Burke and Hare (3 page)

The crime was discovered when young John Dallas’s corpse was found dumped in the street with all-too-obvious signs of its having been in the surgeons’ hands. Torrence and Waldie were brought to trial and blamed each other for the crime. Waldie claimed that the boy must have been accidentally smothered while concealed under her coats. When their defence was rejected and both were convicted of murder, Torrence claimed that she was pregnant, but this was soon disproved, and the women were hanged in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket on 18 March 1752. It was less than a year after a new Act decreeing that
all
executed murderers were to be either publicly dissected or hung in chains. The preamble to the Act for Preventing the horrid Crime of Murder (25 Geo. II) asserted that ‘It is become necessary that some further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy be added to the Punishment.’

Meanwhile, the demand for bodies so far outstripped the capabilities of medical students to keep pace with it that an import trade started from Ireland and France, where corpses were cheap and plentiful. They could be bought from Irish body-snatchers for ten shillings each in the early days of the trade. Cargoes of bodies were landed at Britain’s leading ports, disguised in crates marked ‘fish’ or ‘apples’ or ‘glue’. Provided that their sea-crossing was brief and their distribution to the medical schools prompt and efficient, they reached their destinations undetected and still fresh enough to be of use.

Many cases are recorded, however, of imported corpses being discovered by their stench of putrefaction, when ships had been delayed by bad weather from entering port, or bodies had rotted during over-long voyages. Glasgow was the main clearing-house for bodies imported from Ireland, and on one occasion a dreadful stench from a shed at the Broomielaw led to the discovery of putrefying corpses which had been addressed to a merchant in Jamaica Street by Irish medical students, and documented as a cargo of cotton and linen rags.

A box brought to the King’s Arms at Lancaster on the coach from Liverpool, in October 1826, was opened because passengers had complained of the smell. Addressed to ‘Archibald Young, Esq., 59 South Bridge-street, Edinburgh’, it was found to contain the putrid corpses of a middle-aged woman and an infant boy. The box, which measured 22 x 15 x 12 in, could be traced back only as far as Manchester, but it had undoubtedly come from Ireland. The coroner’s verdict was ‘Found in a box, Lancaster’.
⁷

An opportunity had clearly presented itself to the underworld of Britain for opportunists to move in and supply teachers of anatomy with subjects for dissection, relieving medical students of the burden of responsibility for quarrying their own raw materials. At first, men with an eye for the main chance carried out this work as casual labourers, raising corpses when chances occurred and, as itinerant salesmen, disposing of them wherever they could. But as the demand for subjects continued to increase, a corps of specialists in body-snatching grew and turned the robbing of graves into a profession, encouraged – and sometimes actually employed – by the leading teachers of anatomy, who were out of business themselves if they had no corpses. Professional body-snatchers were engaged in what has been called ‘the foulest trade in human history’.

Grave-robbery was not, of course, a new invention of Georgian Britain. It occurred in ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, and has, some claim, to be regarded as one of the oldest offences against humanity. Necrolatry played some part in the European witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Witches were believed to exhume the corpses of children and executed criminals to use parts as ingredients in magic potions. Readers hardly need reminding of the delectable ingredients of the witches’ brew in
Macbeth.
And werewolves, according to the Jacobean dramatist John Webster, ‘steal forth to churchyards in the dead of night, and dig dead bodies up’.
⁸
The great Vesalius himself had obtained his first skeleton by stealing the body of a hanged man from outside the city walls of Louvain, and was subsequently sentenced to death for body-snatching by the Inquisition, though the sentence was commuted.

But body-snatching had never before been a commercial business, driven by market forces, and it dawned only slowly on the British public as a whole that isolated incidents, here and there, were but the tip of an iceberg. Few people at the turn of the nineteenth century suspected that doctors were in league with body-snatchers on a scale that was a disgrace to a supposedly civilised country.

Private individuals, meanwhile, were taking extreme measures to protect their newly buried loved ones from the resurrection men. They sometimes hired guards to watch new graves throughout the night. Spring-guns were occasionally set near graves. In Edinburgh, a man had a crude land-mine buried in his daughter’s grave. Another common and effective method of protection was to have a huge stone slab lowered onto the lid of the coffin. This could be left until the corpse was out of danger of exhumation, being no longer fresh enough for the doctors’ purposes, then lifted and made available for the next bereaved family that required it.

The specialist suppliers – variously known as body-snatchers, resurrection men, grabs and sack-’em-up men – soon developed a degree of finesse in their work that was beyond the amateurs, who only wanted fresh corpses as easily as they could get them and had no interest in protecting a trade. Professional body-snatchers did not leave open graves and shattered coffins to provoke local communities into defensive action. They took care to cover their tracks by tidying up and replacing soil and turf so that, nothing being suspected, they need have no fear of visiting the same churchyards again. Two men working by the light of an oil-lamp, with another to keep watch, could quickly and quietly uncover a coffin buried only a few hours earlier, perhaps, in shallow and uncompacted soil, remove the lid, extract and strip the corpse, stuff it in a sack and restore the grave, leaving the churchyard virtually as they had found it except for the missing resident.

As revelations of grave-robbing grew, and the public became ever more outraged as it realised the extent of the foul trade, two particular methods of protection were favoured, especially in Scotland. One was to appoint armed watches to guard churchyards at night. Men, usually local volunteers, would spend the hours of darkness in specially built watch-huts, keeping a lookout for any disturbance. The weakness of this system was that the men would get drunk, fall asleep, or shoot nervously at some perfectly innocent citizen passing through the churchyard.

