The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde (23 page)

The following footnote appeared in Creech’s report of the affair: ‘Much anxiety was shown that the body might not be detained in prison; and after the Magistrates retired a vein was opened. It is said other means of recovery were used after it was taken away, but the neck was found to be dislocated.’

All of which would sound decidedly terminal to any sensible person, so why – even when Brodie had (apparently) found his way to an unmarked grave at the Buccleuch Church in Chapel Street – was his termination unaccepted by so many sceptics? There was widespread local talk that, after a ‘set-up’ exit, a ‘born-again’ Brodie had found his way abroad. Some said he had fled to his original escape destination of New York; others swore he had been seen on the streets of Paris where he had taken up residence.
Pardon
? as they might say in the French capital. Roughead again: ‘There is a tradition that, on a subsequent occasion, the grave was opened, when no trace of his body could be found.’

Had it then contained someone else? The theories still bubble on, well into the third century of Deacon Brodie’s dark story, but there is little chance of doubts being settled now, as the burial ground is now covered by a car park behind university lecture halls.

But just for the fascination of it, let’s think about this more than one-dimensionally. ‘The neck was found to be dislocated’ – who said that? If it is to be attributed to Dr Degravers, who would have been part of any getaway conspiracy, it is not a huge stretch of the imagination to respond: ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ It’s what Edinburgh University’s Owen Dudley Edwards calls his Mandy Rice-Davies theory (look it up) and as one who has written and broadcasted many thousands of words on the Brodie case, he feels there are many other areas of doubt about the ‘death’ that have never really been resolved.

Speaking over a black coffee in the stairwell café of the National Library of Scotland on George IV Bridge – not much more than 100m from the scene of the (punishment of the) crime – the distinguished historian and author of many academic books explains why he leans towards the theory that Brodie was indeed revived and removed from the scene of his ‘death’. While conceding that there is no solid evidence for that belief, he feels that the middle-class miscreant ‘was so well connected in Edinburgh society, with a circle of important business and political contacts and even genuine friends, that his fate would have been comprehensively protected by them when any official or reporter asked them or his doctor for confirmation of his demise’. In other words, the enquirers would have been sold a dummy or, to put it even more bluntly, told an outright lie.

‘Let’s face it,’ says the historian, ‘this could have been the idea from the start – for the cheating of the gallows to succeed, for friends to be primed to say he was gone, to feign grief, see off any questioners and, once the episode had blown over, to quietly help him out of the city and the country.’

Dudley Edwards thinks it likely that Brodie was hidden away for a while, provided with new identity and disguises, and ‘smuggled to America’ where he lived out his days. Indeed, the historian once memorably said so with persuasive conviction in a feature called
Case Reopened
on BBC Radio Scotland:

Brodie’s excellent connections stretched to the judge himself at the trial, who was embarrassed he had known Brodie and, more importantly, ‘kent his fether’. And let’s not forget what a clever man this uncommon thief was. He would not have given up his life easily, that’s for sure, and would have employed every possible means at his disposal to sustain it.

So I believe it’s more than possible that he survived. The only evidence we have that he died are the statements to that effect from the people around him, but these were his own friends. They said he was dead but, frankly, that was not reliable evidence. You wouldn’t expect them to say anything else. We know his friends put out a very odd story, that he had hoped to survive, but had failed. So basically, it was all very suspicious. It suggests they were anxious to prevent rumours that this is exactly what had happened.

Also, Brodie was not hanged for murder, so his body was not the property of the state and taken away for dissection. The historian also points to the fact that there is no direct evidence of a burial.

So how exactly could he have cheated the hangman, assuming there is doubt about the steel collar idea, but at the same time accepting that he was an expert in carpentry?

Whether or not he was hanged on a gibbet of his own design, as has been reported many times, he had been certainly involved to some degree of consultancy on its reconception the year before, so he understood the new workings.

He knew he ran the risk of being hanged and knew how he could have a good chance of avoiding it. The gibbet was reinforced so that it didn’t break his neck on the first drop.

