Burke and Hare Read online

  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’.12

  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:

  In the present state of the common law . . . the Individual who dissects a human body, or even has it in his possession for any other purpose than that of burial, is guilty of a misdemeanour unless it be the body of a Malefactor hanged for Murder.

  Bodies used for dissection in the anatomy schools have necessarily been procured by illegal means, by the invasion of consecrated ground and the disturbance of graves, in a way disgusting to society at large and especially offensive to the friends and relatives of the deceased . . .

  The Council . . . have laboured under much embarrassment from the inconsistencies and contradictions of the law itself, which at the same time that it declares the Student to be guilty of a misdemeanour if he attempt to obtain anatomical knowledge, renders him also, when afterwards engaged in practice, liable to a civil action on account of any mistake which his ignorance of Anatomy may lead him to commit.13

  Or, as Sir Astley Cooper, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, put it more bluntly, an ignorant surgeon ‘must mangle the living if he has not operated on the dead’. ‘You must employ medical men,’ Sir Astley told the committee:

  . . . whether they be ignorant or informed; but if you have none but ignorant medical men, it is you who suffer from it; and the fact is, that the want of subjects will soon lead to your becoming the unhappy victims of operations founded and performed in ignorance.14

  The predicament in which the anatomy teachers found themselves (not only in London and Edinburgh, but also in Bristol and Liverpool, Glasgow and Aberdeen, Manchester and Sheffield, Cambridge and Leeds and other cities which had their own medical schools in the first quarter of the nineteenth century) forced them to encourage body-snatchers and in effect become their partners in crime. Sir Astley Cooper himself became known as ‘King of the Resurrectionists’ because he was one of the best clients of the London body-snatchers. He boasted that there was ‘no person, let his situation be what it may, whom, if I were disposed to dissect, I could not obtain’.

  Nevertheless, the doctors purported to be horrified by their enforced association with men whom they freely represented in their public pronouncements as the scum of the earth. The hypocritical moral position of the medical men, who had once been body-snatchers themselves, was that they had done it in the interests of science and the public good, whereas the professionals did it for money!

  Of course, it was hardly to be expected that men who made their livings by theft would be scrupulously honest in their business dealings. One Edinburgh body-snatcher obtained an advance of £2 10 shillings from an anatomy lecturer for a corpse he had promised, then delivered a box filled with rubbish. Another sold a corpse to the lecturer John Lizars, then stole it back from his dissecting-room and sold it to Lizars’ rival Knox, getting £25 for the one corpse. But the assumption that the doctors were entirely altruistic and the grave-robbers totally depraved was an easy trap to fall into. One author went so far as to say that the Anatomy Act, which became law in 1832, ‘permitted cultured, brave and honourable members of the medical profession to escape the slimy tentacles of the resurrectionists’.15

  At any rate, by 1827, the stage was well set for an enterprising double-act of criminal depravity, which made its dramatic entrance in one of the kingdom’s most handsome cities.

  NOTES

  1 G.A.G. Mitchell, ‘The Medical History of Aberdeen and its Universities’. Lecture printed in Aberdeen University Review, Spring 1958, p. 234.

  2 H.J.C. Grierson (ed.), Letters of Sir Walter Scott, Vol XI, 1828–31, (London, Constable, 1936), pp. 124–26.

  3 Scots Magazine, March 1742, p. 140.

  4 Ibid, pp. 140–41.

  5 Scots Magazine, July 1742, pp. 336–37.

  6 Scots Magazine, February 1752, p. 98.

  7 Lancaster Gazette, 7 October 1826.

  8 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Act V, Scene II.

  9 The Quarterly Review, Vol 23, 1820.

  10 Evidence given to the Select Committee on Anatomy, 1828.

  11 Liverpool Mercury, 13 and 20 October 1826; 3 and 10 November 1826; 26 January 1827.

  12 The Humble Petition of the Liverpool Literary and Philosophical Society to the Honourable the Commons of Great Britain and Ireland, in Parliament Assembled, May 1825.

  13 Petition of the Royal College of Surgeons in London to the Viscount Melbourne, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, 10 December 1831. Home Office papers in Public Record Office, HO 44/24.

  14 Evidence given to the Select Committee on Anatomy, 1828.

  15 James Moores Ball, The Body-Snatchers, (New York, Dorset Press, 1989 ed), p. 187. (Originally published in 1928 as The Sack-’Em-Up-Men.)