Another method, invented in Scotland a little later, was the iron ‘mortsafe’. The mortsafe was a strong and heavy iron grille which was lowered by block-and-tackle into a grave to form an impenetrable cage round the coffin until all danger of disinterment was past. A correspondent to the
Quarterly Review
in 1820 wrote, ‘The iron cage or safe is a Scotch invention which we have lately seen at Glasgow, where it has been in use between two and three years . . . The price paid for this apparatus is a shilling a day.’
⁹

The Edinburgh
Weekly Chronicle
had devoted a leader column to the existing system of supplying teachers of anatomy with subjects, pointing out that it was indispensable in the present state of the law. But the fury of the public could not be abated, and the zealousness with which the Scots guarded against body-snatching and pursued and punished resurrection men, when they were caught, led to a serious situation for the medical schools.

One obvious consequence was to drive the trade across the border, and resurrection men in England – even as far away as London – did good business supplying corpses to Edinburgh and Glasgow. A diary kept by one London body-snatcher, generally believed to have been Joshua Naples, is preserved in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons, and the entry for Wednesday, 15 January 1812, is fairly typical of its contents:

The diary or log-book consists of 16 leaves (i.e. 32 pages, not 16 pages, as some writers have it). The pages are carefully ruled and mostly written in a flowing and legible hand, and cover the period from November 1811 to December 1812. The identification of this diarist as Joshua Naples is based chiefly on the fact that he is known to have been literate. The son of a stationer and bookseller, he served under Nelson and worked as a grave-digger after his discharge from the navy, then became a professional body-snatcher, working with a gang operating from Southwark and led by Ben Crouch. Naples was later given a job in the dissecting-room at St Thomas’s Hospital, but eventually died of drink.

It is very likely that this same man gave evidence to the Select Committee on Anatomy set up by the House of Commons in 1828. Three professional body-snatchers were granted immunity from prosecution and protected from identification by the use of the initials AB, CD and FG. (One naturally wonders why the third was not EF, but speculation about that is pointless.) CD is thought to have been Naples. He was asked by the committee to state the number of subjects he and his colleagues had supplied to the anatomy schools in 1809 and 1810:

The apparent confusion between the committee (‘1809 and 1810’) and the witness (‘the same year’) is explained by the fact that there was little demand for bodies during the summer months before the days of refrigeration, and a year for the body-snatcher was the winter period from the autumn of one year to the spring of the next, when most demonstrations of anatomy took place.

There are many other recorded instances of body-snatchers in England eagerly supplying the market in Edinburgh. One of the most remarkable occurred in October 1826 when dockers at St George’s Dock, Liverpool, complained about the dreadful stench from three casks they had put aboard a smack bound for Leith. The casks were opened and found to contain eleven naked corpses, six male and five female, pickled in brine. The shipping note read, ‘Please ship on board the
Latona
three casks of Bitter Salts, from Mr Brown, Agent, Liverpool, to Mr G.H. Ironson, Edinburgh’. The carter who had delivered the casks to the dock was traced and said that he had been hired by a Scotsman to collect them from a cellar at 12 Hope Street. This address turned out to be the house of a clergyman, Rev James McGowan. He had let the cellar to a man named Henderson, who said he was a cooper.

Police went down to the cellar and found themselves in a veritable charnel house. There were twenty-two corpses consisting of nine men, five women and eight children, both male and female. Some of them had been lifted from the parish churchyard, where three empty graves had been found. Some were in an advanced state of decomposition. A young Scot named James Donaldson was later identified by local witnesses as one of a number of men who came to the cellar frequently with a hand-cart bearing casks. He was charged with having conspired ‘with divers other persons, lately, at Liverpool, and unlawfully, wilfully, and indecently disinterred, taken and carried away, divers dead bodies, which had lately before that time been interred’. One witness testified during the trial that a tierce of brine in the cellar had been found to contain the bodies of babies, and this evidence made the foreman of the jury feel so ill that he had to leave the court to recover. Donaldson was sentenced to twelve months in the Kirkdale House of Correction and fined £50, and two other men were identified later as members of the Hope Street gang and similarly charged and sentenced. One of them was identified by the carter as the man who had hired him to transport the casks to the dock, but ‘Mr Henderson’, who had rented the cellar from Rev McGowan, was never traced.
¹¹

Nevertheless, in spite of all this apparent activity to supply subjects to Edinburgh, the medical school there, the
Westminster Review
reported, ‘is now subsisting entirely on its past reputation, and in the course of a few years it will be entirely at an end, unless the system be changed’. The difficulty of procuring subjects, the article continued, had led many students to leave the place in disgust, as they were unable to pursue their studies properly. The Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society added its voice to the call for new legislation in 1825, and pointed out that increasing prosecutions and more severe sentences for body-snatching had, among other things, ‘compelled students to leave London and Edinburgh for Dublin and Paris, where the difficulties of acquiring anatomical knowledge are not so great’.
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This was the situation when Burke and Hare appeared on the scene. It was admirably summarised by the Royal College of Surgeons of England in a petition sent later to the Home Secretary, one of a continuous flow of appeals from the medical profession to have the study of anatomy placed on a legal footing. After observing that it was the college’s duty, under the terms of its charter, to examine those who intended to practise surgery to ensure that they had acquired a sufficient knowledge of human anatomy, the petition went on: