Bodysnatchers

Digging Up the Untold Stories of Britain's Resurrection Men

Suzie Lennox

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473866560
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

The grim history of England's bodysnatching trade: "Lennox's thorough exploration is riveting" (Naomi Clifford, author of The Disappearance of Maria Glenn ). From the string of murders committed by Burke and Hare, a pair of ghouls who are still the stuff of pop culture legend, to the lesser-known but equally gruesome grave-robbing exploits of Henry Gillies, William Patrick, and Joseph Grainger, here is the fascinating true chronicle of England's "Resurrection Men." During the winter months of 1742–1832, selling fresh cadavers to anatomists up and down the country, all in aid of medical advancement, was the surest way to earn a living for desperate men. After all, anatomy schools would pay high prices for corpses to dissect—the fresher the better. And they asked no questions as to their origins. This resulted in the criminal underworld of the "Sack 'em up Men" who left behind disinterred churchyards and burial grounds, and spread fear and horror throughout the United Kingdom. In Bodysnatchers, Suzie Lennox unearths the truth behind the macabre tales, separating fact from folktale, and setting the record straight about Britain's gruesome, often forgotten history.

Chapter 1

The Beginnings of Bodysnatching in England & Scotland

‘Yesterday morning an attempt was made in open day to rob a churchyard in the neighbourhood of London. A wretch … seeing a grave dug, and a coffin already in it, broke it open, and took out the bodies (there happening to be more than one) with which he was making off; but being seen … he was seized and committed to Bridewell.’

– Oxford Journal, Saturday, 31 March 1759.

The discovery of someone stripping grave clothes from a corpse in a churchyard in the middle of the afternoon is naturally suspicious. Yet, one Dublin gravedigger named John Loftus was seen in the Round Church graveyard one afternoon in May 1732 doing just that. Although Loftus’s case is often cited when discussing early examples of bodysnatching, instead of stealing the cadaver for use by a surgeon, Loftus was in fact after human fat.

Not all exhumations made it to the dissecting table and John Loftus had realised that the fat produced when boiling a cadaver was a valuable commodity. It later transpired that Loftus had ‘plunder[ed] of above fifty [graves], not only for their coffins and burial cloaths (sic), but of their fat, where bodies afforded any, which he retailed at a high price.’ While shocking to modern standards, using by-products of cadavers was not unknown during the eighteenth century. It can be surmised from an incriminating line in a poem written in 1796 by Robert Southey, ‘The Surgeon’s Warning’: ‘I have made candles of infants’ fat.’

Another failed attempt at selling a cadaver to the surgeons occurred in 1802 after a tussle arose at the gallows between a group of surgeons and the friends of a hanged shoemaker, who were trying to claim their friend’s body to give him a Christian burial. The friends won and took the body back to his widow’s home, naturally expecting thanks for their efforts. Rather uncharitably, the widow had removed herself from the situation, leaving the shoemaker’s friends with a body on their hands which they now needed to dispose of. In a complete turn of events, the shoemaker’s friends now tried, in vain, to sell his body to the apothecaries situated between Horsley and Rotherhithe, but even at a reduced rate no one was interested. Defeated, they covered the body in pitch and hastily buried it in St George’s Fields.

Students and surgeons were yet to fear for their reputations or the risk of being caught by the mob if found violating a grave. They could afford to turn away cadavers that appeared randomly for sale at their back doors. Whilst demand for cadavers remained manageable and the general population was unaware of events taking place in local churchyards, the surgeons and their students did not think twice about entering graveyards at night to ensure there was a body to dissect at the next morning’s lecture.

As the century progressed, however, things changed. Students and lecturers began to be prosecuted as local people became more aware that bodies were going missing and, as a result, medical students visited more far-flung churchyards. Pilfering of graves was not restricted to the environs of London or the major Scottish centres for anatomical training either. In 1792 Berwick parish church was the target of a raid by three young surgeons. A local mob tore down the house of one of the perpetrators, 24-year-old surgeon and student of physic Robert Nesbitt, after it was discovered that the trio had been stealing dead bodies from the churchyard and storing them inside Nesbitt’s house.

