The Resurrectionists Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
Note: Scotland is produced and designed to be heard, not read. We encourage you, if you are able, to listen to the audio, which provides insight which is significantly different to how it appears on the page. Transcripts are generated from the original scripts of the episodes. They may be slightly different to the corresponding audio and may contain errors.
Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 13 - The Resurrectionists
It is 1827 and the sound and smell of squelching viscera is all-consuming. You watch as Doctor Monro in his white coat with even whiter hair and a drab, monotonous voice that could have lulled you to sleep if he wasn’t wrist deep in a corpse’s chest cavity.
The doctor tells you about the size of the subject’s heart. He tells you about that some crackpots down the road believe that bumps in the skull can predict criminal intent. He laughs heartily, a bit of spit gets caught in his beard and you’re pretty sure that something from his mouth ended up on the unfortunate subject’s lung.
The man you’re supposed to be learning from is dishevelled - in fact that’s too nice - he’s downright dirty and he wipes his bloody hands on his coat and hacks out a cough. You begin to question why you came all the way to Edinburgh to study medicine of all things. You could have stayed at home and become a clerk, or gone somewhere else and become a lawyer, or an accountant, or something that didn’t involve nodding sagely over someone’s decomposing liver.
You feel the vomit rising in your throat. It’s the same vomit you’ve been holding in every day for months after the first time you made a holy show of yourself decanting your breakfast over that ambitious young doctor in the row in front.
Hold it down. Don’t think about where the bodies come from.
From Be Quiet Media, this is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
You take a walk through the kirkyard to settle your stomach. In the hustle and bustle of the city, a cemetery can be a peaceful - if a little morbid - place to take a stroll. There are crooked old stones, there for hundreds of years that look like some drunk’s taken a punch in the mouth and then there are new ones. Fresh, the inscriptions still clear as day.
In front of some of them lie monolithic slabs, or weird looking iron grates which have been lowered over the grave plot. The dead have yet to punch up through the ground and return to hunt the living - at least in stories - so you think it’s pretty weird.
There’s a couple of auld boys standing next to a newly cut grave with one of these hideous carbunkles on it. They talk in hushed tones about other auld boys who were looking to earn a couple of extra bob ‘working nights’. As long as they’re not coming for our old bones, one laughs. The other seems less comfortable with the possibility, and kicks the iron grate with a hobnail boot to check it’s secure.
You shrug. Times are tough for everyone, not just students.
It is half past two in the morning, because doing what they’re doing might seem like a midnight activity but the chances of getting caught are way lower at half past two in the morning.
The wooden spade drives down into the sodden, cloying dirt until one of the men says in hushed tones to slow down. The wooden shovel makes less noise than a metal one but it’s not silent and they really don’t want to attract attention. The two figures in the gloom are occasionally picked out by the dim light of their lamp. The sweat from their foreheads catches the light, and the shadows sink their eyes making them appear dead themselves.
The ghoulish figures continue their digging efforts, getting quieter and slower the deeper they go, digging in a wee rectangle right in front of the headstone. It’s not long until the the shovel strikes something. A coffin.
A head pops out of the hole and looks around, studying every eerie shadow cast by the surrounding stones. The quiet shovelling is replaced by the muffled impact of a crowbar on wood. There’s an almighty creaking, a constant snapping sound for a minute until the head in the hole reappears. The figure hoists itself out and both spectres reach in, pulling something immensely heavy out of the hole.
Then the two figures are a flash of activity. They push the soil back into the hole and make sure it was level, then they bundle up the body in sheets and place it in a box on the back of a handcart.
A third man hoves into view with a lantern. He checks if they’ve finished yet - he thinks he heard something on the street. They should hurry up. The best bodies came from the best cemeteries, but the best cemeteries had Night Watchmen. Fortunately, as every good resurrectionist knows, everyone has a price.
But the humble and strangely honest practice of digging up freshly buried cadavers isn’t the story you thought you were getting.
It’s not the story you’re here for…
It is a beautiful day in the city of Edinburgh. Two men are wheeling a small cart with a tea chest on it through the gates of a property on Surgeon’s Square. One looks like he’s been in the wars-
BURKE: -the other is a handsome devil even if he does say so himself. I’ve grafted every day of my life, sometimes nights too, and nothing has ever brought me down - doesn’t matter how bad things get. I’m from County Tyrone but I’ve been all over. I’m what you’d probably call an entrepreneur. I’ve done startup after startup, selling second hand clothes, repairing shoes, all that sort of stuff. But I think I’ve finally hit on the one.
I’m in the medical supply game now. You see all the doctors around the medical school are trying to teach anatomy from books and that’s not really going to do it. It’s harder to understand all the really squishy, bloody bits of the body if you can’t see them squish and bleed.
So that’s where me and my associate here come in. Just ignore him, his craic’s rotten. I’m William, by the way, William Burke.
Our business is delivering the finest, freshest human specimens to Edinburgh’s finest medical practitioner. And let me tell you something my friend. Business is good.
MICHAEL PARK: The other man snarls something to the attendant at the back door who looks pretty on edge. His name is Bill Hare.
The two men disappear into the back of the building, accompanied by the attendant. Some time passes before the two men emerge with the tea chest, looking flushed and pleased with themselves. The attendant looks more ashen-faced than before.
This isn’t the first time that these two Irishmen have appeared at the dissection rooms of Dr Robert Knox. In fact they had turned up four or five times with their tea chest before and every time the good Doctor was delighted to see them, even if he didn’t always deal with them directly.
BURKE: We don’t sell tea - that’s not the big idea but nobody looks twice at ya when you’re humphing a tea chest through the streets. One guy even gave us a hand when we couldn’t get the horse and cart. Helped us halfway up the Grassmarket without even batting an eyelid.
He’d have batted more than eyelid if he’d known he was helping us make ten pounds off the good Doctor, I’ll tell you that.
MICHAEL PARK: Ten pounds in 1827 is about £700 today. It was more than a month’s wage. This was a lucrative business indeed. Burke and his growling associate Hare were resurrection men - two of the most reliable ones in town. This was the fifth time they’d turned up to Knox’s place with a tea chest and disappeared in the back door.
BURKE: We got into the biz by accident really. My colleague here runs a boarding house. Well, he has lodgers - I wouldn’t say the service is good enough to be a boarding house.
Anyway, one day some old soldier drops dead of something or other and here’s Bill out four pounds. Imagine going and kicking the bucket when you owe that much in rent.
So here’s me, making my way as honestly as I could and there’s Bill, trying to run an honest racket and then I thinks to myself, I think ‘why not reclaim the arrears?’
We got the coffin from the parish - it was the least they could do for an old war hero or... whatever he was... and we left him lying in the room.
We snuck in, opened up the coffin, dumped the body under the bed and filled it up with bark. They took the coffin away and then we took the body and sold it to the first anar- anap- anapon- cuttin’ doctor we came across! Doubled our money right there.
MICHAEL PARK: Therein lies the rub. Under scots law, selling a body to an anatomist wasn’t illegal. The body didn’t belong to anyone and therefore it wasn’t stealing. It was digging up a grave that was illegal.
So there were Burke and Hare, ten pounds richer and - legally speaking - free and clear.
But the attendant had told them they’d happily take any other bodies they were able to provide. There was a shortage after all.
Neither man fancied digging up corpses in the dead of night and there didn’t seem like much chance that Hare’s lodgers would keep dying on the regular. So what were two enterprising young men to do? They stood to make a fortune if they could keep up a decent supply of fresh cadavers for the anatomist and there was only one sure-fire way to keep up a supply of fresh meat.
BURKE: If you want someone done properly, you have to kill them yourself.
MICHAEL PARK: Burke met Mary Paterson - the woman whose body they’d just sold - and her friend in the Canongate and got them royally pished. He took them back to his brother’s for breakfast and kept plying them with booze. Mary fell asleep, face down on the table, and her pal left after Burke’s wife burst in and accused them of being - to use a well-worn phrase - at it.
BURKE: She probably stopped us getting two done but she’s a jealous woman so she is, my good lady.
MICHAEL PARK: Burke and Hare didn’t care who you were, as long as nobody would miss you.
