Devonshire Characters and Strange Events/The Stoke Resurrectionists
THE STOKE RESURRECTIONISTS
IN the year 1829 Mr. Warburton introduced a Bill into the House of Commons for the prevention of the unlawful disinterment of human bodies and for the regulation of schools of anatomy. The horrible revelations of the murders—at least thirty—committed by Burke and Hare, in Edinburgh, for the sake of providing subjects for the purposes of anatomy to lecture on, had produced a profound emotion. The Bill passed the House of Commons, but was thrown out by the Lords.
So long as the European war continued, the period of time required for the completion of the education of medical students, so as to fit them for the service in the Army or Navy, was unduly short, and the study of anatomy was consequently much neglected. At that time the dissecting-rooms were supplied by men who in general exhumed bodies. The trade was lucrative; one resurrectionist at his death left nearly £6000 to his family. Another resurrectionist, after a long career, withdrew in 1817. He had attended the army in the Peninsula and in France as a licensed sutler, and after a battle went over the field extracting the teeth of those who had fallen and such as were dying, and disposed of them to dentists in England. With the produce of these sales he built a large hotel at Margate. A leading resurrectionist once received £144 for twelve subjects in one evening. Sir Astley Cooper expended hundreds of pounds in the purchase of bodies and in advancing money to screen these useful auxiliaries of the anatomical school. To obtain the liberation of one he paid £160.
The proper education of a surgeon demanded that he should be acquainted with anatomy, and the only provision made by the legislature was that the bodies of criminals who had been executed should be handed over to the schools. This did not furnish by any means an adequate number, and the professors of anatomy were obliged to have recourse to the professional purveyor of corpses, knowing well enough, or suspecting, whence they came.
A select committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire into the matter, and several of the profession were had up for examination.
Here is the evidence of one resurrectionist, condensed:—
"A man may make a good living at it if he is a sober man, and acts with judgment. I should suppose there are at present in London between forty and fifty men that have the name of raising subjects. If you are friends with a grave-digger, the thing will be all right to know what bodies to get; if you are not, you cannot get them. The largest number of bodies I have got were twenty-three in four nights. It was only in one year that I got one hundred. Perhaps the next year I did not get above fifty or sixty. When I go to work I like to get those of poor people buried from the workhouses, because, instead of working for one subject, you may get three or four. I do not think, during the time I have been in the habit of working for the schools, I got half a dozen of wealthier people."
A second said: "The course I should take would be to have the workhouse subjects; we can get them out of the burial-ground without any difficulty whatever."
One of the largest dealers was Israel Cohen, commonly called Izzy, a Jew, well known to surgeons and sextons. By the surgeons he was patronized; of the sextons he was the patron; and so complete was the understanding between the profession to which he belonged and those with which he was connected, that the interest of all three was advanced by coalition. He was a square-built, resolute ruffian, with features indicative of his Hebrew origin, black whiskers, and a squint.
The Plymouth medical men memorialized the Government in 1827 relating to the necessity they were in of having human bodies for dissection, and the inadequacy of the legitimate supply. "In other countries," they said, "the dissection of the dead, so necessary to the well-being of the living, is permitted and protected; and is actually prosecuted, without shocking any existing prejudice or violating the sanctities of the dead. It follows either that the professional gentlemen of this kingdom must be contented with a very inferior medical education, or that they must resort to the Continent to obtain that information which is denied to them by the laws of Great Britain." The alternative of having recourse to resurrectionists they did not refer to. The memorial produced no results.
In the recent alterations of Princetown Church, it was found that no inconsiderable number of the graves of the French prisoners who died during incarceration were empty. There can be little doubt that the bodies were disposed of to the surgeons in Plymouth. It was generally supposed that the body-snatchers in exhuming a corpse first proceeded, as would a novice, in excavating the whole grave, and having arrived at the coffin would then force off the lid and so get possession of the body. But this would have been too slow an operation. To do the job expeditiously they cleared away the earth above the head of the coffin only, taking care to leave that which covered the rest of the coffin undisturbed. As soon as about one-third of the chest was thus exposed, they forced a very strong crowbar between the end of the coffin and the lid, and easily prised it open. It usually happened at this stage of the proceedings that the superincumbent weight of earth on the other portion of the coffin-lid caused it to be snapped across. As soon as this was effected the body was drawn out, the death-gear removed from it and replaced in the coffin, and finally the body was tied up in a bundle or thrust into a sack and taken away, the whole operation lasting not over a quarter of an hour.
Very generally a hackney coach or a spring cart was in waiting to receive the body. When corpses were sent from the country to London they were generally packed in barrels or hat-crates. But when one was to be taken to a dissecting-room in the same town it was laid on a large piece of green baize, the four corners were tied together, and so the body was rolled up in a bundle. The body-snatcher would then, dressed as a porter, swing the load over his shoulder, and often, even in broad daylight, carry it to its place of destination through the most crowded streets.
Every means which ingenuity could suggest was put in practice to obtain bodies which had not been buried. For this purpose the men, when they heard of the body of a person being found—drowned, for instance, and lying to be owned—trumped up a story of an unfortunate brother or sister, humbugged a coroner's jury, and thus obtained possession of the body. In this sort of trickery the wives of the men were often employed, as their application was attended to with less suspicion, and it was never difficult to impose on the parochial officials, who were always anxious to avoid the expense of burying the deceased. Subjects were thus occasionally procured, but they were more frequently obtained by pretending relationship to persons dying without friends in hospitals and workhouses. As the bodies thus obtained were much fresher than those which had been buried, they produced generally, independent of the teeth, as much as twelve guineas each.
