Burke and Hare Read online

  Hare became one of Logue’s lodgers and evidently took a fancy to his common-law wife, Margaret Laird. An Irish Catholic like himself, she had worked on the canal, too, digging in a navvy’s jacket alongside the men, and was a hard-featured and debauched virago. She was nicknamed, for some reason that escapes me, ‘Lucky’, and she had a young child. No doubt it was Hare’s friendship with her that got him thrown out of the house by Logue, but in 1826 Logue died and Hare, having heard the news, returned to Tanner’s Close to pursue his interest in the widow. She, it is said, was already being comforted by a young lodger, but Hare seems to have insinuated himself not only into her bed but also into possession of the house. By some date in 1827, Hare had elevated himself to the status of landlord, and was relieved of the need for regular employment, although he appears to have worked intermittently as a labourer or street vendor. He spent much of his time drinking and fighting in public with ‘Lucky’, who was ‘often brutally intoxicated and seldom without a pair of black eyes’.10

  Hare’s estate consisted of three rooms on one floor of a building of random stone walls with some waste ground behind it. The two larger rooms were equipped with the eight beds between them. Anyone passing by in Tanner’s Close could see through the windows into both of these rooms, but the third room was a smaller closet at the back, with a window looking only onto a wall and a shed or stall which appears to have served as a stable and a pig-sty. Hare had acquired a horse and cart, and he occasionally ventured out with them hawking fish and scrap.

  To this insalubrious doss-house came William Burke, a fellow-Irishman from Ulster, born near Strabane in County Tyrone in 1792, the son of a labourer, Niel Burke. Burke’s published confession in the Edinburgh Evening Courant gave his birthplace as ‘Orrey, Co Tyrone’, and the Dictionary of National Biography and most subsequent writers gave it as Orrery. But there is no such place as either Orrey or Orrery, and, as Owen Dudley Edwards has pointed out, the name is almost certainly an erroneous transcription of Urney, three miles south-west of Strabane. (By a curious coincidence, one of the ruling elders of the parish of Urney was a man named Knox.) William Burke had also come to Scotland in 1818 to work on the Union Canal, leaving his wife, Margaret, and two children in Ireland. His wife refused to join him in Scotland, and he never saw her or his children again. The Union Canal took four years to construct, and for some years afterwards, Burke worked as an itinerant farm labourer and a pedlar of old clothes around Peebles and Leith. At Leith, Burke had learned from his landlord or a fellow-lodger how to mend shoes.

  While still working as a navvy, he had met an illiterate woman known as Helen or ‘Nelly’ Dougal or McDougal. She was a native Scot, born at Redding, near Falkirk, where Burke had lived while employed on the canal, but the surname was only that of the man she was living with at the time, by whom she had two children. She may have worked as a prostitute among the canal navvies. She absconded with Burke, and by 1827 the pair were in Edinburgh, repairing old boots and shoes and hawking them among the city’s poor. They were lodging with an Irishman, Mickey Culzean, proprietor of an establishment whimsically known as ‘The Beggar’s Hotel’ in Portsburgh.

  In November of that year Burke and Nelly had met Maggie Laird in the street and gone for a drink with her. It appears that Burke was already acquainted with Laird. When he mentioned that he was intending to move away and seek work as a cobbler, Maggie said that there was a room in Hare’s house which might suit him. He and Nelly could live there and carry on his trade in Edinburgh. This was the first time the two men met, but they quickly became firm friends. It was also the first time the two women had met, but no love was lost between them.

  Burke’s elder brother Constantine was also living in Edinburgh with his wife Elizabeth (née Graham) and their children, and was employed as a street-cleaner by the city police. There is no mention anywhere, in the records of the subsequent events surrounding Burke and Hare, of either Maggie Laird’s or Nelly McDougal’s children. The Evening Courant alleged later that Margaret Laird had murdered the first child she had with Hare, but there is no evidence to support this or any speculation about the fate of McDougal’s two children by previous consorts.

