Authors: Brian Bailey
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 said:
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.
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
S
tatement 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 employment 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.
Early last spring, 1828, a woman from Gilmerton came to Hare’s house as a nightly lodger, – Hare keeping seven beds for lodgers: That she was a stranger, and she and Hare became merry, and drank together; and next morning she was very ill in consequence of what she had got, and she sent for more drink, and she and Hare drank together, and she became very sick and vomited; and at that time she had not risen from bed, and Hare then said that they would try and smother her in order to dispose of her body to the doctors. That she was lying on her back in the bed, and quite insensible from drink, and Hare clapped his hand on her mouth and nose, and the declarant laid himself across her body, in order to prevent her making any disturbance – and she never stirred; and they took her out of bed and undressed her, and put her into a chest; and they mentioned to Dr Knox’s young men that they had another subject, and Mr Miller sent a porter to meet them in the evening at the back of the Castle; and declarant and Hare carried the chest till they met the porter, and they accompanied the porter with the chest to Dr Knox’s class-room, and Dr Knox came in when they were there: the body was cold and stiff. Dr Knox approved of its being so fresh, but did not ask any questions.
The next was a man named Joseph, a miller who had been lying badly in the house: That he got some drink from declarant and Hare, but was not tipsy: he was very ill, lying in bed, and could not speak sometimes, and there was a report on that account that there was fever in the house, which made Hare and his wife uneasy in case it should keep away lodgers, and they (declarant and Hare) agreed that they should suffocate him for the same purpose, and the declarant got a small pillow and laid it across Joseph’s mouth, and Hare lay across the body to keep down the arms and legs; and he was disposed of in the same manner, to the same persons, and the body was carried by the porter who carried the last body.
In May, 1828, as he thinks, an old woman came to the house as a lodger, and she was the worse of drink, and she got more drink of her own accord, and she became very drunk, and declarant suffocated her; and Hare was not in the house at the time; and she was disposed of in the same manner.
Soon afterwards an Englishman lodged there for some nights, and was ill of the jaundice: that he was in bed very unwell, and Hare and declarant got above him and held him down, and by holding his mouth suffocated him, and disposed of him in the same manner.
Shortly afterwards an old woman named Haldane, (but he knows nothing farther of her) lodged in the house, and she had got some drink at the time, and got more to intoxicate her, and he and Hare suffocated her, and disposed of her in the same manner.
Soon afterwards a cinder woman came to the house as a lodger, as he believes, and she got drink from Hare and the declarant, and became tipsy, and she was half asleep, and he and Hare suffocated her, and disposed of her in the same manner.
About Midsummer 1828, a woman, with her son or grandson, about twelve years of age, and who seemed to be weak in his mind, came to the house as lodgers; the woman got a dram, and when in bed asleep, he and Hare suffocated her, and the boy was sitting in the fire at the kitchen, and he and Hare took hold of him, and carried him into the room, and suffocated him. They were put into a herring barrel the same night, and carried to Dr Knox’s rooms.
That, soon afterwards, the declarant brought a woman to the house as a lodger; and after some days, she got drunk, and was disposed of in the same manner: That declarant and Hare generally tried if lodgers would drink, and if they would drink, they were disposed of in that manner.
The declarant then went for a few days to the house of Helen M’Dougal’s father, and when he returned he learned from Hare that he had disposed of a woman in the declarant’s absence, in the same manner, in his house; but the declarant does not know the woman’s name, or any farther particulars of the case, or whether any other person was present or knew of it.
That about this time he went to live in Broggan’s house, and a woman, named Margaret Haldane, daughter of the woman Haldane before mentioned, and whose sister is married to Clark, a tinsmith in the High Street, came into the house, but the declarant does not remember for what purpose; and she got drink, and was disposed of in the same manner: That Hare was not present, and neither Broggan nor his son knew the least thing about that or any other case of the same kind.
That in April, 1828, he fell in with the girl Paterson and her companion in Constantine Burke’s house, and they had breakfast together, and he sent for Hare, and he and Hare disposed of her in the same manner; and Mr Ferguson and a tall lad, who seemed to have known the woman by sight, asked where they had got the body; and the declarant said he had purchased it from an old woman at the back of the Canongate. The body was disposed of five or six hours after the girl was killed, and it was cold, but not very stiff, but he does not recollect of any remarks being made about the body being warm.
One day in September or October 1828, a washer-woman had been washing in the house for some time, and he and Hare suffocated her, and disposed of her in the same manner.
Soon afterwards, a woman named M’Dougal, who was a distant relation of Helen M’Dougal’s first husband, came to Broggan’s house to see M’Dougal; and after she had been coming and going to the house for a few days, she got drunk, and was served in the same way by the declarant and Hare.
