Burke and Hare (5 page)

When his employment on the Union Canal had ended, Hare worked as a labourer and met a man named Logue who ran a cheap lodging house at the bottom of Tanner’s Close, one of the squalid alleys off the West Port near its junction with the Grassmarket. These alleys led between the walls of a dense conglomeration of slum tenements northward to King’s Stables, below the castle mound. To the customary filth and dankness of these slum passages was added the distinction, in this case, of a permanent stench of animal putrefaction from tanneries at the back of the ‘lands’, which gave the close its name. Logue’s tenement had eight beds, and he charged threepence a night. This did not limit his customers to eight at a time, however. Sometimes they slept three to a bed.

Hare became one of Logue’s lodgers and evidently took a fancy to his common-law wife, Margaret Laird. An Irish Catholic like himself, she had worked on the canal, too, digging in a navvy’s jacket alongside the men, and was a hard-featured and debauched virago. She was nicknamed, for some reason that escapes me, ‘Lucky’, and she had a young child. No doubt it was Hare’s friendship with her that got him thrown out of the house by Logue, but in 1826 Logue died and Hare, having heard the news, returned to Tanner’s Close to pursue his interest in the widow. She, it is said, was already being comforted by a young lodger, but Hare seems to have insinuated himself not only into her bed but also into possession of the house. By some date in 1827, Hare had elevated himself to the status of landlord, and was relieved of the need for regular employment, although he appears to have worked intermittently as a labourer or street vendor. He spent much of his time drinking and fighting in public with ‘Lucky’, who was ‘often brutally intoxicated and seldom without a pair of black eyes’.
¹⁰

Hare’s estate consisted of three rooms on one floor of a building of random stone walls with some waste ground behind it. The two larger rooms were equipped with the eight beds between them. Anyone passing by in Tanner’s Close could see through the windows into both of these rooms, but the third room was a smaller closet at the back, with a window looking only onto a wall and a shed or stall which appears to have served as a stable and a pig-sty. Hare had acquired a horse and cart, and he occasionally ventured out with them hawking fish and scrap.

To this insalubrious doss-house came William Burke, a fellow-Irishman from Ulster, born near Strabane in County Tyrone in 1792, the son of a labourer, Niel Burke. Burke’s published confession in the Edinburgh
Evening Courant
gave his birthplace as ‘Orrey, Co Tyrone’, and the
Dictionary of National Biography
and most subsequent writers gave it as Orrery. But there is no such place as either Orrey or Orrery, and, as Owen Dudley Edwards has pointed out, the name is almost certainly an erroneous transcription of Urney, three miles south-west of Strabane. (By a curious coincidence, one of the ruling elders of the parish of Urney was a man named Knox.) William Burke had also come to Scotland in 1818 to work on the Union Canal, leaving his wife, Margaret, and two children in Ireland. His wife refused to join him in Scotland, and he never saw her or his children again. The Union Canal took four years to construct, and for some years afterwards, Burke worked as an itinerant farm labourer and a pedlar of old clothes around Peebles and Leith. At Leith, Burke had learned from his landlord or a fellow-lodger how to mend shoes.

While still working as a navvy, he had met an illiterate woman known as Helen or ‘Nelly’ Dougal or McDougal. She was a native Scot, born at Redding, near Falkirk, where Burke had lived while employed on the canal, but the surname was only that of the man she was living with at the time, by whom she had two children. She may have worked as a prostitute among the canal navvies. She absconded with Burke, and by 1827 the pair were in Edinburgh, repairing old boots and shoes and hawking them among the city’s poor. They were lodging with an Irishman, Mickey Culzean, proprietor of an establishment whimsically known as ‘The Beggar’s Hotel’ in Portsburgh.

In November of that year Burke and Nelly had met Maggie Laird in the street and gone for a drink with her. It appears that Burke was already acquainted with Laird. When he mentioned that he was intending to move away and seek work as a cobbler, Maggie said that there was a room in Hare’s house which might suit him. He and Nelly could live there and carry on his trade in Edinburgh. This was the first time the two men met, but they quickly became firm friends. It was also the first time the two women had met, but no love was lost between them.

