Burke and Hare

by Bailey, Brian

  . . . that which would never have been sanctioned by the deliberate wisdom of parliament, is about to be extorted from its fears . . . It would have been well if this fear had been manifested and acted upon before sixteen human beings had fallen victim to the supineness of the Government and the Legislature. It required no extraordinary sagacity to foresee, that the worst consequences must inevitably result from the system of traffic between resurrectionists and anatomists, which the executive government has so long suffered to exist. Government is already in a great degree, responsible for the crime which it has fostered by its negligence, and even encouraged by a system of forbearance.2

  During the Lords debate the Earl of Harewood considered that it was a national disgrace that the recent affairs in Edinburgh had not been investigated more fully and the public properly informed of the facts, but he was answered by the Earl of Haddington, who assured their lordships that the dreadful atrocities which had taken place in Edinburgh had in fact been probed as deeply as possible. Lord Tenterden thought that greater vigilance by doctors in discovering whether subjects were victims of barbarity, or persons who had died a natural death, would prevent any recurrence of such crimes as had lately been committed in Edinburgh.

  The Scottish press was full of fresh revelations about body-snatching and accompanying riots, but as far as the London papers were concerned, Scotland was a long way off and most of the trouble there was put down by The Times to Scottish hooliganism and the magistrates’ lack of wisdom. The English, however, were soon to get a shock of their own.

  Meanwhile, in July, John Broggan, the man who had absconded with his wife and the rent money from the basement flat which Burke and McDougal had lived in, was arrested in Glasgow and accused, along with one Bernard Docherty, of the attempted murder, in the course of robbery, of Andrew Naismith, a tailor, by means of laudanum. In September, James Gray, the homeless labourer who had blown the whistle on the homicidal careers of Burke and Hare, died penniless. His widow wrote to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, ‘the only friend that I have in this place’, begging for financial help to bury him.3 Mr Gray’s honesty and selfless action had undoubtedly saved lives. If it had not been for his incorruptible character, Burke and Hare would have continued undetected for who knows how long.

  On Saturday, 5 November 1831, two London body-snatchers, John Bishop and James May, called on William Hill, porter at the King’s College medical school, and offered him a subject for twelve guineas. It was, they said, a male of about fourteen years, very fresh, and they could deliver it that afternoon. The porter knocked the price down to nine guineas. The two men came back later, while it was still daylight, with another body-snatcher, Thomas Williams, and a street porter carrying a hamper. They tipped a corpse out on to the floor and asked for their money. But Mr Hill was immediately suspicious. It was obvious that the boy’s body had not been buried. Rigor mortis was still present and there was a deep cut on the forehead with blood round it. The lips and jaw were swollen and there was blood about the mouth and neck. Hill asked what the boy had died of, but May, who was drunk, told him that was neither his business nor theirs. The anatomy demonstrator, Richard Partridge, then came in to look at the body.

  Mr Partridge did immediately what Dr Knox had never done at all. He detained the men, on the pretext of having no cash ready to hand, while someone went for the police. All four men were arrested on suspicion of murder. Enquiries revealed that the same body had previously been offered to Guy’s Hospital and Grainger’s Anatomical Theatre, but both had declined to purchase it. The outcome was that at the Old Bailey on 1 December 1831 – almost two years after the trial of Burke – Bishop and Williams were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. In the condemned cell, Bishop admitted that they had got the idea of murdering the boy, and two other victims, from the Burke and Hare case. He thought that all the body-snatchers in London had tried ‘burking’. Bishop and Williams had rendered their victims insensible with rum laced with laudanum, then drowned them by lowering them head-first into a well in Bishop’s garden, apparently in the belief that the contents of the stomach would run out at the mouth, leaving no trace of foul play. Bishop and Williams were hanged outside Newgate Gaol and their bodies dissected, Bishop’s at King’s College and Williams’s at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.

