The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  The evidence in the Fanny Pigburn affair was coming in thick and fast. Corrupt gravedigger and snatcher’s assistant Michael Shields read one of the accounts of her identification and on the night of Monday, 28 November, paid a visit to Superintendent Thomas. Having earlier decided that Shields’s word on any matter was worthless, Thomas and the magistrates now appeared to give weight to the tale he told them.

  Shields recalled that he had been woken at five o’clock in the morning on Sunday, 9 October, by John Bishop and Thomas Williams banging on his door in Eagle Street. They wanted him to carry a trunk to St. Thomas’s Hospital. Shields walked at dawn the two miles to Nova Scotia Gardens with Bishop and Williams. There, Bishop placed a large but fairly light trunk on Shields’s head and told the porter that he was to proceed to St. Thomas’s on one side of the road, accompanied by Williams’s wife; Rhoda would be carrying a small box tied up in a handkerchief, and the two of them were to give the impression that Rhoda was a servant going to a new position and Shields a porter employed to carry her possessions for her. Bishop and Williams would walk on the other side of the street and would pretend, if anyone stopped them, to have no connection with Shields and Rhoda.

  In this formation they walked from Nova Scotia Gardens to St. Thomas’s—a distance of nearly two miles—crossing new London Bridge on opposite sides of the roadway. Rhoda waited outside as the three men entered the hospital dissecting rooms and failed to make a sale; Bishop had asked the footman of Dr. John Flint South, demonstrator of anatomy, if he was in need of a body, and his footman said that South was in need but did not have time to come down and look at the corpse—could Bishop come back tomorrow?11 The men decided to leave the trunk at St. Thomas’s and go to a nearby pub to ponder the offer. Rhoda was then left at the pub as a pledge, since there was no money to pay for the beers they had just drunk.

  They walked to Grainger’s school in Webb Street, and Bishop spoke alone with John Appleton, porter to the dissecting room. The conversation lasted only a few minutes; then the three went back to St. Thomas’s for the trunk. At Grainger’s, Bishop pulled from it a corpse for Appleton to inspect. It was the body of a thin, middle-aged female, extremely fresh and with no grave dirt on it, thought Shields. The Subject’s hair was dark and short. Appleton and Bishop spent some time striking a bargain, and when the sum had been agreed on—ten pounds—Appleton paid Bishop half and promised to pay him the remainder the following day. Gin was then sent for, and all four men had a genial drink together.

  Bishop, Williams, and Shields went back to the pub to collect Rhoda and found her weeping. The innkeeper wanted his payment and had been unpleasant to her. Bishop flew into a rage and, as he paid up, shouted that he would never drink there again and would tell his friends not to drink there either. They all left together and walked over London Bridge and up Bishopsgate Street, where Bishop bought them all some gin at the Flowerpot.12 Bishop paid Shields his ten shillings for the job and even offered to pay him a little more when he got hold of the rest of his earnings the next day. At this point, Shields went home.

  Shields told Thomas that the reason he had not mentioned any of this at the various hearings was that he had been too frightened of implicating himself. He now wished to atone, he said. Superintendent Thomas was quite satisfied, since Shields’s chronology seemed roughly to tally with the time that Fanny Pigburn was last seen, and the corpse that Shields described appeared to match Fanny Pigburn in age and stature. The information also confirmed the superinten-dent in his suspicion that the women of 3 Nova Scotia Gardens were implicated in murder. He gave orders for Rhoda to be rearrested, which she was, the following afternoon, as she sat at the porter’s lodge at Newgate, waiting to visit her husband.

  She was brought before Minshull at Bow Street, and charged with being an accessory after the fact in the willful murder of Frances Pigburn. Thomas declared that he expected to be able to produce further evidence against her. Rhoda wept. Minshull asked her if she had anything to say, warning her that whatever she did say would be taken down in writing and might be used as evidence against her, and she said: “I thank you, sir, but I want to say what I know. I wish to speak the truth.”

  She told of how her “father” had awoken her at six o’clock on a Sunday morning “about six or seven weeks ago.” He asked her if she would carry a small box for him to the Borough. She agreed and walked with Bishop, her husband, and Shields over London Bridge. Just across the bridge, they came to a pub and Bishop told her to go in and wait until they returned. They came back again in about half an hour, and then they all went together to another pub, and had a pot of “half-and-half” (half ale, half porter) and smoked pipes. There was no money to pay for the drinks, and Bishop told her to wait there. When he came back, he paid the barman, and then all four of them went to Bishopsgate Street and drank gin in a pub. Shields then left, and later Rhoda, her father, and her husband went home. “That is all I wish to say, I have nothing more to add.”

  Minshull remanded her for a fortnight, though Thomas said he would be able to find further evidence against her within a week. As Rhoda rose to be taken away, Thomas said he believed she had not eaten all day and he hoped she would be given some food, since she was now passing out of his jurisdiction. Minshull replied: “Most certainly—the jailer shall provide her with what is necessary. No prisoner shall want food while I sit here as a magistrate.”