Burke’s elder brother Constantine was also living in Edinburgh with his wife Elizabeth (née Graham) and their children, and was employed as a street-cleaner by the city police. There is no mention anywhere, in the records of the subsequent events surrounding Burke and Hare, of either Maggie Laird’s or Nelly McDougal’s children. The
Evening Courant
alleged later that Margaret Laird had murdered the first child she had with Hare, but there is no evidence to support this or any speculation about the fate of McDougal’s two children by previous consorts.

William Burke was, to all outward appearances, a more pleasant and sociable character than his new friend Hare. His parents were respectable Catholics, and he had been given at least a basic education. When he was nineteen, he had followed Constantine into the army, and served for seven years as a batman in the Donegal Militia. He was married to Margaret Coleman at Ballina, County Mayo, while a serving soldier. John Wilson described him as he appeared at the age of thirty-six in his prison cell:

Nevertheless, Professor Wilson found him ‘impenitent as a snake, remorseless as a tiger’. Wilson noted Burke’s ‘hard, cruel eyes’ and his voice, ‘rather soft and calm, but steeped in hypocrisy and deceit; his collected and guarded demeanour, full of danger and guile – all, all betrayed, as he lay in his shackles, the cool, calculating, callous, and unrelenting villain’.
¹²
But this, of course, was a case of being wise after the event.

James Maclean, a fellow-Irishman living nearby in the West Port, told Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, the antiquary and friend of Sir Walter Scott, that Burke was a peaceable man and steady at his work when sober, and ‘even when drunk, rather jocose and prone to banter, but by no means riotous or quarrelsome, without considerable provocation’. But Helen McDougal was of ‘dull morose disposition’, and the two ‘led a most unhappy life, everlastingly quarrelling, and on these occasions she was often severely beaten by him’.
¹³
Nevertheless, the two were genuinely attached to each other. When Burke was exhorted by a local priest to return to his wife in Ireland, he refused and was excommunicated.

The various portrait sketches purporting to be of Burke, made by press artists in court or in gaol, have only two things in common – the round face and the penetrating eyes. Some drawings show him with long sideburns, others without. One gives him more of a pug-nose than the rest. Another represents him as balding at the temples, while others give him a good head of hair. One shows him wearing a cravat in the dock, but others give him only a thin scarf or neckerchief.

Burke and Nelly had scarcely settled into their new accommodation, in November 1827, before another of Hare’s lodgers, an old soldier named Donald, died, apparently of dropsy. For Hare, this was a disaster, for the old man had owed him £4 in rent, and his quarterly army pension, due shortly, would have covered the debt. Preparations were made for the old man’s burial by the parish, and a day or two after his death, the body was placed in a coffin ready for the hired mourners known in Scotland as ‘saulies’.

In the meantime, however, Hare (according to Burke) had hatched a plan for recovering his bad debt, and as he needed help in carrying it out, he approached Burke. The slums fringing High Street and Canongate were well-known resorts of the ‘resurrectionists’, and it was impossible to be part of the low life of Edinburgh at that time and not know that fresh corpses could be sold as anatomical subjects. As there were no friends or relatives to claim Donald’s body, why not sell it to the doctors? If Burke would help him, he could have a share of the proceeds.

According to one of Burke’s confessions, Hare ‘started the coffin lid with a chisel’. In the other confession, Burke said that Hare ‘unscrewed the nails’. Either way, the two men lifted out the corpse and hid it in one of the beds, then filled the coffin with tanner’s bark collected from the yard at the back and refixed the lid. The coffin was then taken away at the expense of the parish and with brief solemnity interred in a paupers’ grave in the kirkyard of St Cuthbert’s, known as the West Kirk, a quarter of a mile away.