  William Burke was, to all outward appearances, a more pleasant and sociable character than his new friend Hare. His parents were respectable Catholics, and he had been given at least a basic education. When he was nineteen, he had followed Constantine into the army, and served for seven years as a batman in the Donegal Militia. He was married to Margaret Coleman at Ballina, County Mayo, while a serving soldier. John Wilson described him as he appeared at the age of thirty-six in his prison cell:

  A neat little man of about five feet five, well proportioned, especially in his legs and thighs – round-bodied, but narrow-chested – arms rather thin – small wrists, and a moderate-sized hand; no mass of muscle anywhere about his limbs or frame, but vigorously necked, with hard forehead and cheek bones; a very active, but not a powerful man, and intended by nature for a dancing master. Indeed he danced well, excelling in the Irish jig, and when working about Peebles and Innerleithen he was very fond of that recreation. In that neighbourhood he was reckoned a good specimen of the Irish character – not quarrelsome, expert with the spade, and a pleasant enough companion over a jug of toddy. Nothing repulsive about him, to ordinary observers at least, and certainly not deficient in intelligence.11

  Nevertheless, Professor Wilson found him ‘impenitent as a snake, remorseless as a tiger’. Wilson noted Burke’s ‘hard, cruel eyes’ and his voice, ‘rather soft and calm, but steeped in hypocrisy and deceit; his collected and guarded demeanour, full of danger and guile – all, all betrayed, as he lay in his shackles, the cool, calculating, callous, and unrelenting villain’.12 But this, of course, was a case of being wise after the event.

  James Maclean, a fellow-Irishman living nearby in the West Port, told Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, the antiquary and friend of Sir Walter Scott, that Burke was a peaceable man and steady at his work when sober, and ‘even when drunk, rather jocose and prone to banter, but by no means riotous or quarrelsome, without considerable provocation’. But Helen McDougal was of ‘dull morose disposition’, and the two ‘led a most unhappy life, everlastingly quarrelling, and on these occasions she was often severely beaten by him’.13 Nevertheless, the two were genuinely attached to each other. When Burke was exhorted by a local priest to return to his wife in Ireland, he refused and was excommunicated.

  The various portrait sketches purporting to be of Burke, made by press artists in court or in gaol, have only two things in common – the round face and the penetrating eyes. Some drawings show him with long sideburns, others without. One gives him more of a pug-nose than the rest. Another represents him as balding at the temples, while others give him a good head of hair. One shows him wearing a cravat in the dock, but others give him only a thin scarf or neckerchief.

  Burke and Nelly had scarcely settled into their new accommodation, in November 1827, before another of Hare’s lodgers, an old soldier named Donald, died, apparently of dropsy. For Hare, this was a disaster, for the old man had owed him £4 in rent, and his quarterly army pension, due shortly, would have covered the debt. Preparations were made for the old man’s burial by the parish, and a day or two after his death, the body was placed in a coffin ready for the hired mourners known in Scotland as ‘saulies’.

  In the meantime, however, Hare (according to Burke) had hatched a plan for recovering his bad debt, and as he needed help in carrying it out, he approached Burke. The slums fringing High Street and Canongate were well-known resorts of the ‘resurrectionists’, and it was impossible to be part of the low life of Edinburgh at that time and not know that fresh corpses could be sold as anatomical subjects. As there were no friends or relatives to claim Donald’s body, why not sell it to the doctors? If Burke would help him, he could have a share of the proceeds.

  According to one of Burke’s confessions, Hare ‘started the coffin lid with a chisel’. In the other co
nfession, Burke said that Hare ‘unscrewed the nails’. Either way, the two men lifted out the corpse and hid it in one of the beds, then filled the coffin with tanner’s bark collected from the yard at the back and refixed the lid. The coffin was then taken away at the expense of the parish and with brief solemnity interred in a paupers’ grave in the kirkyard of St Cuthbert’s, known as the West Kirk, a quarter of a mile away.