That ‘Daft Jamie’ was then disposed of in the manner mentioned in the indictment, except that Hare was concerned in it. That Hare was lying alongside of Jamie in the bed, and Hare suddenly turned on him, and put his hand on his mouth and nose; and Jamie, who had got drink, but was not drunk, made a terrible resistance, and he and Hare fell from the bed together, Hare still keeping hold of Jamie’s mouth and nose; and as they lay on the floor together, declarant lay across Jamie, to prevent him from resisting, and they held him in that state till he was dead, and he was disposed of in the same manner, and Hare took a brass snuff-box and a spoon from Jamie’s pocket; and kept the box to himself, and never gave it to the declarant – but he gave him the spoon.
And the last was the old woman Docherty, for whose murder he has been convicted. That she was not put to death in the manner deponed to by Hare on the trial. That during the scuffle between him and Hare, in the course of which he was nearly strangled by Hare, Docherty had crept among the straw, and after the scuffle was over, they had some drink, and after that they both went forward to where the woman was lying sleeping, and Hare went forward first, and seized her by the mouth and nose, as on former occasions; and at the same time the declarant lay across her, and she had no opportunity of making any noise; and before she was dead, one or other of them, he does not recollect which, took hold of her by the throat. That while he and Hare were struggling, which was a real scuffle, M’Dougal opened the door of the apartment, and went into the inner passage and knocked at the door, and called out police and murder, but soon came back; and at the same time Hare’s wife called out never to mind, because the declarant and Hare would not hurt one another. That whenever he and Hare rose and went towards the straw where Docherty was lying, M’Dougal and Hare’s wife, who, he thinks, were lying in bed at the time, or, perhaps, were at the fire, immediately rose and left the house, but did not make any noise, so far as he heard, and he was surprised at their going out at that time, because he did not see how they could have any suspicion of what they (the declarant and Hare) intended doing. That he cannot say whether he and Hare would have killed Docherty or not, if the women had remained, because they were so determined to kill the woman, the drink being in their head; – and he has no knowledge or suspicion of Docherty’s body having been offered to any person besides Dr Knox; and he does not suspect that Paterson would offer the body to any other person than Dr Knox.
Declares, That suffocation was not suggested to them by any person as a mode of killing, but occurred to Hare on the first occasion before mentioned, and was continued afterwards because it was effectual, and showed no marks; and when they lay across the body at the same time, that was not suggested to them by any person, for they never spoke to any person on such a subject; and it was not done for the purpose of preventing the person from breathing, but was only done for the purpose of keeping down the person’s arms and thighs, to prevent the person struggling.
Declares, That with the exception of the body of Docherty, they never took the person by the throat, and they never leapt upon them; and declares that there were no marks of violence on any of the subjects, and they were sufficiently cold to prevent any suspicion on the part of the Doctors; and, at all events, they might be cold and stiff enough before the box was opened up, and he and Hare always told some story of their having purchased the subjects from some relation or other person who had the means of disposing of them, about different parts of the town, and the statements which they made were such as to prevent the Doctors having any suspicions; and no suspicions were expressed by Dr Knox or any of his assistants, and no questions asked tending to show that they had suspicion.
Declares, that Helen M’Dougal and Hare’s wife were no way concerned in any of the murders, and neither of them knew of any thing of the kind being intended, even in the case of Docherty; and although these two women may latterly have had some suspicion in their own minds that the declarant and Hare were concerned in lifting dead bodies, he does not think that they could have any suspicion that he and Hare were concerned in committing murders.
Declares, That none of the subjects which they had procured, as before mentioned, were offered to any other person than Dr Knox’s assistants, and he and Hare had very little communication with Dr Knox himself; and declares, that he has not the smallest suspicion of any other person in this, or in any other country, except Hare and himself, being concerned in killing persons and offering their bodies for dissection; and he never knew or heard of such a thing having been done before.
Wm Burke.
G. Tait.
O
n 22 January, Burke made a further statement. The same three officials were present, as well as Rev William Reid, a Catholic priest.
Compeared William Burke, at present under sentence of death in the gaol of Edinburgh, and his declaration, of date the 3d current, being read over to him, he adheres thereto. Declares further, that he does not know the names and descriptions of any of the persons who were destroyed except as mentioned in his former declaration. Declares that he never was concerned in any other act of the same kind, nor made any attempt or preparation to commit such, and all reports of a contrary tendency, some of which he has heard, are groundless. And he does not know of Hare being concerned in any such, except as mentioned in his former declaration; and he does not know of any persons being murdered for the purpose of dissection by any other persons than himself and Hare, and if any persons have disappeared any where in Scotland, England, or Ireland, he knows nothing whatever about it, and never heard of such a thing till he was apprehended. Declares, that he never had any instrument in his house except a common table knife, or a knife used by him in his trade as a shoemaker, or a small pocket knife, and he never used any of those instruments, or attempted to do so, on any of the persons who were destroyed. Declares, that neither he nor Hare, so far as he knows, ever were concerned in supplying any subjects for dissection except those before mentioned; and, in particular, never did so by raising dead bodies from the grave. Declares, that they never allowed Dr Knox or any of his assistants, to know exactly where their houses were, but Paterson, Dr Knox’s porter or door-keeper, knew. And this he declares to be truth.