  Horace Bleackley wrote in The Hangmen of England:

  The case of Bishop and Williams caused a great sensation in England, coming as it did so soon after the similar crimes of Burke and Hare, ‘the Scottish resurrection men’, who had murdered more than a dozen victims in West Port, Edinburgh, by suffocating them with pitch-plasters in order to sell the corpses to the surgeons.4

  An anonymous letter to the Home Secretary, signed ‘Anatomicus’ and dated 29 November 1831, suggested that all dissection should be suspended until other arrangements were made to supply subjects for teaching anatomy. There was not the shadow of a doubt, the writer claimed, ‘but that the practice of Burkeing (horrible to relate!) was adopted at Edinburgh by members of the fraternity of Resurrectionists’, and similar outrages ‘transpire here daily’.5

  A few days later, Henry Warburton presented a revised Bill to the House of Commons. A much improved version of the proposal to license anatomists and provide them with a legal supply of subjects, it also proposed abolition of the practice of dissecting executed murderers, and its provisions obviated the need for new laws against grave-robbing. It thus successfully dissociated the study of anatomy from crime. By this time, the country had a new government, and Sir Robert Peel had been replaced as Home Secretary by William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne.

  Even if we go back no further than the beginning of the nineteenth century, the successive governments of Pitt, Addington, Grenville, Portland, Perceval, Liverpool, Canning, Goderich and Wellington, all of them Tory except one (Lord Grenville’s), had failed to respond to constant calls from the medical profession to change the law on dissection. To the gentleman politicians, the subject was sordid and unseemly, affecting the poor and ignorant rather than the wealthy and privileged, and they preferred to pass by on the other side. Even now, when the Whig government of Earl Grey was intent on getting the Anatomy Bill through Parliament, few turned up for the debates.

  Less than forty Members were present in the House for the revised Bill’s second reading – a clear sign of continuing reluctance to tackle a distasteful subject and reach difficult decisions. Alexander Perceval, the Member for County Sligo, thought that dissection of animals would provide nearly all the advantages which could result from the mutilation of human bodies, while John Cresset Pelham, the Member for Shropshire, considered that the field of battle in time of war should furnish enough subjects for surgeons to obtain a competent knowledge of anatomy. The Member for Preston, Henry Hunt (the radical agitator known as ‘Orator Hunt’) had recommended elsewhere that ‘in the first place . . . the bodies of all our kings be dissected, instead of expending £700,000 or £800,000 of the public money for their interment’.

  In the House of Lords, the Duke of Sussex, who became President of the Royal Society, said that he had made provision for his own body to be dissected, ‘for I have some reason to think that there is a peculiarity in my conformation, the knowledge of which may possibly serve the interests of science’.

  I cannot sit down without expressing my full conviction, that if some arrangements be not speedily made, you will drive the study of anatomy altogether from this country, and compel our medical men to resort to foreign countries for that information which they ought to be able to obtain at home.

  (It is perhaps worth noting that, in the event, the Duke, who died in 1843, was not dissected. No doubt the royal family had something to say about that. The sixth son of George III, Augustus had suffered all his life from painful and sometimes dangerous paroxysms which mystified his physicians, but are now thought to have been symptoms of a hereditary disease of the royal family, porphyria.)6

  Among the Bill’s supporters was Lord Macaulay, who s
aid:

  If the education of a surgeon should become very expensive, if the fees of surgeons should rise, if the supply of surgeons should diminish, the sufferers would be, not the rich, but the poor in our country villages, who would be left again to mountebanks, and barbers, and old women; to charms and quack medicines . . . I think this is a Bill which tends to the good of the people, and which tends especially to the good of the poor.

  While the new Bill was being debated in Parliament, another resurrectionist murder hit the London headlines. A couple named Edward Cook and Eliza Ross (aka Cook or Reardon) were tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of an old woman named Caroline Walsh or Welsh. There was no body in the case, but the chief witness against Ross was her twelve-year-old son, who had heard his mother tell his father that she had sold the body to the London Hospital. Both defendants were known as drink-sodden body-snatchers. There was insufficient evidence against Cook, but Eliza Ross was found guilty and hanged in January 1832. Her body was delivered to the London Hospital for dissection.

