by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
The Borough Gang were the leading Regency grave robbers because they aimed to control the market in all corpses. They saw themselves as professionals and looked down on amateurs. The job involved more than stealing from graveyards. It meant controlling demand and supply.
In November 1816, a group of six resurrectionists attacked the home of a Mr Millard. Millard was the beadle (overseer) to the dissecting room at Guy’s Hospital. They believed – correctly – that Millard was responsible for hiring private contractors to steal bodies in order to bring down the price. A mob opposed to the six men gathered around the house and the Morning Chronicle announced that it was only the intervention of Mr Milliard that stopped these people attacking the resurrectionists. This seems unlikely. The men intimidating Millard, and by implication the whole staff at Guy’s, were hardened criminals who could have handled the situation easily. They merely threatened the beadle with unspecified punishments if he did not stop organising competition. They asked for six guineas, not four, per body and gave Millard a fortnight to think about it. A spinner would be earning £1 per week and a weaver 12s at this time. Body snatching was a lucrative trade that was worth defending.
William Millard claimed complete ignorance of the gang, but he was lying. Millard was a major supplier of bodies to Sir Astley Cooper, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, and the gang knew it. The gang also had links with Sir Astley, and the attack on Millard was a proxy warning to a man too eminent for them to threaten directly.
The problem for the resurrectionists was that the London teaching hospitals were the only market for their goods; they partially got around the problem by sending bodies to the provinces (normally packed onto weekend coaches or ships), but it did not solve the problem of the hospitals trying to dictate the price.
Benjamin Crouch was a key member of the Borough Gang by 1811-12, as he is mentioned frequently in Joseph Naples’s famous account of their work, The Diary of a Resurrectionist. By 1816 he was being described as the captain of the gang. He was formerly a porter at Guy’s and would have known Millard well. Ben was described as short, ugly, but more often sober than the rest of the gang, and their undoubted leader. He had a previous criminal record. In December 1814, a Ben Crouch was convicted of passing stolen bank notes. His address in Kent Road was one that he was known to live at, according to Millard’s wife Ann, who later wrote a pamphlet explaining how her husband was found in a graveyard in the middle of the night, and while doing so gave out Crouch’s home address.
Earlier, in January 1810, a Benjamin Crouch was accused of assaulting a guest at the wedding of a local man to a ‘Daughter of Israel’, having gatecrashed the celebrations at the ‘London Hospital’ public house. This was close to, and named after, the nearby hospital of the same name. It seems likely that Crouch was in the area doing some sort of business related to it – perhaps working there. There is no motive given for the attack, but throughout his career, Crouch was indignant about the role of Jews taking ‘his’ trade and this might explain the assault. This kind of intimidation was certainly part of Crouch’s way of working.
Crouch had been to the Waterloo battlefield in 1816 with another resurrectionist, Jack Harnett. They had been collecting teeth from the corpses of those who had fallen, as well as the epaulettes from uniforms to sell as souvenirs. Later in the year Crouch was indicted for an attack on St Thomas’s Hospital. He pointed out that teeth were just as profitable as corpses and that, if push came to shove, he would concentrate on that. Indeed it seems that Crouch was to move away from body snatching and spent more time cutting the jaws out of corpses in the years after 1816. Ben went on to buy a hotel in Margate, which failed because his reputation preceded him – hospitality and grave robbery not being complementary ideas in the minds of most hotel guests.6
The Borough Gang continued their intimidation in 1816. In November four resurrection men entered St Thomas’s Hospital during a dissection. It may be that they had been organising a kind of strike to push the price of bodies up to six guineas and the surgeons had responded by encouraging others to enter the profession. As with other workers, trade unionism was illegal for employees in 1816. The Chester Courant, killing two birds with a ghastly pun and a reactionary attitude, announced that the ‘spirit of combination’ had even spread to the grave robbers. The gang mutilated the corpses that were being dissected; they had a good attempt at turning the young surgeons into future business too.
The leader of the mob was Israel ‘Easy’ Chapman, a noted resurrectionist, according to the papers, although perhaps his Jewish background was the reason for his top billing. When they were finally apprehended they complained that they were badly treated by the surgeons, who could not survive without them. The judge asked them to find bail; the paper, in an aside, noted that ‘the sums that these men make are immense’. It seems clear that the teaching hospital paid their bail and negotiations were restarted.
Israel Chapman was born in 1794, in Chelsea, and died in the Jewish poor house in Australia on 4 July 1868. Little can be worked out from his early life – the lack of compulsory state records and his Jewish background put him outside the normal system. However, he had a young brother, Noel, born 1809, and both boys were coach drivers – a job that could put you in contact with body snatchers.
Israel Chapman was well known to the legal establishment. In the mid 1810s he was living first in Haymarket, and later at Vine Street, Covent Garden. The Morning Post of 27 August 1816 reported that the ‘well known character Israel Chapman’ had been indicted at Hatton Garden magistrates’ court for stealing a watch. In April of the same year, it was reported by the papers that the ‘Jew resurrection man’ was accused of carrying off a wounded man from a site of attempted murder in Newton’s Court. It is clear that Chapman had not kidnapped the wounded man to administer first aid.