Nesbitt, described in the papers as being ‘very deaf’ with ‘a custom of turning his head to one side when he is spoken to’, absconded, and a reward of twenty guineas was offered by the parish vestry to anyone who apprehended him. Nesbitt’s accomplices, George Miller and Thomas Yellowly, were not so quick on their feet and both men appeared in court indicted for stealing the body of Christian Ross, the wife of John Ross on 31 July 1792. The young surgeons were also found to be in possession of a child’s body, together with his coffin, as well as the body of an unknown female.

The two young surgeons, together with a further accomplice William Burn, all denied their involvement in the exhumation, which subsequently resulted in a verdict of not guilty by the jury. Nesbitt, on the other hand, was never caught and no further record of him involved in this or any subsequent bodysnatching scandal has been found.

Berwickshire would be hit with a further bodysnatching scandal in 1820, this time in Coldingham when a Dr Lowry was convicted of ‘lifting up and carrying away’ a dead body from the parish churchyard. Suspicion was aroused when a large number of goods were requested to be delivered from his house to Edinburgh ‘without delay’. After taking charge of one particular trunk, it soon became apparent that the container was emitting a nauseating smell. Other passengers waiting to travel to Edinburgh insisted that it be investigated immediately. After the lid was forced open, their suspicions were confirmed when out tumbled the body of a grey-haired woman, a former parishioner of Coldingham. The smell of her decomposing corpse had filtered through the trunk, despite her having been embalmed and packed carefully ‘amidst a variety of perfumes’. Lowry was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in Greenlaw Gaol and a subsequent six weeks in Canongate Tollbooth, Edinburgh.

It appears that Dr Lowry was in the habit of stealing the bodies of the recently interred from the parish churchyard and storing them at his home. An article in the Berwickshire News and General Advertiser published in 1906 stated that Lowry was working hand-in-hand with ‘all the body-snatchers in the district’. When a corpse arrived at his house, it would be passed through a small window in the gable end known as ‘Resurrection Window’.

Coaches were often used to transport cadavers across the country and in 1797 the December issue of the Ipswich Journal included a story about hackney coachman Samuel Taylor. The coachman was arrested on the suspicion that he was working with a bodysnatcher by the name of Hutton. After the parish watch saw Taylor’s coach pull up outside the burial ground on Old Street Road, London they wasted no time in challenging him. Taylor was found to have the bodies of a man and three children in his possession. They also discovered that a number of bodies had been hidden under the wall of the churchyard, ready for transportation at a later date. It was believed that all the corpses buried in the churchyard over the five weeks preceding Taylor’s capture had been removed from their graves – around fifteen a week.

In order to transport Taylor to the New Prison in Clerkenwell so that he could be brought before the magistrates, he was thrown into the back of his own coach along with the rotting corpses he had stolen. He must have been tired after all his efforts that evening, for it was reported that he fell asleep in the back of the coach, alongside the corpses and the authorities had some difficulty waking him up when they arrived at their destination.

As the need for more cadavers increased, so the methods of procurement began to alter. In London, the Hunter brothers were both involved in obtaining bodies for anatomy lectures by the mid-eighteenth century. William would send his students out to assist grave-robbers and the students themselves would bribe the sextons. It did not usually take much to persuade these poorly paid employees of the church to bend the rules just a little. A few pence was often all that was needed to ensure a little help, just sufficient to make sure that a gate to the churchyard was left open.

The younger of the Hunter brothers, John, became quite adept at exhuming corpses for his brother’s lectures, taking with him a number of students to help with the exhumation and to carry the cadavers. By day John worked as a demonstrator in his elder brother’s lectures, pointing out the intricate workings of the human body, whilst William explained the structure to the students. By night he would liaise with the most depraved characters of the London streets in order to keep his brother’s promise to teach students in the ‘Paris Manner’, for each student to have a corpse of their own to dissect.

John is perhaps most famed for acquiring the body of Irishman Charles Byrne in 1783. Byrne is stated to have been over 7ft tall and he knew that his body was desired by anatomists. They were eager to investigate why he had grown so tall and, after dissecting his corpse, would have been fascinated to see his skeleton, although they would have struggled to fit his thigh bones and tibia into a pot to boil away the fat. John Hunter successfully obtained Byrne’s body, even though Byrne’s friends had promised him that he would be safe from the anatomist’s table.

