by Sarah Wise
Hilton’s protestations were disingenuous. Guy’s dissecting-room porter, James Davis, had already admitted at Bow Street that he had bought two corpses from James May on the second or third of November, and at the Old Bailey he would repeat this evidence. So while no Subject had been bought between April and October—which was, in any case, the summer recess—purchasing had resumed by early November. Even more compromising was the reported exchange between Davis and May when the body snatcher turned up on the evening of Friday, 4 November, with Bishop and Williams—a friendly, chatty conversation that made it clear how cordial such relationships could be.
But Anatomical John was correct about the error. The source of the mistake was Superintendent Thomas, who had told Minshull in open court that he had ascertained that the bodies of two women had been sold to Guy’s Hospital. What Thomas had meant to say was “Grainger’s,” not “Guy’s.” Nevertheless, Guy’s and missing women were now linked in the minds of newspaper readers, and Hilton’s efforts to disengage them looked like trying just a little too hard.
Richard Grainger of the Webb Street School was also tying himself in knots. With a citywide panic aroused, the condition of Subjects being brought into dissecting rooms by resurrectionists was under scrutiny, and one of Grainger’s own pupils had gone to the magistrates when the corpse of a forty-year-old man with a head injury turned up at Webb Street. Grainger came forward to explain that this was a disinterred convict who had died on the Woolwich Marshes. The body had been caked in mud and the injury had, Grainger believed, occurred when the body was pulled from the grave. The Morning Advertiser reported
that in consequence of the misstatements which had appeared in some of the public journals, respecting the connection of the Webb Street School with Bishop and his gang, he was extremely anxious to remove an unfavourable impression which had been in the minds of many on the subject. In the first place, the body of the unfortunate Italian boy was not brought to Webb Street, nor was it ever seen by Appleton, the porter. Bishop merely called to inquire if a Subject would be purchased, and was answered that none was wanted. Secondly, that with the exception of one body, bought in October, no Subjects had been received from Bishop and Williams in two years. Thirdly, that on its being known that Bishop and his vile associates were apprehended on the charge of having murdered the Italian boy, information was given by Mr Pilcher, one of the lecturers, to Mr Thomas, the superintendent of police, of the fact that those men had brought the body of a female to Webb Street early in October. The circumstance of Mr Thomas having omitted to mention this fact, when he communicated Shields’s confession, although he acknowledged it at Bow Street on Thursday last, has led the public to suppose that the lecturers in Webb Street had concealed this important circumstance, when, in point of fact, they had done everything in their power to assist the cause of justice.… The circumstance of bodies being occasionally stolen from dead houses before interment, and disposed of for dissection, no suspicion was excited in Appleton’s mind by the state of the body brought early in October.40
This denial only served to underline Webb Street’s involvement in flesh trading and suggests that the public had in some way been making known its disapproval of the school’s anatomists.
* * *
One surgeon was covering himself with glory in this affair. Richard Partridge would distinguish himself in little else during the rest of his career (one epitaph would claim “he was best operating on a body that was already a corpse”), but he would be credited with uncovering the Case of the London Burkers.41 He had arrived in London from Birmingham four years earlier and had studied under John Abernethy at St. Bartholomew’s. He was just twenty-seven when he was appointed King’s first demonstrator of anatomy. He dressed in dandyish fashion—highly polished boots, beautifully tailored trousers—and drove a very smart coach and horses. He was no Bat, but—like so many other self-made men of the nineteenth century—he quickly adopted the condescension and waggishness of the gentleman born. He told his class one morning that his carriage had just run over “a little street urchin” but that the child had jumped straight up and made a rude gesture to him. “Really, you cannot break the bones of these street arabs—they’re so elastic!” he joked.42 Confidential details about colleagues and off-color jokes about the corpses in front of him punctuated his lectures. (Partridge was not alone in this facetiousness: Joseph Carpue claimed in classes to have known some of the Subjects that ended up on his dissecting table. “That skeleton is one of the prettiest girls I ever saw,” he once told his students.)