Chapman was well known to the magistrate John Nares, who worked at both Bow Street and Covent Garden. Chapman once told him that, should Nares die first, he would be after his dead body. Nares died on 16 December 1816, and the Bow Street Patrol guarded his body for three weeks. There was no sign of Israel – he was at war with the London anatomy hospitals at the time.
In December 1817, Israel’s life changed forever. Chapman and his partner George Scott were accused of the highway robbery of a half sovereign in gold and four shillings in silver. The victim was James Palmer. Palmer was from Southall, had been drinking in the Seven Stars public house in Star Court, Whitechapel, and had been violently beaten and robbed by a gang, of whom only Scott and Chapman were captured by the watchmen.
Scott – a ‘tall athletic type’, probably in contradistinction to the ‘Jew Chapman’, was also convicted of a similar crime committed the same day – waiting around in public houses for people to leave drunk, although Chapman’s victim claimed to have only had two pints of porter and some tea. This was the turning point of Chapman’s life in England; this attack on the property of a gentleman was much more serious than taking the dead bodies (and dignity) of the poor.
Scott and Chapman were given the death penalty in January 1818, later commuted to transportation.
Scott and Chapman were given the death penalty in January 1818, later commuted to transportation. Chapman arrived in New South Wales on 14 September 1818. His life improved almost immediately – he became a poacher-turned-gamekeeper in a very profound way. He became a police officer and a local businessman, clearly using skills learned on the other side of the law in Britain.1
Joseph Naples was another member of the gang who kept a diary of his activities in 1811-12; by 1816, he was the bookkeeper for the group. Naples was born in Deptford in about 1773 and was a sailor during the Napoleonic Wars. He worked both as a gravedigger at Spa Fields in Clerkenwell, and a servant at the dissecting rooms of St Thomas’s, so he had the perfect CV for a body snatcher. From around 1802, Naples was an important ally of Sir Astley Cooper as a valuable source of cadavers. It is clear that Cooper used his influence to keep many of the Borough
Gang members out of prison and paid their bail and sureties.
Naples was caught many times by the authorities. In May 1802, when he was a gravedigger at St James in Clerkenwell, he received two years in the Coldbath Fields House of Correction for stealing bodies to order from the Spa Fields burial ground. His mistake was to pilfer other property from the coffins. He upset people as well. A local paper reported:
George Windsor and Edward King were next called. They swore that, having heard of the last mentioned circumstances, and that the bodies were lying in the vault under Clerkenwell Church, they went there, when the former recognised the body of the woman to be that of his wife, and the latter that of the child to be his son, both which had been buried by them a short time before. They were much agitated during the delivery of their testimony.
The authorities put him to work picking oakum by unravelling old rope; in May of the same year the Morning Post reported that he and an accomplice had made a new rope and scaled the walls and escaped. By December 1804 he was back in prison, pleading clemency for his good character and the need to support his two children and his wife Jane.
In September 1813 he was apprehended at the St Pancras graveyard, and in April 1819, he and an accomplice (George Marden) were caught stealing bodies from Sutton graveyard. A few months later the same two were accused of stealing the recently interred body of Ann Johnson from a grave in Guildford, and hiding it under a dunghill.
Joseph seemed to be living in Reigate at the time and was clearly operating in Surrey rather than London. Joseph seemed to prefer burial places that were recently opened. In the case of Sutton, the Windsor and Eton Express reported that only twenty people had been interred there, and sixteen had been stolen. Joseph went back to work in the local hospitals when his trade was abolished by the 1832 Anatomy Act. A man of that name died in Southwark in 1843.
The final leading resurrectionist of the Regency period was Joseph Crouch, a relative of Benjamin, but the details are sketchy. Joseph Crouch was fortunate in his timing when he was eventually brought to justice. His career was over anyway; the new Anatomy Act of 1832 was to provide the anatomy schools with a regular supply of bodies and body snatching as an organised, lucrative trade was about to come to an end. He and his accomplice David Baker were found guilty of stealing the shroud from one of the bodies that they had taken from St John’s Horsleydown in Southwark. They were intercepted with two bodies still lying on the ground, one without a shroud, on 8 April 1832. Crouch’s last words before arrest were: ‘Don’t hurt me. I will go with you quietly; this way I have got my living for the last twenty years.’