What had he been talking to the hangman about before he made the drop? Again, it does not stretch the imagination to think that there was some collusion there.

And if the rope was the right length he would be okay. There would have been a bit of a jar, but he had a plan and nothing would have been broken. Once supposedly hanged, he would plunge through a platform taking him out of sight.

The structure underneath the actual gallows was hidden away from the public. And Brodie’s friends were there, immediately receiving the body, and he was almost certainly still alive. He would have been taken down very quickly and spirited away.

So resurrection is the definitive conclusion? ‘It is at least as good a theory as any other, and I would say a good deal better,’ says Dudley Edwards with a mischievous twinkle, which prompts the listener to suspect he would find it rather a shame if the mystery were actually to be solved.

And wait … what is this we have here? Just to muddy the waters still further, we note that in its issue of 1823 – thirty-five years after the drama –
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
had something to say about it in a series of ‘imaginary colloquies’ with a scenario attended by Timothy Tickler, Morgan O’Doherty, James Hogg and Christopher North (the fictitious editor, who was actually editor John Wilson) chairing the discussion in ‘The Blue Room, crowded with bottles at 1 in the morning’. It seems Mr Tickler, a croupier to trade, claimed to have been a witness of the hanging and had not been impressed by the magazine’s previous ‘bad’ number that had carried a piece on Mr Brodie and his fate:

North: ‘What was your chief objection?’

Tickler: ‘That shocking, that atrocious lie, about Brodie – or I should say, that bundle of lies.’

O’Doherty: ‘I wrote it.’

Tickler: ‘That paragraph was full of shocking misstatements. The fact is, I saw Brodie hanged and he had no silver tube in his windpipe, and no flowered waistcoat on. It is true that he sent for a doctor to ask if there was any probability of escaping with life, but [Pierre] Degravers told him at once, sir, that he would be “as dead as
Julius Caesar”; these were the words. But Brodie would hold his own opinion; and nobody e’er threw down the pocket handkerchief more assured of resuscitation. Poor devil! He just spun round a few times and then hung there as quiet as you please with his pigtail looking up to heaven.’

O’Doherty: ‘Alas! Poor Brodie!’

Just how imaginary was that discussion? Not entirely, one has to suspect. There is a detectable authenticity about it, is there not? And so the mystery goes on.

Not just one mystery, actually. In many ways, the saga of the man with the double life is still riddled with a variety of puzzles. He had alluded to one of them himself (as reported in
The Scots Magazine
) on realising that he was facing the ultimate punishment for what he considered his minor crimes:

He declared that, not withstanding the censures and opinions of the world, he was innocent of every crime except that for which he was condemned; and endeavoured to extenuate his guilt by saying that the crime for which he suffered was not a depradation committed on an individual, but on the public, who could not be injured by the small trifle the Excise was robbed of.

In other words, he may not have been the honest, upstanding citizen he pretended to be (at least by day) and perhaps he would venture out on one or two of his night jobs with a selection of deadly pistols, but he was still not a murderer, surely just a glorified burglar who hadn’t won much for his troubles and who hadn’t hurt anyone. Did that really merit the death sentence?

Maybe not, but another puzzle, for this writer at least, is the extent to which such a miscreant was and is let off the hook and celebrated, even in today’s world. Most people in Scotland, and many much further afield, would claim at least to have heard of him, though they might not be familiar with the details of his story. There are several pubs that revel in the resonance of his name – from Dundee through his native Edinburgh to Chicago and the place where he once wanted to end up: New York.

As is mentioned elsewhere in this volume, the arched alleyway off Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket that housed his home and workshops still boasts not just the Brodie’s Close plaque above its entrance but a full-size replica of the man himself just outside, inviting passers-by into the restaurant within, which occupies the Deacon’s one-time working space. Where once there was wood, now there is food.

There have been songs, plays and books written about him; in 1997 a television movie of the same name was made starring the Scottish actor-comedian Billy Connolly.