  The Wester Portsburgh district where Burke and Hare lived was close to several hospitals and burial grounds, well guarded at night against body-snatchers, and beyond the Infirmary, in the High School Yards between Cowgate and Roxburgh Terrace, was Surgeons’ Square, where university and extramural anatomy lecturers had their premises. Either Burke or Hare had heard of Professor Monro, third of a famous dynasty which had held the university chair of anatomy since 1720. Burke and Hare walked the half-mile from Tanner’s Close to the College yard, where they encountered a young man whom they asked to direct them to Dr Monro, or any of his men. The man, probably a medical student, enquired what they wanted Dr Monro for, and when they nervously confided in him that they had a body to dispose of, the young man directed them to the premises of Dr Robert Knox, at 10 Surgeons’ Square. Knox’s biographer, Henry Lonsdale, gives the date of this event as the evening of 29 November, but it cannot have been the day on which Donald died as given by William Roughead in his book on the trial. Burke himself said it was ‘about Christmas, 1827’, but he added that it was ‘a day or two after the pensioner’s death’ when Hare suggested selling the body to the doctors.

  Burke and Hare, at any rate, were met by three students, subsequently known to them as Fergusson, Miller and Jones. The two novice dealers were hesitant to come to the point, but eventually admitted that they had a body for sale, and were told to bring it when it was dark. They were not asked whose body it was nor how they had obtained it. They went back to Tanner’s Close, stuffed the corpse into a sack, and returned to Surgeons’ Square later that night. They were greeted by the same three students, who told them to bring the body upstairs to the lecture room. Here, they took the body from the sack and laid it on the dissecting table. It was still dressed in the shirt in which Donald should have been buried. The students told Burke and Hare to take away the shirt, which they did. Dr Knox’s assistants, used to receiving corpses from body-snatchers, would have been well versed in the law regarding clothes and other property. A corpse dug up from a churchyard was deemed to belong to no one. But clothing – even a shroud – was property, and its theft was punishable as a felony under Georgian criminal law. So experienced body-snatchers and anatomists alike took good care not to be caught with any item in their possession which could make them liable to prosecution for the greater offence. Dead bodies were always sold naked. As Burke and Hare were removing Donald’s shirt, Dr Knox himself entered the room, looked at the naked corpse and suggested a price of £7 10 shillings. This being readily agreed by Burke and Hare, Knox told Jones to settle with them. As they saw Burke and Hare out, one of the students said ‘they would be glad to see them again when they had any other body to dispose of’.14 Hare took £4 5 shillings of the proceeds, and gave Burke £3 5 shillings.

  Before we proceed further with events, we should ask ourselves if the story of the old pensioner Donald is entirely true. It is based solely on the subsequent confessions of Burke. If we do not believe it, it opens up the possibility, among other things, that Burke and Hare murdered more than the sixteen victims usually accepted as their total tally. But it is not only Burke’s statements that we need to be wary of. Dr Knox’s biographer, Henry Lonsdale, stated that Burke and Hare ‘furnished thirteen victims in all to Knox’s rooms during their eleven months’ operations’.15 Owen Dudley Edwards refers repeatedly to Burke ‘murdering seventeen people’. But to the best of our knowledge, Burke and Hare between them murdered sixteen people, one of whom Burke was not involved with. Burke himself committed or took part in fifteen murders.

  The first (and perhaps seemingly obvious) question – though no one seems to have asked it before – is, how had Donald managed to accumulate a debt of £4 in rent? If Hare was charging him three pence a night for his bed, £4 would represent almost a year’s rent. Are we to take it that the evil Hare, out of the goodness of his heart, had been letting the matter slide, when Donald received his pension quarterly? Secondly, if Donald had really owed Hare £4, it appears uncharacteristically generous of Hare to take only five shillings profit and allow Burke nearly half the proceeds. Perhaps there was never any debt at all. Did Hare invent the debt in order to make his idea of selling the body appear reasonable to Burke, whom he needed as an accomplice? Or did they devise the story of the debt together in order to make the idea of selling the body seem somehow less callous afterwards? Or, worse still, did they really murder Donald, along with the rest, and if so, how many others, of whom we know nothing, might they have killed?

  Perhaps the best reason for accepting Burke’s version of events is the detailed description he gave of their first sale and their encouraging reception in Surgeons’ Square. It has the ring of truth about it. The man who diverted them from Monro to Knox must have been one of Knox’s own students, and was as eager as the doctor’s agents that night – Fergusson, Miller and Jones – that there should be an ample supply of subjects available.