  Warburton’s Anatomy Bill was approved in both Houses of Parliament. It received the Royal Assent on 1 August 1832 and became law as an Act for regulating Schools of Anatomy. The preamble acknowledged that ‘in order further to supply Human Bodies for such Purposes, divers great and grievous Crimes have been committed, and lately Murder, for the single Object of selling for such Purposes the Bodies of the Persons so murdered’.7 The Act provided for executors and other persons legally in charge of dead bodies to give them to licensed surgeons and teachers of anatomy unless the deceased had expressed conscientious objection to being dissected.

  We have no knowledge of how professional body-snatchers felt about those – principally Burke and Hare – who were responsible for bringing the curtain down on their lucrative proceedings. It is virtually certain that if murder had not made an entrance on the scene, the show would have gone on for several more years at least, since the government had no reason or appetite for alienating its supporters for the sake of a few stolen corpses which were no one’s legal property. Nevertheless, the Anatomy Act put a decisive end to the trade in dead bodies, and without the huge public outcry that many had feared. It ended the careers of body-snatchers as appendages of the medical profession, and they vanished into the underworld shadows from which they had emerged with the advent of this long-flourishing and peculiarly British black market, while the names of Burke and Hare were used, especially in Scotland, to frighten naughty children.

  What remains are some important gaps in our knowledge of Burke and Hare which, if it were possible to fill them, would perhaps give us one or two surprising facts about the most notorious serial-killing partnership in the annals of crime in Britain. What happened to Hare’s statement? It was never published and neither the original nor any copy is to be found in Edinburgh or in Home Office papers in the Public Record Office. It seems clear that it was destroyed as part of a conspiracy of silence regarding the teaching of anatomy in general, and Hare’s part in the murders in particular. If Hare admitted murder in it, any leak would have called into question the Lord Advocate’s judgement and inflamed the populace even more about Hare’s escape from justice. The Sheriff of Edinburgh told the Lord Provost that:

  Hare disclosed nearly the same crimes in point of number, of time, and of the descriptions of persons murdered, which Burke has thus confessed; and in the few particulars in which they differed, no collateral evidence could be obtained calculated to show which of them was in the right.8

  Note that ‘nearly!’ How instructive it would be to discover the points on which they differed. It is only because Sir Walter Scott saw Hare’s statement, and said that he gave the same account of the number and the same description of the victims, that we accept – because we have no alternative – that there were sixteen murders.

  If we had Hare’s statement and the testimony of potential witnesses who were never called – not only Knox himself but also Fergusson and others – we might know with certainty what we can only surmise. But Knox and his associates were kept out of the witness box because that, too, presumably, would have implicated Hare more deeply in the murders as well as publicising unpalatable facts about the everyday practices of the anatomists. What happened to Dr Knox’s account books? Why did the Marquis of Queensberry resign from the committee at an early stage? What evidence was given to the committee – and what not given – that enabled the members to reach their unanimous conclusions? Who was allowed to visit Burke in the condemned cell, and what was the true identity of the ‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’?

  It seems probable that such questions will remain unanswered, unless some dusty and forgotten old file is one day discovered in some secret vault. We assert in our books of criminal records that Burke and Hare murdered sixteen people, but only one murder was proved beyond doubt in a court of law, and there is independent circumstantial evidence of only two others. Of the thirteen citizens (and possibly more) who were deprived of their lives by these hideous killers, we know nothing more than what Burke told us, and that was very little. Worth more dead than alive, their only humble claim on our memories is that they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and fell foul of an evil pair unrivalled in infamy and of an arrogant and amoral lecturer.

  We prefer our images of famous men to be simple and straightforward. We do not easily embrace opposing characteristics in one individual, and would prefer to be told that Knox was either a great man or a wicked scoundrel. But the facts deny us such black-and-white simplicity, and we have to come to terms with the paradox of a man deserving our respect and our contempt at the same time. There can be no doubt at all that Knox’s knowledge and teaching of anatomy were of the highest calibre, maintaining the reputation of Edinburgh as the leading medical school and, more importantly, advancing the progress of surgery at a time of great need. But he was also a man of low moral principle, arrogantly indifferent to decent common human feelings and caring nothing about where his ‘subjects’ came from as long as they served his purposes. Leaving aside the question of the two women, there were three ghouls at work in Edinburgh in the year 1828 – and one of them was Robert Knox.