As observed in chapter 1, the even better-known split personality of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that Deacon Brodie spawned through the vivid imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson has become even more internationally iconic, adapted for countless plays, movies and other channels of popular culture, while the very phrase has entered the English language as a kind of shorthand for someone who encapsulates good and evil.

The series of disturbing questions that this raises starts, of course, with ‘Why do we allow it?’ And it follows with ‘Why are some villainous rogues almost forgiven as we elevate them – like Ned Kelly, Ronnie Biggs, Deacon Brodie – to a status that can even overtake that of the good-guy heroes?’ and ‘Why do we enjoy explorations of badness as much in real life as in dark thrillers? Is it because both good and evil are to be found in all of us and it is perhaps best that we indulge the latter characteristic vicariously, at arm’s length, through the device of daredevil personalities, real or fictional?’ Answer if you dare.

It was a theme that obviously fascinated Stevenson, who himself was given to dabbling in the two sides of his own personality, moving as he did between the extreme Victorian respectability of his parents’ elegant New Town and the looser worlds that he relished, whether represented by the ‘trivial lecheries’ of Edinburgh’s ‘vicious lamp-lit fairyland’ or the bohemian life he fled to – after rejecting the law career so desired by his family – among the mistressed, carefree company of art students in France.

He clearly believed everyone to be capable of a double life – and Dr Jekyll was surely his way of urging us to acknowledge this human trait that, he would say, varies among individuals only by degrees of intensity and controllability.

So in many ways the masked intruder who inspired that sinister creation did not really die here or even there; the man who was the original Jekyll and Hyde lives on not just in the ghostly shadows of old Edinburgh but in our own hearts, fears and imaginations.

Whether or not the disgraced deacon lived on, it can’t be denied that there was a clear desire among his surviving family to see his name removed as much as possible from evidence of his existence – so especially from the family Bible which accommodated, between the pages of its Old and New Testaments, a handwritten manuscript of many pages registering Brodie births, marriages and deaths.

It was the fondly maintained work of William’s father Francis and began with his own birth in 1708, carrying on with that of his wife, Cicel Grant, in 1718, their marriage in 1740, and the births of their eleven children – most dying in their infancy – along with the deaths of other relatives.

One name whose birth and death no longer feature in these pages is that of their infamous wayward son who gave the family so much agony and shame. The entry relating to William’s birth has been cut out of the register’s relevant page and the vacant space filled with glued-on blank paper. ‘Who knows who did this?’ says Nico Tyack, documentation officer at the Museum of Edinburgh where the Bible now rests in the city council’s special history collection. ‘But it’s a fair bet that it was one of the family.’

It’s a fair bet, too, that that this would have been done just after the Deacon’s trial and execution in 1788, six years after his father’s death. His father’s death was recorded in the 15cm thick leather-bound volume by Jean, William Brodie’s sister who kept house for the Deacon, while his other sister Jacobina kept herself busy being the wife of local upholsterer Matthew Sheriff. She was recorded as having died in 1839.

The 50cm × 30cm volume is a fine, leather-bound copy of the Folio edition of the Holy Bible, including the King James versions of the metrical psalms. It was printed by the famous Edinburgh printer James Watson in 1722 and, after a ‘lost’ period, was ‘discovered’ and acquired in the following century by bookseller Richard Cameron – who, doing what booksellers tend to do, sold it to the city council in 1904. Since then it has been protected among many other historical curiosities in the museum’s Huntley House home towards the foot of the Royal Mile.

‘It is allowed out only for special occasions,’ says Mr Tyack, ‘as we are quite nervous about putting any of our vulnerable paper documents on permanent display. We have James Craig’s original plan for the New Town, for instance, but we allow in into the light for viewing by the public only two hours per day.’

The Brodie Bible’s most recent outing was on show to the public under a glass case in Edinburgh’s City Art Centre as recently as July 2014. ‘It is rather a sad book,’ says Mr Tyack, ‘not just because of the conspicuous absence of William but because of the high incidence of infant deaths within the family.’ Anyone who wishes to view it can do so by making an appointment with the museum’s history department.