  * * *

  It was all shaping up very nicely now, which was just as well, because the Old Bailey trial, at which Bishop and Williams would now be charged with three counts of murder and May with one, was set to begin in three days’ time, on Friday, 2 December. Even though no name had yet been suggested for the missing and presumed-burked owner of one of the sets of clothes unearthed in the garden of the House of Murder, the identities of Carlo Ferrari and Fanny Pigburn now seemed reasonably well fixed.

  On Wednesday the thirtieth, Minshull received his first visit from an anatomist. George Pilcher was a lecturer in anatomy—and keeper of the Anatomical Theatre of Medical Specimens—at Grainger’s school.13 He had read Shields’s statement in the newspapers and came to Bow Street to give Grainger’s side of the story with regard to Fanny Pigburn. He also wanted to point out that he had in fact come forward to Superintendent Thomas as soon as the discovery of the Italian boy’s body had been made and had explained that Grainger’s had refused to buy it but had bought the body of a woman early in October. Did the policeman not remember his visit?

  Minshull asked when he had first seen Fanny’s body.

  Pilcher: “The body, I understand, was brought to the theatre on the morning of Sunday 9th October, but I did not see it until the following day.”

  Minshull: “In what state did the body appear to you then?”

  Pilcher answered that the body had seemed far fresher than most Subjects brought in for dissection. He thought that it looked as though it had never been buried or prepared for burial, and he had assumed that Bishop, as a resurrectionist, had probably stolen it from a bone house or an undertaker’s premises. Pilcher said that Appleton, the dissecting-room porter, had thought the same thing; and both men took Bishop’s willingness to accept only part of his payment on the Sunday as further proof that there was nothing unusual about the way in which the corpse had been procured (the inference being that a man guilty of murder would want all his money at once). “Of course, had there been any suspicion that the woman had been unfairly dealt by, the body would not have been purchased at all,” said Pilcher.

  Minshull: “Did you perceive any marks of violence on the body when you saw it on the Monday?”

  Pilcher: “I was not aware of any, but Mr Dunn, the pupil by whom the body was dissected, is now present and ready to be examined.”

  Minshull said that he “did not think it proper to put any questions to Dunn then.” That decision did nothing to assist the case but was likely to have been an example of Minshull’s characteristic, if sometimes misdirected, courtesy. The young man risked
implicating himself, his tutors, and his school in body trafficking, since his statements would be printed in the press.

  Pilcher then took it upon himself to speak on behalf of the London medical profession. He told the magistrate, with the court reporters sitting nearby, that he regretted “as much as any man, the horrible disclosures that had taken place; and he was truly sorry that the profession was driven to the necessity of dealing with men such as Bishop, Williams and May. He, however, begged to repeat that no suspicion existed in his mind of anything wrong, until he heard that Bishop and Williams were charged with the murder of the Italian Boy; and then he immediately came forward to state that the body of a woman had been sold at Webb Street by Bishop early in October.” Thomas said yes, that was right, Mr. Pilcher had indeed come forward straightaway to tell of that particular purchase, he remembered now.

  Minshull had had his curiosity about dissecting-room etiquette stimulated, and in a reply to a question by the magistrate, Pilcher said that the normal practice was for the porters to wash and prepare for dissection any Subjects that were brought in. Appleton had washed the middle-aged thin woman before the student Dunn had wielded the scalpel.

  Minshull: “Do you remember whether or not the face of the woman was marked with the small-pox?”

  Pilcher: “Mr Dunn told me that the face was slightly marked with the small-pox. But I did not perceive any such marks myself. Generally speaking, they are not easily discoverable after death.”

  Thomas, still dwelling on an earlier point, said that it was utterly out of the question that the woman’s body could have been stolen from a mortuary because he had obtained additional evidence that left him in no doubt that the woman had been murdered. He said he now knew that Fanny had left the house of Mr. Campion in Church Street, Bethnal Green, at half past nine on the night of Saturday, 8 October, and that at half past eleven Bishop and Williams had been seen dragging a woman, who appeared to be intoxicated, in the direction of their home. About an hour later, said the superintendent, cries of murder were heard proceeding from Nova Scotia Gardens. Meanwhile, he said, at seven o’clock the next morning, Shields was hired by Bishop and Williams to carry the body of a woman to St. Thomas’s Hospital. They arrived at the hospital at eleven in the morning but failed to make a sale, but between noon and one o’clock the body was sold at Grainger’s school in Webb Street.

  Thomas had got much of his information from Bethnal Green pub goers. They told him that on the night of the eighth, Fanny had been seen drinking porter with two men in a public house called the London Apprentice, in Old Street, near Nova Scotia Gardens. Concerned, they decided to keep an eye on Fanny—the conversation they had overheard between the trio had seemed rather odd to them. When Bishop, Williams, and Fanny left the London Apprentice, the concerned drinkers followed them and watched as Bishop and Williams persuaded Fanny to come to another public house, the Feathers, just behind Shoreditch Church. There, they bought her some mixed spirits and beer called “hot,” after which Fanny seemed to be incapacitated and was last seen with her arms linked in those of Bishop and Williams, staggering in the direction of Nova Scotia Gardens.

