MURDER AT ROSS ISLAND
TODAY LITTLE ROSS Lighthouse stands sentinel guarding the estuary of the river Dee. The light is unmanned except for the visits by the boatman/attendant,  to change the gas bottles, which now fuel the light.
It was not always so.
Back in August 1960, two lighthouse relief keepers were stationed on the island, Mr Hugh Clark, a former postman from Main Street, Dalry, a relief keeper who was on duty during the principal keeper's holiday, and Robert Dickson, assistant keeper, a 24 year-old ex-sailor. Here is the story, reconstructed from contemporary newspaper accounts. (Willie McKenzie was the first journalist to report the story.)
Mr TR Collin, a local bank manager and secretary of the local branch of the RNLI, was out sailing in a dinghy with his 19 year-old son David, and went ashore at Little Ross to have lunch, and go for a walk. As he approached the lighthouse buildings he heard the telephone ringing.
Since the lighthouse keeper did not seem to be answering the call Mr Collin knocked on the cottage door, thinking Mr Clark was asleep. When he got no reply he entered the house and found Mr Clark lying in a blood-stained bed, with injuries to his head.
Mr Collin rang the Kirkcudbright police and after several hours Inspector William Garroch and Constable George Thomson, accompanied by Dr RN Rutherfurd, arrived at the island in a launch piloted by George Poland, a local fisherman.
Chief Constable Berry stated that Mr Clark's body was found in circumstances which might suggest homicide. (Expert medical examinations later revealed that death was due to rifle wounds.)
The police said: "A main line of enquiry is being followed up and we are anxious to trace a motor car, GV 4534, believed to be a fairly old 10 h.p. grey Wolseley, and to interview the driver."
The car, which belonged to Mr Clark, was discovered by the police to be missing from where he always parked it, at Ross Farm, on the nearest convenient mainland point to the lighthouse.
The Wolseley was later found abandoned in Dumfries with no trace of the driver.
A nation-wide hunt began centred on Selby in Yorkshire, where police took up positions on the northern side of the town at the toll bridge and watched all vehicles heading south. When at 8.25 am a car answering to the description stopped to pay the 9d toll, the policemen moved out of their positions. After speaking to the police, the man in the Wolseley was arrested and later detained.
Robert McKenna Cribbes Dickson was charged in Dumfries High Court with the murder of Hugh Clark. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang – four days before Christmas. He heard the demanding, accusing voice of a prosecution counsel: This was a black-hearted crime… this man plotted a mystery of the sea.
He had heard an impassioned plea in his own defence: Here is a horrifying touch of Jekyll and Hyde… and ask you not to call this a murder.
But what did it all mean to the 24 year-old former sailor?
From contemporary newspaper reports

GOD'S LAW

What did the trial mean to the one other person who knew his secret? That person was his mother. And THIS was the knowledge they shared. In a bare prison room Robert Dickson searched his heart and said: Mum, I know my Bible and I know God's law – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Mrs Winnie Dickson walked in tears through the prison portals that day, and made her way home to 11 Loganlea Place, Edinburgh.

Her boy was prepared to face his judges.

FAVOURITE

But all the time she knew that her boy was prepared for the worst. Robert Dickson was the black sheep of his family but still his mother's favourite.

Robert has always been good to me, she said.

GREW ILL

As the trial approached – and her son passed the time reading novels in his cell – Mrs Dickson grew ill with worry. She did not make the long journey to the High Court in Dumfries. She could not forget what her son had said. And at 4.19 the following day came the moment she had been dreading. The moment when Robert Dickson was sentenced to death for the murder at Little Ross Island, Kirkcudbrightshire, of his 64-year old lighthouse colleague, Hugh Clark.

As a gale battered the courtroom windows Lord Cameron donned the grimly symbolic black cap: You will be taken from this place to Dumfries Prison and then forthwith to the prison of Edinburgh. You will be hanged on the 21st day of December between the hours of 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.

Meanwhile in her council home in Edinburgh 60 year-old Mrs Winnie Dickson waited and prayed.
Robert Dickson was reprieved on 16th December, but later took his own life while in prison.
Little Ross Island is a haven of tranquil beauty now, housing two families who have converted the lighthouse keeper's cottages and are enjoying the peace with the gulls and cormorants. But in its time the Little Ross has seen many more brutal times with smugglers and covenanters.