  NOTES

  1 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis, (London, Ridgway, 1832 edn), pp. 207–8.

  2 The Lancet, 28 March 1829.

  3 Roughead, p. 39.

  4 Horace Bleackley, The Hangmen of England, (London, Chapman and Hall, 1929), p. 216.

  5 Home Office papers in Public Record Office, HO 44/24.

  6 Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad-Business, (London, Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1969), pp. 258-61.

  7 ‘An Act for Regulating Schools of Anatomy’, 1832.

  8 Letter to the Lord Provost, 5 February 1829.

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  APPENDICES

  * * *

  I Burke’s Official Confession

  II Burke’s Courant Confession

  III Knox’s Letter to the Caledonian Mercury

  IV Report of Knox’s Committee of Enquiry

  V Open Letter to the Lord Advocate by ‘The Echo of Surgeons’ Square’

  Note: The appendices are all reproduced verbatim.

  No corrections have been made to grammar, spelling,

  punctuation or printers’ apparent errors.

  * * *

  APPENDIX I

  * * *

  BURKE’S OFFICIAL CONFESSION

  Statement made in Calton jail on 3 January 1829 in the presence of George Tait, Sheriff-substitute; Archibald Scott, Procurator-fiscal; and Richard Moxey, Assistant Sheriff-clerk.

  Compeared William Burke, at present under sentence of death in the jail of Edinburgh, states that he never saw Hare till the Hallow-fair before last (November, 1827), when he and Helen M’Dougal met Hare’s wife, with whom he was previously acquainted, on the street; they had a dram, and he mentioned he had an intention to go to the west country to endeavour to get employm
ent as a cobbler; but Hare’s wife suggested that they had a small room in their house which might suit him and M’Dougal, and that he might follow his trade of a cobbler in Edinburgh; and he went to Hare’s house, and continued to live there, and got employment as a cobbler.

  An old pensioner, named Donald, lived in the house about Christmas, 1827; he was in bad health, and died a short time before his quarter’s pension was due, that he owed Hare £4; and a day or two after the pensioner’s death, Hare proposed that his body should be sold to the doctors, and that the declarant should get a share of the price. Declarant said it would be impossible to do it, because the man would be coming in with the coffin immediately; but after the body was put into the coffin and the lid was nailed down, Hare started the lid with a chisel, and he and declarant took out the corpse and concealed it in the bed, and put tanner’s bark from behind the house into the coffin, and covered it with a sheet, and nailed down the lid of the coffin, and the coffin was then carried away for interment. That Hare did not appear to have been concerned in any thing of the kind before, and seemed to be at a loss how to get the body disposed of; and he and Hare went in the evening to the yard of the College, and saw a person like a student there, and the declarant asked him if there were any of Dr Monro’s men about, because he did not know there was any other way of disposing of a dead body – nor did Hare. The young man asked what they wanted with Dr Monro, and the declarant told him that he had a body to dispose of, and the young man referred him to Dr Knox, No 10 Surgeon Square; and they went there, and saw young gentlemen, whom he now knows to be Jones, Miller, and Ferguson, and told them that they had a subject to dispose of, but they did not ask how they had obtained it; and they told the declarant and Hare to come back when it was dark, and that they themselves would find a porter to carry it. Declarant and Hare went home and put the body into a sack, and carried it to Surgeon Square, and not knowing how to dispose of it, laid it down at the door of the cellar, and went up to the room, where the three young men saw them, and told them to bring up the body to the room, which they did; and they took the body out of the sack, and laid it on the dissecting-table. That the shirt was on the body, but the young men asked no questions as to that; and the declarant and Hare, at their desire, took off the shirt, and got £7 10s. Dr Knox came in after the shirt was taken off, and looked at the body, and proposed they should get £7 10s, and authorised Jones to settle with them; and he asked no questions as to how the body had been obtained. Hare got £4. 5s and the declarant got £3. 5s. Jones, &c, said that they would be glad to see them again when they had any other body to dispose of.