The Wester Portsburgh district where Burke and Hare lived was close to several hospitals and burial grounds, well guarded at night against body-snatchers, and beyond the Infirmary, in the High School Yards between Cowgate and Roxburgh Terrace, was Surgeons’ Square, where university and extramural anatomy lecturers had their premises. Either Burke or Hare had heard of Professor Monro, third of a famous dynasty which had held the university chair of anatomy since 1720. Burke and Hare walked the half-mile from Tanner’s Close to the College yard, where they encountered a young man whom they asked to direct them to Dr Monro, or any of his men. The man, probably a medical student, enquired what they wanted Dr Monro for, and when they nervously confided in him that they had a body to dispose of, the young man directed them to the premises of Dr Robert Knox, at 10 Surgeons’ Square. Knox’s biographer, Henry Lonsdale, gives the date of this event as the evening of 29 November, but it cannot have been the day on which Donald died as given by William Roughead in his book on the trial. Burke himself said it was ‘about Christmas, 1827’, but he added that it was ‘a day or two after the pensioner’s death’ when Hare suggested selling the body to the doctors.

Burke and Hare, at any rate, were met by three students, subsequently known to them as Fergusson, Miller and Jones. The two novice dealers were hesitant to come to the point, but eventually admitted that they had a body for sale, and were told to bring it when it was dark. They were not asked whose body it was nor how they had obtained it. They went back to Tanner’s Close, stuffed the corpse into a sack, and returned to Surgeons’ Square later that night. They were greeted by the same three students, who told them to bring the body upstairs to the lecture room. Here, they took the body from the sack and laid it on the dissecting table. It was still dressed in the shirt in which Donald should have been buried. The students told Burke and Hare to take away the shirt, which they did. Dr Knox’s assistants, used to receiving corpses from body-snatchers, would have been well versed in the law regarding clothes and other property. A corpse dug up from a churchyard was deemed to belong to no one. But clothing – even a shroud – was property, and its theft was punishable as a felony under Georgian criminal law. So experienced body-snatchers and anatomists alike took good care not to be caught with any item in their possession which could make them liable to prosecution for the greater offence. Dead bodies were always sold naked. As Burke and Hare were removing Donald’s shirt, Dr Knox himself entered the room, looked at the naked corpse and suggested a price of £7 10 shillings. This being readily agreed by Burke and Hare, Knox told Jones to settle with them. As they saw Burke and Hare out, one of the students said ‘
they would be glad to see them again when they had any other body to dispose of
’.
¹⁴
Hare took £4 5 shillings of the proceeds, and gave Burke £3 5 shillings.

Before we proceed further with events, we should ask ourselves if the story of the old pensioner Donald is entirely true. It is based solely on the subsequent confessions of Burke. If we do not believe it, it opens up the possibility, among other things, that Burke and Hare murdered more than the sixteen victims usually accepted as their total tally. But it is not only Burke’s statements that we need to be wary of. Dr Knox’s biographer, Henry Lonsdale, stated that Burke and Hare ‘furnished thirteen victims in all to Knox’s rooms during their eleven months’ operations’.
¹⁵
Owen Dudley Edwards refers repeatedly to Burke ‘murdering seventeen people’. But to the best of our knowledge, Burke and Hare between them murdered sixteen people, one of whom Burke was not involved with. Burke himself committed or took part in fifteen murders.

The first (and perhaps seemingly obvious) question – though no one seems to have asked it before – is, how had Donald managed to accumulate a debt of £4 in rent? If Hare was charging him three pence a night for his bed, £4 would represent almost a year’s rent. Are we to take it that the evil Hare, out of the goodness of his heart, had been letting the matter slide, when Donald received his pension quarterly? Secondly, if Donald had really owed Hare £4, it appears uncharacteristically generous of Hare to take only five shillings profit and allow Burke nearly half the proceeds. Perhaps there was never any debt at all. Did Hare invent the debt in order to make his idea of selling the body appear reasonable to Burke, whom he needed as an accomplice? Or did they devise the story of the debt together in order to make the idea of selling the body seem somehow less callous afterwards? Or, worse still, did they really murder Donald, along with the rest, and if so, how many others, of whom we know nothing, might they have killed?