Richard Partridge as a young man
It was dissecting-room porter William Hill who had raised the alarm about Bishop’s fresh Subject, with a still-weeping wound, but it was Partridge who received the credit.
Minshull asked Hill: “Was it by direction of the persons in the College, under whom you act, that the prisoners were taken into custody?”
Hill: “Certainly. Mr Partridge and the gentlemen who belong to his class agreed that the appearance of the body was so suspicious that information should be given to the police.”
Minshull: “In doing so, they acted very properly.”
With King’s College in receipt of so much praise, certain sections of the press now felt able to criticize the rest of the medical profession for its inability, or unwillingness, to differentiate between a burking victim and an honestly-dishonestly obtained Subject. The Times of 2 December editorialized thus: “In the case of Frances Pighorn, who was seen alive on the evening of 8th October, and whose body was disposed of early on the morning of the 9th at Mr Grainger’s, there must have been appearances to excite suspicion, had attention been properly directed to them. Though no marks of violence on the surface betrayed the hand of the murderer, yet the freshness of the body, which could scarcely be cold, the absence of all signs of interment, and the certain evidence supplied by the corpse of the unfortunate woman, that she must have died suddenly, and in the enjoyment of perfect health, ought to have suggested to the purveyors for the dissecting knife in Grainger’s establishment, or to the lecturer himself, the necessity of putting some questions to such customers as Bishop and Williams about the history of their prize. We should be sorry to accuse the purchasers of the body in this case of being accessories to murder after the fact, or to excite any vulgar clamor against a most useful and honorable profession, whose necessary means of instruction the law has rendered unattainable, except by the commission of an offence; but we cannot help stating that in our opinion a culpable negligence appears on the face of this transaction.… If the deposition of Shields be true, it will require a good deal of explanation to remove the charge of blameable carelessness from the parties which it implicates.”
It is curious to note that in showing concern at the moral inertia of surgeons in general, the Times singled out for criticism the most successful of the private schools, Grainger’s. Guy’s willingness to buy May’s corpses and to store Bishop and Williams’s dead boy overnight did not bring Sir Astley Cooper’s former hospital into disrepute.
Many alarmed individuals wrote to urge all surgeons and their porters never to accept corpses that looked suspiciously fresh—to be always alert to the signs of murder. But this assumed a level of skill in forensic medicine that had not yet been achieved. Hope and expectation were running ahead of scientific advance. Of the medical men who had examined the dead boy brought to King’s College, and those who had seen Fanny Pigburn’s body, not one had come close to identifying the cause of death. Three people knew it, and none was a doctor.
ELEVEN
At the Bailey
At eight o’clock on the morning of Friday, 2 December, the public gallery of the Sessions House in the Old Bailey was already crowded, and surgeons made up a sizeable proportion of the onlookers. Offers of over a guinea were being made for a seat (the sheriffs normally pocketed a shilling a head but raised prices for the more interesting cases), and some people had tried to pass themselves off as court officials, newspape
r reporters, and even jurors in an attempt to get into the room. One man rented a barrister’s wig and gown at a theatrical costumers for three shillings and six pence and sat unchallenged in the well of the court. Even though the hearing was not due to “come on” until ten, the customary aromatic herbs had been strewn about the courtroom—an attempt to block out the infamous Newgate Stink from the prison adjoining the court. (Not just Newgate: to legal noses, those appearing before the court typically had the aroma of last night’s gin, cheese, and onions on their breath, clothes, and skin.)1
The dock in the courtroom had a notable feature, a mirror that was fixed above the heads of the accused, tilted in such a way that the bench and most of the room had a view of the back of the prisoners, from the crown of the head down to their boots. Three heads now appeared in the mirror. The thick, dark, wavy hair of John Bishop; the dark-blond mop of James May, and the nondescript mousiness of Thomas Williams. Still in his smock frock, which was by now filthy, Bishop looked like a rustic, according to the Morning Advertiser, but “tinged with metropolitan cunning”; he stood at one side of the dock and gazed at the floor. Alongside him, and seeming to hang back slightly, was Williams in a fustian jacket with a brown neckerchief at his throat; he looked, wrote one reporter, “extremely inoffensive” and “shorter than average”—though at five foot four he was by no means short for a workingman of the time. May, also in fustian, and with a yellow silk cravat carefully tied at his neck, appeared to be brimming with life—athletic and alert, with lips pressed tight together and a stern, determined expression on his face. “Their appearance rather indicated low cunning than hardened ferocity,” declared the Times’s man of the trio.2