At the commencement of a new term at the hospitals, the lecturers on anatomy were beset by the leading dealers in subjects, and "fifty pounds down, and nine guineas a body," was often acceded to. The larger sum down secured to the lecturer the exclusive supply of that dealer's wares. The competition for subjects was great, and in some cases twenty pounds were paid for a single corpse in good condition.
Stoke Church and yard lay solitary amid waste land. It had a wall round it, but no houses very near, and there were no oil lamps burning in the road that passed it.
A strong suspicion was entertained that the graves there had been rifled, and were so continually, and it was proposed to the parish authorities to have lamps and organize a night watch. But the officials shrank from the expense, and many people reasoned that it were well to allow the resurrectionists to get bodies from graves, as bodies the surgeons must have, rather than run the risk of inducing these scoundrels to imitate the proceedings of Burke by killing individuals for the purpose. Within a stone's throw of Mill Bridge was a commodious residence called Mount Pleasant, with Stonehouse Lake or Creek on one side, and Stoke Church on the other. A man, apparently well to do, a Mr. Gosling, took the house, and brought in a somewhat mixed party of men and women. The neighbours thought the family was peculiar, but as he was a pleasant-spoken man and the ladies of the party were affable and sympathetic, and as he paid his way with punctuality, they were content. Indeed, they were more than content. The females of the Gosling household attended every funeral, and expressed their tenderest feelings of regard and pity for the mourners, asked all particulars about the deceased, his or her age, and what malady had hurried the lamented one to his grave, as also occasionally whether the deceased had good teeth. At night, immediately after every funeral, the men of the party stole forth, furnished with crowbar and spades, and equipped with a sack or two, and made their way into the graveyard, where they worked by the light of a dark lantern. The sexton had been squared, and he had not made the grave very deep, nor had he heaped the earth thickly over it.
But the gang did not confine operations to the last interment. They opened other graves, and if the corpses were too much decomposed to be of any commercial value they contented themselves with drawing all their teeth.
Sometimes it happened that the subjects when removed to Mount Pleasant underwent rapid decomposition. Then they were buried in the garden, and restored to the graveyard on the next visit.
Neighbours now began to notice that lights were burning in Mount Pleasant at all times of the night. It was also remarked that the grave mounds bore a suspicious look of having been tampered with—not those recently made only, but others more ancient.
In the nearest house was a shrewd, observant servant-girl, and the lights, the way they moved about at night in the rooms of the villa—not in the bedrooms, but downstairs, at times when every one else was asleep—aroused her suspicions. Her bedroom window commanded the villa of Gosling and Co., and wake at what time she might or however early in the morning before daybreak, there the lights were. She resolved on keeping watch; and she stationed herself where, unseen, she could observe proceedings. Towards midnight she saw dark figures emerge from Mount Pleasant and make their way to Stoke Church. Follow she did not. Her courage was not equal to that; but she waited and watched till the figures stole back, and on this occasion she distinctly saw sacks being carried on the backs of two of the men. She now remembered that she had often noticed packing-cases and casks being taken from the villa to the water's edge and placed on a barge apparently waiting there for its load. In the morning the girl told her master what she had seen, and he at once apprised the police.
These latter now placed themselves behind the wall at night to watch what would happen; they were rewarded one night after there had been a couple of funerals in the churchyard. The constables saw the men dig and shovel for about ten minutes; heard them strike a coffin-lid, and proceed to force it up. Then by the faint light they saw them remove a corpse and put it into a sack. Thereupon one of the men came out of the yard as a scout to see that the coast was clear. After that they hoisted the body over the churchyard wall and made towards Mount Pleasant. As the constables on this occasion were but two and there was a considerable gang in the villa, they returned to Devonport, where they collected a sufficient force of watchmen and special constables, and surrounded the building, where the resurrectionists were enjoying a refreshing sleep after their labours. Scaling the wall by means of a ladder and advancing in their stocking-soles, they entered the various bedrooms, and secured four men and two women, pinioned and gagged them. They were taken completely by surprise.
In the kitchen were found two sacks. In one was the body of a girl of eighteen, in the other that of an elderly man. The cupboards and drawers were stocked with extracted teeth and implements of dentistry for drawing them.
When on the following morning it was noised in Devonport that a confederacy of body-snatchers had been captured, the greatest excitement prevailed. The relatives of all who had died and been buried within a couple of years and more crowded the cemetery demanding that the graves of their kinsfolk should be examined. The graveyard turned out to have been a mine well worked. Grave after grave was opened, and dishevelled shrouds and mutilated bodies, teethless jaws, revealed to the distracted relatives of the dead that the graves had been violated.
Gosling and his confederates were brought to trial, and confessed their guilt, and even revelled in their horrible reminiscences. Gosling grimly recalled how on one night the resurrection party had been so drunk that they had fought in an open grave under the shadow of the church.
This took place in 1830. Gosling and his confederates were transported.
It was not till 1832 that Mr. Warburton's Bill, already referred to, passed both Houses; and public feeling had been further stirred on the subject by the case of Bishop and Williams, who had murdered an Italian boy in London for the sake of providing a subject for S. Bartholomew's Hospital, and Bishop had admitted that he had committed sixty such murders.
The objection raised to the Bill in the House of Lords in the first instance, and again in the second, was that Warburton's project was that such persons as died in a hospital, and whose bodies were not claimed by relatives, should be given up for dissection. What the Lords objected to was that this subjected the poor to what might be considered an evil in which the rich did not participate. But the serious condition of affairs, the evidence that many murders were committed so as to provide the anatomical schools with subjects, overrode the sentimental feeling, and the Bill passed. Happy indeed would it have been if it had passed thirty years earlier.