  Furthermore—quite a coup this—Thomas announced that he now had reason to believe that Fanny had died by drowning: he had found her shawl at the bottom of the well in Bishop’s garden; this well consisted of a wooden barrel sunk into a hole in the ground, and he wondered whether the victims were told to bend down and drink from the well and were then pushed in headfirst. He had learned that the vessels of Fanny Pigburn’s heart had been engorged, which, as he understood it, was generally the result of drowning—the medical gentlemen present would correct him if he was wrong.

  TEN

  A Horrid System

  The medical men had been keeping a low profile since their original announcement that the King’s College corpse had been a victim of murder; but no group was watching the unfolding events with more interest. Herbert Mayo, professor of anatomy at King’s College, and his junior colleague Richard Partridge, “demonstrator,” or lecturer, in anatomy, both had reason to take particular notice of the Italian Boy case. At thirty-six, Mayo had established a formidable reputation as an anatomist, having been made house surgeon at Middlesex Hospital at the age of twenty-two, in the same year that he published his Anatomical and Physiological Commentaries, in which he revealed his discovery of the functions of individual facial nerves. A bitter quarrel followed publication, with Mayo’s former teacher, Sir Charles Bell, claiming it was his own unattributed groundwork that had made Mayo’s discoveries possible. Mayo replied that the opposite was true, that Bell’s work had been based on research by Mayo. The dispute became one of the most famous medical wrangles of the day, and those who mulled it over later in the century tended to concur that most of the glory should have been Mayo’s. (Had the junior man won his argument, a temporary paralysis of the face might today be referred to as Mayo’s palsy.)

  Mayo had been chosen as King’s College’s first professor of anatomy—properly, professor of morbid anatomy and physiology—just as his own private school and anatomical theater in Great Windmill Street, Soho, was going into decline.1 But, like most of his peers, Mayo was not quite so acute in the new field of forensic medicine. King’s College (which had officially opened in October 1831, just one month before Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields made their troubling delivery to its dissecting rooms) had been founded as a response to the new University College—“the godless institution of Gower Street,” as its critics called it. University College had been refused a royal charter since no religious instruction was given there and Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters were allowed to take courses. King’s, by contrast, was built on Crown land and reeked of Anglican religiosity; its founder (Rev. George D’Oyly) was a future chaplain to the archbishop of Canterbury; its first principal (Rev. William Otter) would soon be made bishop of Chichester. Present at the inaugural meeting of the council of King’s College in June 1828 were George IV (patron), the duke of Wellington (governor), and three archbishops and seven bishops, while the governors of the medical school included two baronets. The bishop of London’s address at King’s opening ceremony was entitled “The Duty of Combining Religious Instruction with Intellectual Culture.” The lower orders were not overlooked: a (never observed) rule in King’s constitution stated that “post-mortems must not be performed at such times as would interfere with the presence of the hospital porters at divine service in the chapel.”2

  The college, according to its charter, would attract those whose ambition for their sons was “to fix in their minds the true principles of morality.” Perhaps it was this kind of earnestness that urged Partridge and his students to look further into the matter of the too fresh corpse that Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields had delivered and so make King’s stand apart from other, conniving medical schools. Or perhaps the new school was receiving so steady a supply of bodies from St. Clement Danes workhouse just across the Strand in Portugal Street that it felt secure enough to raise the alarm when a suspect Subject turned up; though King’s was attached to no hospital, the workhouse provided plenty of useful case studies.

  The medical journal the Lancet missed no chance to pillory King’s for its ultraconservatism. Refusing to defer to King’s royal links, the journal nicknamed it Strand Lane College, and the Church and Tory College in the Strand, while the cap and gown that King’s students were required to wear were, it said, “disgusting mummeries.” Herbert Mayo was regularly mocked in the Lancet. Dubbed the Owl because he lectured with his eyes half closed, he was castigated for his “Cockney” accent, in a strangely snobbish attack (for a Radical publication) on his nongentry background, and a contributor pondered how very un–King’s College it was that Mayo had taken out advertisements in the newspapers to publicize his book Observations on Injuries and Diseases of the Rectum.3 Mayo was further criticized for the fact that upon joining King’s he had asked for (and received) the enormous sum of nine hundred pounds for his jars and bott
les of interesting specimens (human parts showing rare pathological conditions, unusual animals, “monster” stillborn babies) that had been stored in the anatomical museum of the Great Windmill Street School.4 The nine hundred pounds included a payment of three hundred pounds for “assistance,” which may or may not have been money to pay resurrectionists. Mayo was also taken to task for being a poor lecturer, with bad diction; a student complained to the Lancet about the Owl who “does not whoop with a clear voice.”5