Today, Byrne’s skeleton is on display at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, London, for all to see. Byrne’s friends sold his corpse for £500 (the equivalent of over £31,000 today), forgetting their promise to bury his body in a leaden coffin far out at sea. This was a princely sum and they must have reasoned that, after all, Byrne would be none the wiser.

Before 1800, the rising demand for cadavers among anatomists was evident throughout England and many anatomy courses had begun to be advertised by medical schools outside London. In 1777 Bristol Infirmary was providing ‘Courses of Anatomy’, for which bodies were procured from London, presumably by illicit means. Similarly, in 1776 a Mr Hunt was offering a ‘Course in Anatomical and Chirurgical Lectures’ at his home in Burford, Oxfordshire, for the price of two guineas, with each course lasting about six weeks. Hunt’s advert, which appeared in the Oxford Journal, stated that ‘there will be one body for dissections and another for operations in every course.’ Where did he get his supply of cadavers from, one wonders? Perhaps the charge of ‘three Guineas and a half for each body’ was enough to pay off the bodysnatcher or sexton and still ensure he was able to pocket a profit.

But not everyone was able to procure bodies so readily, as can be seen from an advert placed by Newcastle surgeon Mr William Smith in the Newcastle Chronicle for ‘Lectures on Midwifery and Anatomy’ commencing in November 1782: ‘Mr Smith proposes … to instruct … in the knowledge of the Human Body from wet and dry preparations of the bones, muscles, blood vessels etc.’ No fresh cadavers for his students.

While bodysnatching had evidently spread across the country, most of the earliest recorded cases took place within the capital, rather than the provinces. Often, however, these cases were merely anecdotes reported in newspapers to excite the general public or mere rumours, with few cases casting any real light on who the bodysnatchers were.

In 1765, the Oxford Journal included an unusual level of detail within a story involving bodysnatchers William Holt and Abraham Evans. The pair had been tried for stealing the body of a child from the parish churchyard of St Andrews, Holborn. Holt received four months’ imprisonment in Newgate Gaol and was ordered to pay a fine of one shilling, whilst Evans received four months in the Compter – probably the Poultry Compter, a sheriffs’ prison within the city of London – and was also fined one shilling. In contrast, a more typical report appearing in the Universal Magazine in 1796 provides no clues as to who might have targeted a churchyard in Cripplegate and subsequently sold ‘divers bodies’ to the surgeons for two guineas each.

One of the biggest cases before the turn of the eighteenth century occurred in February 1795 in London, when three men were disturbed whilst trying to remove bodies from Lambeth burial ground. When inquiries were made, it transpired that the three men in question were part of a fifteen-strong gang which included a gravedigger, coachmen and ‘eight surgeons of public repute’. The bodies had been procured from about thirty burial grounds in the area and were subsequently sold at a set price: ‘for an adult two Guineas and a crown, for every one under age, [children] six shillings, for the first foot and nine-pence per inch’.

Reports stated that some of the bodies, once prepared by the articulator (of human skeletons), were sent to America and the West Indies whilst ‘many with the flesh on [were] made into skeletons [and] sent to different parts of this kingdom’. Perhaps most shockingly of all was the end use that some of the snatched corpses were put to. The report claimed that the articulator not only ‘substituted human skulls for nail boxes’ but also ‘[gave] the skeleton of a child, instead of a doll, for his own child to play with.’

As reports like these proliferated, the public became increasingly wary of bodysnatchers and began to respond to rumours of their presence, at times violently. This can be seen throughout the history of Scotland when one of the earliest accounts of bodysnatching occurred in 1678. It was rumoured that the body of a 16-year-old gypsy, who had been hanged for murder along with three family members, had been taken from Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh by surgeons ‘to make an anatomical dissection of’. The discovery of the disturbed grave on the morning of 6 February led to a few different conclusions, including the theory that the hanged felon had survived his punishment and risen from the grave.

However, the very first confirmed account of bodysnatching for the purposes of dissection in Scotland occurred once again at Greyfriars, when medical students raided the kirkyard in 1711. The corpse of Robert Findlay was found to have been taken from his grave, with the populace blaming both the surgeons and the gravedigger. As a result, the Incorporation of Surgeons threatened their apprentices with expulsion if they were found violating the graves in an attempt to secure ‘subjects’ for their medical training.

Fourteen years later, Edinburgh would again be up in arms regarding the conduct of its medical students. A mob threatened to ransack Surgeons’ Hall, which housed Alexander Monro’s lecture theatre, after students were once again caught violating graves in the city. These threats were enough to send Monro in search of safer lecture rooms within the University buildings.

As far as riots go, the 1742 riot in Edinburgh was quite something. The stealing of the Portsburgh drum – used by the town guard to alert people in the neighbourhood to any disturbances – the destruction of any houses and shops possessing the slightest association with anatomists and the burning down of ‘Resurrection Hall’ all took place before the authorities could grasp what was happening.

Tensions had run high through the city for a number of months in the spring of that year, coming to a head when the public received word that surgeon Martin Eccles, together with his eager band of apprentices had obtained the body of Alexander Baxter, who had been interred in St Cuthbert’s Kirkyard (formerly West Kirk) only one week previously. The kirkyard was such a favoured haunt of the medical fraternity that, in 1738, the height of the boundary wall had been increased to 8ft in an effort to stop the raids. Needless to say, these efforts were fruitless.

The first night of riots in the city occurred on 9 March, when an angry mob gathered outside the premises of surgeon Martin Eccles, after the body of the recently buried Alexander Baxter had been found on his premises. Windows were smashed and doors broken down, as the mob shouted abuse to Eccles and the surgeons of Edinburgh, leaving them in no doubt as to how they felt about the theft of their loved ones’ bodies.

Gaining support as the night wore on, the mob seized the Portburgh Drum and proceeded to beat to arms along the Cowgate to Niddery’s Wynd. Here the mob was confronted by the City Guard and stopped before they could incite any more anger. The mob did not need a drum to show its disgust towards Eccles and the other surgeons of the city. Windows of homes belonging to surgeons were smashed, whether or not they had played any part in stealing the body of Alexander Baxter. As far as the mob was concerned, all surgeons were the same; they all had little regard for the sanctity of the grave and the corpse within it.

Still angered by the previous night’s discovery, the mob rose again the following evening, this time entering Eccles’s shop and destroying it completely. Magistrates, the City Guard and High Constables were rallied to help disperse the mob, many of whom escaped through the Netherbow Port. With the city gates locked up and the mob trapped on the wrong side of the city walls, the irate citizens eventually returned home.

Meanwhile, Eccles and his apprentices were charged with removing the dead bodies from their graves. Without warning, two of the apprentices absconded, leaving Eccles and his three remaining apprentices to face the magistrates. Surprisingly, no proof was found to implicate the men and the charges were subsequently dropped.

The mob, however, was not satisfied by the verdict and another rumour began making its way through the city, that George Haldane, a beadle from West Kirk, had been an accessory to the theft of bodies from the kirkyard. The mob descended upon his home, now dubbed ‘Resurrection Hall’ as it was believed to have been built from the proceeds of bodysnatching. There they found fragments of old coffins, which incited them further. The next day the mob went back to finish what they had started and set fire to the property, destroying it completely.

On 18 March, three days after his house has been destroyed, Haldane inserted a public notice in the newspapers, declaring his innocence:

‘All Doctors and Surgeons in Edinburgh or about it, or within the Kingdom of Scotland, or any other person that can make it evident that I had any hand or part in lifting the corpse in the West church yard, I come in the judges’ hands to suffer death.’

By this time, the Edinburgh mob had dispersed into the surrounding neighbourhoods and on the same day Haldane declared his innocence, another mob was targeting the house of Peter Richardson. Yet another man suspected of bodysnatching for the surgeons, Ric...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Beginnings of Bodysnatching in England & Scotland
• Chapter 2: First Forays: From student outings to the rise of the professional bodysnatcher
• Chapter 3: A Slick Operation: The Modus Operandi of the bodysnatching trade
• Chapter 4: Preventative Measures: The art of keeping your loved ones safe
• Chapter 5: Punishment: Dealing with the perpetrators
• Photo Gallery
• Chapter 6: The Trials of the Solicitors’ Clerk: The case of John Craig Hodgson
• Chapter 7: ‘For the Purpose of Gain and Profit’: The case of Henry Gillies
• Chapter 8: A Catalogue of Errors: When snatching a corpse did not go to plan
• Chapter 9: The Final Chapter: Bodysnatching at the time of the Anatomy Act
• Bibliography
• Research Sources
• Tracing a Bodysnatcher Through the Archives