gave to the sick land lady, Mrs Early. 

Authors Vicky Allan and Milo Clenshaw (Image: Vicky Allan)

What’s clear from these stories is that Campbell had a blend of both feminine and masculine skills. He would sew and mend fellow lodgers clothes. He was well-liked at the forge. Workmen, on learning they had been “deceived”, pooled together a subscription, declaring “a more kindly and obliging worker never was engaged in the yard”.

Fast forward to 1901 and this connection between the “parallel” life of John Campbell and Murray Hall was even confirmed by the medical officer of Edinburgh, Sir Henry Littlejohn who is quoted in the Evening Post report. 

“Sir Henry Littlejohn remembers," it describes, "that she had strongly marked features, and this, taken along with the fact that her constitution was remarkably robust and masculine lent her aid in posing as one of the sterner sex. Johnnie Campbell as she called herself, soon found employment as a mason’s labourer at Duddingston, and later was engaged in the construction of the railway viaduct at Dalkeith. No one suspected her sex."

"She could “carry the hod” with any of the other workers; her hands were as hard and strong as those who had been at the work all their days, and her ‘stride’ is said to have been as firm and steady as that of any of her fellow workers walking the ‘plank’.”

Some attempts are made in some of the reports both from 1872 and 1901 to  find an explanation for why Campbell chose the attire and life of a man.  The North British Daily Mail, for instance, notes that  “in consequence of bad usage”, Marie left home at about 13 years of age “to shift for herself”. 

It also states that she had an older brother, the original John Campbell, who on his death (we suspect from a foundry accident), “requested her to take his clothes and wear them, as that would probably enable her the better to make her way in the world”. 

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Were they one and the same?

One of the big questions that emerges from this tale is whether  Campbell/Anderson actually really the same person as Murray Hall?  Certainly, Mrs Canning argued this persuasively enough that a World newspaper reporter described the two lives as tallying “in almost every minute detail”.

Canning’s tale differed a little from the reports of John Campbell, but the basics matched.  Two siblings, Mary and John, orphaned and left destitute; the brother dies issuing instructions to bury him as “Mary Anderson” and assume his identity. 

Some of Canning’s details however are different from those reported in 1872. The smallpox hospital is not Paisley, but "Duddison", believed by some to have in fact been Lauriston. The year was 1870, not 1871.   But there was a great deal of similarity.  Her ‘John’ smoked and drank. He was also threatened with prosecution, which was only halted when he “volunteered to act as a nurse of the smallpox patients at the hospital” . 

This accords with a story, told in the Evening Post, of a Scotsman report dated 14th June 1872, , which described the dropping of charges and how Johnnie, “as she was still called”, was taken on as a cleaner in the hospital “where she remained till close to August 1872”.

“She was a good worker there too,” the article describes, "and became the ‘pet’ of the place. … She would smoke black tobacco, could drink though she never drank in excess and had all the habits of men.” 

But, according to Canning, John Campbell’s torment was not over.  “The Edinburgh Scotsman,” states her New York World interview, “printed the story in full and the notoriety the woman achieved drove her from the hospital. Wherever she went she was jeered at, and finally, unable to bear up under the ridicule any longer, she decided to quit Scotland. She confided this to Mrs Canning and was advised to go to America. This she did in the year 1870, telling her friends that she was going to change her name and begin life over again in the land of promise.”

This last twist is extraordinarily sad.  If the nurse’s story is true, and Murray Hall and John Campbell/Anderson were one and the same, then what drove him to create another life in another land was the unbearable jibes and derision. 

It’s also achingly familiar.  Over 150 years later, for all the progress there has been on women’s, civil and LGBTQI+ rights, that jeering, shaming and ridicule remain. 

Miss Wideawake attacked by Murray Hall (Image: Altoona Mirror)

Was Canning’s tale true? It is not impossible, though the time frame in which Campbell could have made the journey and set up a life before marrying Celia, is incredibly short. There is less than a year between his story being reported in various UK and US newspapers and the marriage of Hall in December of 1872.

It is even tighter, if the following, in the Evening Post, is to be believed: “At the close of the hospital ‘Johnnie’ went to Ratho, where she got employment as a dairywoman. She remained there for some time and in a short time emigrated to America.”

In census records for 1900, Hall gives his age as sixty (roughly aligning with Johnnie’s age) but offers his date of emigration to the United States as 1846, listing both of his parents as from Scotland. Then there are the reports that Murray was highly educated, but Johnnie was not. 

Yet it says something that papers at the time found this believable. If we trust them, perhaps John Campbell did get on a boat in 1872 and quickly reinvented himself as educated Scottish nobleman.

Perhaps Campbell's past, the trauma of exposure at the smallpox hospital, was also why Murray Hall so fiercely guarded himself against the medical profession, turning to surgical books to learn about the tumour growing in his chest, refusing full examination. Perhaps it is even why he too became a blackguard.  

But I'm not sure. Given that so many parts of the story do not quite match up, I can't help wondering if this was a fusion of two separate lives and stories. And if it was, was this because these lives were so threatening, in their day, that they had to be melded into one? What if, rather than the life of Murray Hall being a vanishingly rare thing, it was more common than is often assumed?

Certainly that’s what is claimed in a fascinating book by Emily Skidmore titled True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Century, which the stories behind some of the 65 cases of "individuals who had been assigned female at birth but chose to live as male" which were reported in United States newspapers between the 1870s and 1930s. In it she writes, how trans men often chose "out-of-the-way places in order to make quite regular, maybe even ordinary, lives. They were in a word, unexceptional".

Not just Murray Hall

That such lives have always existed matters at a time like this of some moral panic, in which, in the United States, transgender rights are being particularly strongly targeted. It matters because it shows that transness is not, as Milo points out in his postscript, “something new and frightening”. 

What can we tell you about Campbell, and Hall, and their relationship to gender and sexuality as we understand it now?

Perhaps not all that very much, and certainly it seems inappropriate to place contemporary labels on these lives. As Milo, in his postscript to our novel, writes,  “There are many reasons why Hall might have lived as he did, the two most obvious being that he was transgender, or that  he saw and understood the privileges men enjoyed and wanted to access them himself. It is possible that both were true. For myself, I do believe that he was trans, or at least genderqueer,  because I can’t imagine someone committing so fully to a life  that didn’t truly reflect who they were. But that’s just more  conjecture – if there is an objective truth to the story of Murray Hall, we haven’t found it.”

As co-authors we were cautious around Murray Hall, never wanting assume his voice, and always peering at him from the outside through others’ eyes. We did not want to label or interpret too much. 

Milo has described this approach movingly.  “The labels, he writes, “with which we describe ourselves and each other do serve to create moments of identification, but they also divide us. Murray Hall’s story is illustrative of this. If we claim the story as categorically a trans one, we might lose its potential as a narrative of female resistance and empowerment. These reclamations do not have to sit in opposition to each other, but can instead represent two struggles united in the same cause.

“This then," he adds, "is an invitation to absorb from the story of Murray Hall whatever speaks to you.”

Murray Hall by Milo Allan is published by Black & White.

Milo Clenshaw and Vicky Allan will be talking about their book at Waterstones, Argyle Street, Glasgow on April 15 at 7pm.