  Possibly Donald’s debt to Hare had mounted up because Hare had sold him an old shirt, and Maggie Laird had provided him with food and drink while he was ill. We shall never know, but there are no overwhelming reasons to doubt that Burke’s story was true in substance if not in detail. What seems much more likely is that it was Burke, rather than Hare, who was the author of the plot. This would account for Burke’s generous share of the money they received. If it was Burke who had suggested to Hare that they could sell the body, and that he, Burke, would take the lead in doing so (he being clearly the superior in matters of public relations), Hare would presumably have been more than satisfied to recover the money he was owed and have five shillings profit out of the deal.

  At any rate, by the time the sale was completed, a seed had been planted in the minds of the pair, which apparently lay dormant through the winter months but was to germinate early in the spring of 1828 and grow with mind-boggling vigour in the course of that year.

  NOTES

  1 Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, (London, Penguin edn., 1971), p. 577.

  2 ‘Report on the state of the Irish poor in Great Britain, 1836’, quoted in H.C. Darby (ed.), A New Historical Geography of England after 1600, (Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 172.

  3 Quoted in Kellow Chesney, The Victorian Underworld, (London, Penguin Books), 1982, p. 69.

  4 M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, (London, Penguin Books, 1985), p. 129.

  5 Quoted in Sir Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform 1815–70, (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 601.

  6 Letter to Maria Edgeworth in Grierson, pp. 126–27.

  7 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1829.

  8 Owen Dudley Edwards, Burke & Hare (Edinburgh, Polygon Books, 1980), p. 289.

  9 Ibid, p. 37.

  10 Robert Buchanan et al, Trial of William Burke and Helen McDougal before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh on Wednesday, December 24, 1828 (Edinburgh, 1829), p. xiv.

  11 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1829.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Robert Buchanan et al, Trial of William Burke and Helen McDougal pp. xiii–xiv.

  14 Burke’s official confession in prison, 3 January 1829; my italics.

  15 Henry Lonsdale, A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist, (London, Macmillan, 1870), p. 103.

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  3. CONTRACT

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  There were body-snatchers who were not technically grave-robbers or ‘resurrection men’. Two London operators, Cornelius Bryant and Israel Chapman, became specialists, for instance, in doing deals with undertakers or masters of
workhouses to obtain bodies before they were buried, and they even stole bodies from houses before funerals could take place. A man named Joliffe, living at Bethnal Green, attempted to bring a charge in 1826 against two men who, he said, had stolen the body of his wife, who had died only that night, while he was asleep in the next room. But the magistrate ruled that the men had not broken any law unless they had also taken away an article of clothing or some other property – which, of course, they had not.

  There was no question, however, of Burke and Hare having stolen old Donald’s body, or his shirt, since they were already in Hare’s possession. As far as we know, neither Burke nor Hare had committed any serious criminal act at this point. They had used sleight of hand to turn a situation to their own advantage. It was dishonest, but not felonious.

  The two men must have spent the winter months brooding over the ease with which they had made £7 10 shillings. As Burke mended shoes, Hare collected his rents and they spent their profits on drink they could hardly dismiss from their minds that fatal invitation to call at 10 Surgeons’ Square again when they had another body to dispose of. They must have been tempted at some point to join the body-snatching fraternity, but hesitated partly, perhaps, through cowardice, and partly because of the dawning realisation that there was an easier way of obtaining dead bodies, circumventing the risky business of nocturnal digging in guarded or booby-trapped kirkyards.

  At some date in the winter of 1828, probably early February, it seems that another lodger of Hare’s named Joseph, who had been a miller, fell ill and became delirious. Hare and his wife were anxious that the fever should not deter other lodgers. If rumour got abroad that an infectious disease such as cholera or typhus was present in Hare’s house, it would ruin his business. Burke and Hare were suddenly presented with motive and opportunity. We do not know how old Joseph was, but it is probable that he was getting on in years and was unlikely to recover from the illness. Burke remarked in one of his statements that Joseph had been quite well off at one time and was related by marriage to someone of status in the Carron Ironworks. If he was now lodging alone in Hare’s house for threepence a night, it is perhaps a reasonable assumption that by this time he was an elderly widower with no close relations. After weighing up the risks for a while, no doubt, Burke and Hare made up their minds to ease the poor fellow on his way to oblivion. After making him practically unconscious with whisky, one of them pressed a pillow over Joseph’s face while the other lay across his body to prevent him from thrashing about and making a noise.