  * * *

  2. UNION

  * * *

  Scotland’s capital had become one of the finest cities in northern Europe, with an elegant New Town designed by James Craig and developed northward from 1770 to 1870 from the medieval fortress perched acropolis-like on Castle Rock. New streets on a grid pattern, with squares and crescents, gardens and open spaces, boasted the fashionable neo-classical architecture of Robert Adam and William Playfair. Princes Street and George Street, Queen Street and Charlotte Square prestigiously linked the Scottish city with the royal family, and King George IV, donning the kilt, had already paid a popular visit. Sir Walter Scott, then living in Castle Street, had helped to organise the celebrations and David Wilkie, RA, had recorded the great event on canvas.

  Within half a century of the New Town’s development, it
s residents had included, besides Scott, the philosopher David Hume and the political economist Adam Smith, worthy representatives of the Age of Reason. Thomas Carlyle and Thomas De Quincey lived there, as well as John Wilson, the university’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, more widely known by his pen-name in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine of ‘Christopher North’. Among the students at the university in 1827 was the eighteen-year-old Charles Darwin, a doctor’s son who had come here to study medicine. The city was enjoying a new reputation as one of the leading cultural centres of Europe, basking in an unrivalled ‘Golden Age’.

  But what of the Old Town, which remained unaltered to the south of the castle? Like so many other towns and cities of Georgian Britain, Edinburgh was a place of stark contrasts. From Calton Hill you could gaze across at the ‘Athens of the North’ in one direction and at ‘Auld Reekie’ in another. Edinburgh had a dual personality, and, though Stevenson was not yet born, we may perhaps be forgiven for calling the New and Old Towns the city’s Jekyll and Hyde faces. While the local gentry of the New Town was proud to parade itself in this new cosmopolitan metropolis, which was attracting visitors such as Shelley and Turner, Mendelssohn and Paganini, the Old was the grisly haunt of body-snatchers.

  Defoe described the place half a century or so before the New Town was begun. The city, he wrote:

  . . . lies under such scandalous inconveniences as are, by its enemies, made a subject of scorn and reproach; as if the people were not as willing to live sweet and clean as other nations, but delighted in stench and nastiness; whereas, were any other people to live under the same unhappiness, I mean as well of a rocky and mountainous situation, thronged buildings, from seven to ten or twelve story high, a scarcity of water, and that little they have difficult to be had, and to the uppermost lodgings, to fetch; we should find a London or a Bristol as dirty as Edinburgh, and, perhaps, less able to make their dwelling tolerable, at least in so narrow a compass; for, though many cities have more people in them, yet, I believe, this may be said with truth, that in no city in the world do so many people live in so little room as at Edinburgh.1

  Tall tenement buildings, known as ‘lands’, crowded together in narrow stinking wynds and closes beneath a permanent pall of smoke from the congested multitude of chimneys. Filthy winding staircases, called ‘turnpike stairs’, led from squalid yards and alleys to apartments where washing hung out of the windows during daylight hours, and human and other refuse was tipped out of them at night. ‘Stinking’ had been the adjective commonly used by writers and visitors to describe old Edinburgh for centuries. Neither the grey houses nor the grey streets had drains. Slum dwellers obliterated all consciousness of their miserable plight by means of heavy drinking. Pallid and emaciated inhabitants of the poorer quarters shuffled along dingy alleyways dodging the excrement of dogs and the vomit of drunks, keeping a wary ear open for the brief incantation ‘Gardy loo!’, signalling the ritual dousing of piss and garbage from above.

  The chief problem was, as with many other British towns at the time, the rapid rise in population. Although Edinburgh was not one of the new manufacturing towns, like Manchester and Birmingham, its population had been increasing since the failure of the Young Pretender’s rebellion of 1745, and within the first thirty years of the nineteenth century it had more than doubled.

  One of the improvement works Edinburgh was engaged in was the digging of the Union Canal to link the city with the Forth and Clyde Canal near Falkirk. This brought thousands of men seeking employment on the project. Among them was a large contingent of Irish labourers, part of a continuous stream of poverty-stricken immigrants seeking unskilled work in the industrial towns of Britain. They constituted the cheapest labour in western Europe. They formed close communities which quickly acquired reputations for heavy drinking, especially on Saturday nights, and for being the ‘lowest, dampest, dirtiest, most unhealthy and ruinous’ rabble wherever they settled.2 The squalor of the Irish ghettos was notorious throughout the country, in Edinburgh as in London, Leeds and Liverpool. Friedrich Engels famously described conditions in the area of Manchester known as Little Ireland. The people arrived here as:

  . . . primitive peasants, uprooted by pressure of want from a poor and inefficient rural society untouched by industrialism and with a long tradition of oppression and violence. Ill-equipped for more sophisticated work, desperate to seize whatever means of life a strange and unfriendly environment offered, they were bound to depress living standards and harshen the struggle for survival among the lowest strata of the population.3

  In the slums of large urban centres, they had become notorious for their practice of taking in sub-tenants, thus increasing what were often already unhealthily overcrowded lodgings. Often they dispensed with beds and slept on straw which had also been used by cows or pigs. If a labourer was possessed of a bed, ‘he would take as a lodger, as a tenant of half his bed, another labourer at a weekly rent’.4 The Irish were also notorious for their ‘wakes’, when they allowed corpses to lie about for several days while money was collected to pay for their funerals. A corpse might be laid out for ten days or more in a tiny room where others slept, notwithstanding the stench of putrefaction.

  Irish immigration was a permanent matter of concern to the Scottish authorities. It was stated that this increasing labour force ‘lowered greatly the moral tone of the lower classes, and greatly increased the necessity for the enforcement of sanitary and police precautions where they have settled in large numbers . . . It is painful to contemplate what may be the ultimate effects of this Irish immigration on the morals and habits of the people . . .’5

  Sir Walter Scott commented on this problem too:

  The great number of the lower Irish which have come over here since the peace, is, like all important occurrences, attended with its own share of good and evil. It must relieve Ireland in part of the excess of population, which is one of its greatest evils, and it accommodates Scotland with a race of hardy and indefatigable labourers, without which it would be impossible to carry on the very expensive improvements which have been executed. Our canals, our railroads, our various public works, are all wrought by Irish. I have often employed them myself at burning clay, and similar operations, and have found them labourers quiet and tractable, light-spirited, too, and happy to a degree beyond belief, and in no degree quarrelsome, keep whisky from them and them from whisky. But most unhappily for all parties they work at far too low a rate – at a rate, in short, which can but just procure salt and potatoes; they become reckless, of course, of all the comforts and decencies of life, which they have no means of procuring. Extreme poverty brings ignorance and vice, and these are the mothers of crime. If Ireland were to submit to some kind of poor-rate – I do not mean that of England, but something that should secure to the indigent their natural share of the fruits of the earth, and enable them at least to feed while others are feasting – it would, apparently, raise the character of the lower orders, and deprive them of that recklessness of futurity which leads them to think only of the present. Indeed, when intoxication of the lower ranks is mentioned as a vice, we must allow the temptation is well-nigh irresistible; meat, clothes, fire, all that men can and do want, are supplied by a drop of whisky; and no one should be surprised that the relief (too often the only one within the wretches’ power) is eagerly grasped at.6

  Among these immigrant Irish navvies was one William Hare, a former farm labourer in his native land. Born at Newry, he was illiterate and uncouth – a lean, quarrelsome, violent and amoral character with the scars from old wounds about his head and brow. Professor John Wilson later saw him in prison and described him as the most brutal man he had ever seen.

  His dull, dead, blackish eyes, wide apart, one rather higher up than the other; his large, thick, or rather coarse-lipped mouth; his high, broad cheekbones, and sunken cheeks, each of which when he laughed – which he did often – collapsed into a perpendicular hollow, shooting up ghastlily from chin to cheek bone – all steeped in a sullenness
and squalor not born of the jail, but native to the almost deformed face of the leering miscreant – inspired not fear, for the aspect was scarcely ferocious, but disgust and abhorrence, so utterly loathsome was the whole look of the reptile.7

  Owen Dudley Edwards, who refers pointedly to ‘a great divide between professional historians and amateur criminologists’,8 rightly pours scorn on Peter Mackenzie’s speculation in Old Reminiscences of Glasgow and the West of Scotland that Burke and Hare had previously carried on a trade in murder in Ireland. But he speculates himself that Hare might have been in the Irish militia, deserting and fleeing to Scotland after receiving a brutalising punishment of several hundred lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails.9 There is no shred of evidence that I am aware of to support this idea.

  When his employment on the Union Canal had ended, Hare worked as a labourer and met a man named Logue who ran a cheap lodging house at the bottom of Tanner’s Close, one of the squalid alleys off the West Port near its junction with the Grassmarket. These alleys led between the walls of a dense conglomeration of slum tenements northward to King’s Stables, below the castle mound. To the customary filth and dankness of these slum passages was added the distinction, in this case, of a permanent stench of animal putrefaction from tanneries at the back of the ‘lands’, which gave the close its name. Logue’s tenement had eight beds, and he charged threepence a night. This did not limit his customers to eight at a time, however. Sometimes they slept three to a bed.