But this was the first time anyone had questioned where the pair got their bodies. One of Doctor Knox’s assistants thought he recognised her, but couldn’t put his finger on where from. Knox didn’t care - the corpse was brilliant and he kept it suspended in whisky for three months before dissecting it.
Did he drink the whisky afterwards? No, but this is a Halloween story so let’s say that he did.
Burke and Hare went on to murder seven more people and sell them to Doctor Knox before they set their sights on eighteen year old James Wilson. He was disabled - physically and intellectually and the two ‘resurrectionists’ saw him as an easy target.
BURKE: Yer arse - Daft Jamie was strong as an ox. He wouldn’t take a drink either so it took ages to get him pinned down.
MICHAEL PARK: The young man was a familiar figure in Edinburgh. He lived on the streets, he begged, he would chat to you when you walked by.
People knew Daft Jamie.
So when Jamie turned up at Doctor Knox’s school, his assistants began to ask questions. Knox batted them away. This couldn’t possibly be someone they knew, don’t be so stupid.
When Jamie was reported missing the Doctor moved the body to the top of the dissection queue but not before he removed the boy’s head and feet.
Things were unravelling for Burke and Hare and they were frequently coming to blows in drink-fuelled arguments over money and morality.
And so, it is 31st October 1828. Halloween.
William Burke is lying over the chest of a woman named Margaret Docherty, the life is draining out of her while William Hare covers her nose and mouth. Blood is running from somewhere, from someone as she fights to hold on to the last of her life. Every panting breath from Hare flecks spit across her face.
And then she’s gone.
They hide the body in some straw at the end of the bed and get on with their day.
BURKE: They couldn’t leave it alone, the other lodgers. The Grays or something I think they were called. Kept asking questions when I wouldn’t let the wife get something from her room.
MICHAEL PARK: The Grays had been paid off to stay somewhere else the night of the murder and - for some reason - Burke and Hare left them alone for a bit when they returned the next day.
BURKE: Wasn’t the best idea we ever had, I’ll give you that.
MICHAEL PARK: Ann Gray ran to the police, despite being offered £10 a week to keep the crime quiet and become an accomplice. Burke and Hare ran to Knox with the body - it was the best way to get rid of it after all.
It didn’t help. The murderers and their wives couldn’t keep their stories straight and the police found blood-stained clothes under the bed. The police took Mr Gray to Knox’s medical school to identify the body they had found there.
It was Margaret Docherty.
They were all arrested and when interviewed their answers were all over the map. Witnesses, like Mary Paterson’s friend, began coming forward and details of more murders were revealed.
The Lord Advocate gave William Hare the option to roll over on his partner, leading to Burke and his wife Helen McDougal being prosecuted, found guilty and sentenced to hang. Well, Burke was.
Hare was allowed to walk scot free. McDougal ended up being let off too. Doctor Knox was spared prosecution since Burke absolved him of blame in a written statement.
BURKE: "Burke declares that docter Knox Never incoureged him Nither taught or incoregd him to murder any person Neither any of his assistents that worthy gentleman Mr. Fergeson was the only man that ever mentioned any thing about the bodies He inquired where we got that young woman Paterson
- Sined William Burke prisoner"
MICHAEL PARK: It is 28th January 1829. It’s cold. Really cold. But there are thousands of people on the street as a man is led up a little flight of wooden steps to the gallows.
Burke drops to his knees in prayer, ignoring the braying of the crowd, before the noose is placed around his neck. The hangman pulls the black cap over the murderer’s face as another shout goes up from the crowd.
‘Hare Hare where is Hare?’
In a week Hare will have disappeared in England, never to be heard from again.
William Burke has no such luck. He is dead within seconds.
His body is taken away to be dissected by Doctor Monro, the shabby anatomist.
During the procedure, the doctor will dip his quill pen into Burke's blood and write, "This is written with the blood of William Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh. This blood was taken from his head."
CREDITS
You’ve been listening to Scotland. It was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
Mitch Bain makes the music for every episode of Scotland and you can check out more of his great stuff, including his blinds sales work, by searching out Mitch Bain Music on Facebook.
William Burke was portrayed by Chris Moriarty.
You can find out more about the show on our website, thisisscotland.co and on twitter, facebook and instagram by searching Scotland - Scottish History Podcast.
Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.