Truth about Edinburgh’s gruesome Resurrectionists
Surgeons paid them. Grieving families feared them. Oh, and Burke and Hare were rank amateurs during the horrifying reign of the body snatchers...
Up the close and down the stair, But and ben with Burke and Hare, Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief, Knox the boy that buys the beef…
Colinton is today one of Edinburgh’s most prosperous and sought-after districts; wooded and pretty, with fine houses and expensive cars, pleasant restaurants and steep, quaint streets. But just inside its kirk yard, squat and baleful by the footpath, is a huge iron box, with the unmistakable and tapered lines of a coffin.
this heavy shell is not a memorial or some sort of art installation. Dating from the 1820s, it is a ‘mort-safe’. A few other examples survive in assorted Scottish graveyards. two centuries ago, they had a practical, if ghoulish, use.
For a fee to the kirk session, parishioners could have hired it, on the sad occasion of a family funeral, to ensure the unrotted remains of their mother, wife or child were not quickly dug up and sold for a few pounds to cynical anatomists.
the mort-safe, after all, weighs about a ton. And, especially in or near Edinburgh, they would have been wise to do so, in dark days still recalled in dreadful lines of old playground doggerel…
that ghastly duo never robbed a grave in their lives; but they inadvertently ended the blackest of black-markets – one which, in Britain’s university cities 200 years ago, was an appalling problem.
‘the body snatchers,’ said Edinburgh historian Alan J Wilson in 1991. ‘to the rich… a monstrous obscenity to be guarded against with foresight and precaution. to the poor it was the first horror of sickness and the last terror of death. the horror of being unburied by ghouls, carted to the dissection table and cut to pieces by the apprentice doctors was the dread of all…’
the schools of anatomy were perennially short of corpses; disinclined to ask questions about where remains came from. And they were largely supplied by hard-eyed men who, in a bleak joke, were referred to as ‘Resurrectionists’.
A1505 charter which established Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons granted it one corpse each year for dissection (naturally, that of a condemned criminal). thus, body snatching became a necessity and, to a horrific degree, even normal in an age of gross social division and grinding, desperate poverty. it is whispered of the city’s worst tenements – and it was true – that some nextof-kin would cynically discuss terms even as the merchandise was still gasping his last.
Every surgeon of the day was involved, though would never admit it. there was pious posturing, for the sake of reputation. in 1711, Edinburgh’s College of Surgeons solemnly passed a motion deploring body snatching.
A decade later, it imposed a rule forbidding medical students from any involvement in exhumations (suggesting only, of course, that many were; indeed, records suggest many paid their way through training by supplying their professors with regular corpses).
legislation in 1752 tried to create a legal supply: the bodies of executed murderers. this only made matters worse. it identified anatomy schools with agents of the law and cadavers for their study with the most depraved criminals. Riots at executions – always public, in those days – became commonplace, even as surgeons cut quiet deals with prison governors or bribed officials at a hanging.
By century’s end, historian Ruth Richardson has calculated, several thousand graves a year were robbed – for serious money.
in 1828, surgeon Astley Cooper unabashedly told Parliament’s Select Committee on Anatomy he routinely paid eight guineas – about £7,000 today – for a corpse, but on occasion had been stretched to 14 – in an age when a Spitalfields silk weaver earned six shillings a week.
Edinburgh surgeons muttered darkly the city’s Resurrection Men were profiteering and suspected a price-fixing cartel. So the trade boiled on – one of those dark matters everyone knew of, but was loath to discuss.
the Resurrectionists ran networks of informers – sextons, beadles, undertakers – each taking their own cut. they themselves worked in small gangs at night; and they worked fast.
A wooden spade was often used, to minimise noise; and a freshdug grave was easy to open, especially if the sexton had a casual attitude to the six-feet under principle.
An expert would dig a hole down to one end of the coffin, exposing a third of the lid, cover it in sacking, to deaden any sound, then tug it up till, under pressure of the earth at the other end, it snapped. the remains were dragged out, stripped and bagged. the grave was then hastily refilled, if time permitted.
Paupers’ graves were much preferred: these were mass affairs, shallow and often uncovered for days till the trench was full. there was a crude pay-scale. the body of an adult was worth more than a child’s and that of a man worth more than a woman; so much more interesting muscle.
in his chilling 1811-12 journal the Diary of a Resurrectionist, Joshua naples candidly describes the assorted graveyards he robs, the institutions he supplies and the payments he negotiates.
He laments the difficulty of getting his gang to turn out when there was a full moon; how frustrating it was when anatomists turned down the occasional stiff because it was too putrid; and the night he and his mates panicked and fled when they realised the corpse they were about to lift had died of smallpox.
We should remember this was a far more religious age than our own. People believed in the literal resurrection of the dead. there was horror at the desecration of a relative’s grave; the thought of their remains on some academic’s slab, perhaps alongside those of a hanged felon. those who could afford it went to great lengths to protect their dead.
JAMES Gillespie, 18thcentury tobacco magnate and the local laird, lies not under the common sod of Colinton’s kirk yard, but in a deep vault below the floor of a locked tomb. the very wealthy generally resorted to triple coffins and stout mausoleums, sometimes guarded for months after their demise by servants.
others insisted on very deep graves; or that they be filled in with rocks rather than earth; or their coffins strapped with iron bands. the mort-safe was widely used in Scotland – though it was not foolproof. in 1915, when one
was accidentally exposed in the course of a burial in Aberlour on Speyside, a reproachfully empty coffin was found beneath it.
Minor city gentry liked the ‘caged lair’ – a heavy iron structure built around your family’s burial plot. There is a darkly funny example in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars kirk yard – that of a city surgeon, William Inglis, who died in 1792, who ‘obviously having had a great fear,’ one scholar quips, ‘of ending up in the body snatcher’s sack or on a colleague’s dissecting table.’
The great fear of the Resurrection Men, given public feeling, was of being caught in the act. Naples remembered dogs being set on him and his party.
In a Dublin churchyard in 1828, there was a full-blown battle between mourners and graverobbers. In 1832, having arrested three Resurrectionists in possession of a corpse, it was only with the greatest difficulty that London police fought off a furious mob determined on their lynching.
High feelings were further fuelled by legal absurdity. As the law stood, a dead body belonged to no one – and while it would be naïve to assume body snatchers never pocketed the odd wedding ring, they generally took great care to make off with the corpse and only the corpse.
In English law, that was a mere dismeanour; taking anything else from the grave – a coffin handle or a scrap of shroud – was a felony. In fact, very few Resurrectionists were ever successfully prosecuted.
In Scotland, ‘violation of a sepulchre’ is a legal offence – two Edinburgh youths were convicted of it as recently as 2004, having made off with a head from a 17th century tomb as a lark.
But earlier authorities preferred to turn a blind eye; dissected evidence quickly disappeared. When two ‘chairmen’ were caught with a body in the sedan chair they were carrying towards the medical school, they were but banished from the Athens of the North – and the chair itself solemnly burned by the public hangman.
There was a shameless double standard. In the rare instances of proof and conviction, the grave robbers were punished much more severely than the medical gentry they supplied.
In 1813, Glasgow lecturer and surgeon Granville Sharpe Pattison was but ‘severely reprimanded’ for his part in the theft of a deceased Mrs McAllastar. In 1822, by contrast, one Harry Perring was sentenced to three months’ hard labour for stealing a corpse from a London churchyard.
It took an infamous Edinburgh case finally to end body snatching – that of those gormless Union Canal navvies, William Burke and William Hare.
They first stumbled on its lucrative possibilities when Burke sold the remains of a deceased Highland lodger to Dr Robert Knox at the University.
They then waited hopefully for another to expire of fever – but he endured day after day.
The pair finally lost patience and smothered him with a pillow. Thereafter, the opportunists, egged on by Burke’s vicious girlfriend Helen MacDougall, became confirmed murderers, smothering up to 16 people (including a small boy and several prostitutes) till finally coming a cropper.
Hare saved his own skin by turning King’s Evidence and testifying against Burke and MacDougall. The jury eventually found the charges against her Not Proven, but Burke was convicted and condemned – and some 25,000 people turned out to enjoy his public hanging on January 28, 1829. His body ended up on the dissection table and, in Edinburgh museums, you can still see both his neatly strung skeleton and a pocket book with covers made from his skin.
DR Knox, to public incredulity, was never prosecuted, though his house was assailed by the Mob and the city’s gentlefolk turned implacably against him. A new career in London crumbled in drink.
Stunned by the Burke and Hare revelations and alarmed by copycat ‘Burkeing’ crimes in London, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act in 1832, finally setting sensible terms for the lawful (and sufficient) supply of bodies for dissection, from workhouses, unidentified deceased vagrants and so on.
The Resurrection Men were at last out of business. Yet they are but one long lifetime beyond living memory; the foulest entrepreneurs of a dark and brutal age.