At nine o’clock, the assistant judge, Serjeant Arabin, deputy recorder of London, entered the court to open the proceedings. William St. Julien Arabin was a notorious figure of fun on the circuit, so much so that one young lawyer, Henry Blencowe Churchill, had started to scribble down verbatim his bizarre sayings, non sequiturs, and eccentric decisions; these were privately published and circulated among cognoscenti in 1843 as Arabiniana; or, The Remains of Mr Serjeant Arabin. They included such oddities as: “A man with a cold is not fit to try on a ladies shoe”; “Woman, how can you be so stupid. You are tall enough to be wise enough”; “She goes into a shop and looks at several things, and purchases nothing. That always indicates some guilt”; and “No man is fit to be a cheesemonger who cannot guess the length of a street.” On the notorious draftiness of the Old Bailey Sessions House: “When I sit here, I fancy myself on the top of Mount Breeze, and the first thing I do every morning of the Session is to go to the glass and see if my eyes have not been blown out of my head.” One of those who would come to own a copy of Arabiniana was William Henry Bodkin, cofounder of the London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, chairman of the Houseless Poor Association, member of the 1828 Select Committee on policing London, Tory member of Parliament to be (from 1841), and one of the three prosecution barristers at the trial of Bishop, Williams, and May.3 Bodkin’s colleagues that day were John Adolphus, who had also interested himself in the administration of the poor laws, publishing in 1824 a pamphlet called Observations on the Vagrant Act, and William Clarkson, of whom a contemporary recalled a loud, swaggering demeanor in court and a habit of bullying junior members in chambers.4 In their wigs, the assembled lawyers looked, according to one of the more astute reporters in court that day, like nothing so much as “a row of cauliflowers.”5
Exterior view of the Sessions House, Old Bailey
Serjeant Arabin began by reading the charges. The indictment was all one sentence, weaving its way past many points of interest before coming to rest; the “Jurors” were the grand jury, who decided ahead of a trial whether there really was a case—A True Bill—for the accused to answer:
The Jurors for our Lord the King upon their oath present that John Bishop, late of the parish of St Matthew, Bethnal Green in the county of Middlesex, Labourer, Thomas Williams, late of the same, Labourer, and James May, late of the same, Labourer, being evil disposed persons and not having the fear of God before their eyes and being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil on the fourth day of November in the second year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord William the Fourth by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland King Defender of the Faith with force and arms at the parish aforesaid in the County aforesaid in and upon Carlo Feriere otherwise called Charles Ferrier in the peace of God and our said Lord the King then and there being feloniously, wilfully and of their Malice aforethought did make an assault—And that the said John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May with a certain Wooden Staff of no value the said Carlo Feriere otherwise called Charles Ferrier then and there feloniously, wilfully and of their Malice aforethought did strike and beat—And that the said John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May by such striking and beating the said Carlo Feriere otherwise called Charles Ferrier in and upon the back part of the neck of him the said Carlo Feriere otherwise called Charles Ferrier as aforesaid then and there feloniously, wilfully and of their Malice aforethought did give unto the said Carlo Feriere otherwise called Charles Ferrier divers mortal bruises and contusions in and upon the back part of the neck of him the said Carlo Feriere otherwise called Charles Ferrier of which said mortal bruises and contusions the said Carlo Feriere otherwise called Charles Ferrier did then and there instantly Die—And so the Jurors aforesaid upon their Oath aforesaid do say that the said John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May the said Carlo Feriere otherwise called Charles Ferrier in manner and form aforesaid feloniously, wilfully and of their Malice aforethought did Kill and Murder against the peace of our said Lord the King his Crown and Dignity—And the Jurors aforesaid upon their Oath aforesaid do further present that the said John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May not having the fear of God before their eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil afterwards to wit on the same day and in the year aforesaid with force and Arms at the parish aforesaid in the County aforesaid in the peace of God and our own said Lord the King then and there being feloniously, wilfully and of their Malice aforethought did make an assault and that the said John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May with a certain Wooden Staff of no value the said Male person whose name is unknown as aforesaid in and upon the back part of the neck of the said Male person whose name is unknown to the Jurors aforesaid in the peace of God and our sovereign Lord the King then and there did strike and beat—And that the said John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May by such striking and beating the said Male person whose name is unknown as aforesaid then and there feloniously, wilfully and of their Malice aforethought did give unto the Male person whose name is unknown as aforesaid divers mortal bruises and contusions in and upon the back part of the neck of him the said Male person whose name is unknown as aforesaid of which said mortal bruises and contusions the said Male person whose name is unknown as aforesaid did then and there instantly Die—And so the Jurors aforesaid upon their Oath aforesaid do say that the said John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May the said Male person whose name is unknown as aforesaid in manner and form aforesaid feloniously, wilfully and of their Malice aforethought did Kill and Murder against the peace of our said Lord and King his Crown and Dignity.
Well, at least it wasn’t Latin or Norman French: from 1730 on, indictments had to be written in English, albeit of an archaic kind. The strange, meandering prose reflected the need for something that would stick: the accused could be acquitted if a charge was not accurate; and in a case as serious as murder, as many variations on a theme as possible were included in the indictment.6 The victim would have to be proved to have been Carlo Feriere/Charles Ferrier in order for a conviction to be secured. So a second boy, “Male person whose name is unknown,” appeared in the text, to cover the possibility that witnesses might be unable to convince the jury of the identity of the King’s College body. However, it didn’t matter that “Thomas Williams” was an alias; this was the n
ame that Thomas Head had let himself be known by and would therefore be the name by which he faced conviction.
The killing of Fanny Pigburn was not in the indictment. Despite Shields’s testimony, Rhoda’s statement, the clothes found at 2 Nova Scotia Gardens, and the admission by the Webb Street porter John Appleton and the medical student Dunn that a woman resembling Fanny had been delivered to Grainger’s at about the right time, there was no body and thus no forensic evidence to substantiate a charge. What’s more, Fanny’s case would have brought a surgeon in the role of receiver into the witness box. No hint of any connivance in murder by doctors would be heard in so public an arena as the Old Bailey.
Next, Serjeant Arabin addressed the prisoners and asked how they pleaded; each said “not guilty.” Then the jury was sworn in—twelve good men and true, between twenty-one and sixty years of age and, since they each inhabited a property of ten pounds per annum freehold or twenty pounds per annum leasehold, deemed “respectable.” No one else might sit in judgment on his fellow Londoner. At ten o’clock, the three judges took their place on the bench: Sir Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, lord chief justice of the Common Pleas and Tory member for Cambridge University; Sir John (Baron) Vaughan; and Sir Joseph Littledale. Each man had around thirty-five years’ legal experience. Sitting alongside them were the lord mayor of London, John Key; two sons of the prime minister, Earl Grey; and the duke of Sussex, younger brother of the king and England’s highest-ranking Freemason. Augustus Frederick Hanover was an enthusiastic amateur follower of many matters scientific, literary, and political. (He had been keen to leave his body to medical science but in the event ended up in a sealed vault at the brand-new Kensal Green cemetery, in 1843.) The duke had requested and been granted a place on the bench for the Bishop, Williams, and May trial in order to see for himself the workings of England’s judicial system. But it is possible that as grand master, he was concerned as to how the trial would affect London’s surgeons, many of whom were Masons. (The Anatomical Society met at the Freemasons Arms, in Great Queen Street, Covent Garden.) The duke of Sussex clamped a pocket telescope to his eye and took particular interest in the appearance of Williams, who was seen to return the royal gaze with a glare.