There is no reason to doubt the claim. Joseph had body snatching in the family, and Joseph himself had made headlines on at least three occasions. In January 1832 he was accused by a William Dunelly of stealing his rope and ladders. Dunelly had been away for the weekend and found his equipment missing when he returned. Crouch had a solid defence. Dunnelly was, like him, a body snatcher. It was by no means a coincidence that Dunelly’s lodging had a view of St George’s burial grounds in Southwark. They were in a gang of six – a plausible number. Crouch explained that it took two to carefully remove the body, and four to take it away to a teaching hospital. The rope and ladders were owned in common, according to the defendant. Crouch was dismissive. Dunnelly was such a bad character that ‘ne’er a decent body snatcher would ‘sociate with him’.2
Joseph appears in the newspapers in 1828, but before that had what we must presume to be a decade of not getting caught. There are a few possible reasons for this; it seems that he was a professional, full-time body snatcher rather than an occasional one, as his own admission proves. He was a known associate of Patrick Murphy, who took over the Borough Gang when Ben Crouch retired to run his hotel in Margate. This was well-organised criminality.
It was also very easy to evade arrest. The graveyard watch was designed to deter rather than to catch; with a gang of six it would take only two to remove the body, the rest could scarper. Gravediggers and church deacons were poor and could be bribed. At the worst, a surgeon at the anatomical hospital could give them bail. Unless property was damaged or stolen, they were safe from serious punishment.
In 1828, Joseph Crouch was involved in an abortive attempt at raiding the mortuary of St Mary’s church workhouse in Newington. The gang had forced an entrance and removed two male and four female bodies. An Irishman called Fitzgerald seems to have been sub-contracted to move the bodies to St Bartholomew’s and Guy’s in his pea green cart. He claimed to have no idea about the possible contents of the six unwieldy sacks. Even his admission that he had dropped the two sacks off at the famous anatomical hospital had not given him any clues. By the time the authorities had tracked down the bodies they had been dissected to the point of being unrecognisable. The police tried to use Crouch’s accomplice, Kent, to point the finger at Crouch, which he duly did. The judge was not impressed by the police admission that Kent was certainly drunk. The judge asked them to find bail. As usual, this was not a problem.
Body snatching was a treacherous world, with little loyalty. According to the Morning Chronicle (February 1820), Joseph Crouch appeared as a witness for the prosecution. Crouch explained that he had seen Patrick Murphy, Michael Wood and a man named Wild, remove three bodies from the St Clement Danes burial ground near Portugal Street. Crouch shows his high level of knowledge:
Joseph Crouch stated, that on Monday morning last, about two o’clock, he saw all the prisoners enter the burying-ground in Portugal street, Lincoln’s-inn-fields, by a wicket gate, and afterwards he watched them, having no doubt what their object was, when he saw a large sack thrown over the wall, which he had no doubt contained two bodies, and they brought out a small sack through the wicker gate, which he had no doubt contained one body. Both the sacks were put into a hackney coach, which was waiting and drove away by the prisoner Wood, whom he knew to be a hackney coachman: the prisoners Wild and Murphy, rode in the coach with the sacks.
He followed the coach to St. Thomas’s Hospital, in the Borough, where the sacks were taken in. On the following day he gave information to the parish officers of St. Clement Danes, of what he had seen, when an examination of the burying ground took place; it was ascertained that the bodies of three old people, which had been interred on the Sunday, had been stolen, one of them 82 years of age, and the youngest was 72: they were two women and a man. Only the bodies were taken, the coffins and shrouds remain. A number of other bodies it was ascertained had been stolen, particularly in what was called the poor vault.
Crouch had been a body snatcher ‘since being a child’. He was presenting this evidence due to motives of revenge. This all sounds very plausible – perhaps the gang had fallen out over the distribution of money, or Crouch had been cut out of a deal. It could have been that Murphy supplanting his relative as the leader of Borough Gang was the problem.
They were told by the judge to find bail.
Whatever the situation, it is clear that Crouch, a major criminal (he would need to be very brave to take on Patrick Murphy), was associated with the leading resurrection gang, and was able to act with near impunity in Regency England.
Chapter 22
Being Irish
Ireland was part of the United Kingdom during the Regency, but the Irish were treated like potential traitors. Mostly Roman Catholic, they were regarded as rootless foreigners whose real loyalties lay elsewhere. In the 1790s there had been revolts against British rule, and Irish movements had links with France that were seen as trouble at best and treason at worst.
The fact that they were enthusiastic about coming to England and Scotland spoke volumes for the dismal quality of their life in Ireland. Those Irish who left their miserable, landlord-infested life in Ireland – a country essentially under military occupation – would migrate to London, or new slums in Liverpool, Manchester or Glasgow, hoping for the best, but rarely experiencing it.
Before permanent settlement there was seasonal migration. Irish fa
milies went to England every summer to help to bring in the harvest – up to 100,000 people per year by the 1820s. They were often invited by landowners for whom an oversupply of unskilled labour in summer was a positive advantage when negotiating pay rates with the native labourers. Their presence was resented – they undercut the English labourer, for which at least the landlords were grateful, although it did increase their poor rate contributions that prevented the underemployed English from starving. There was no Poor Law in Ireland similar to that of England, which further encouraged migration in the summer. Calculations were made in the hostile press about how much money was lost to England by paying wages to the Irish. There seemed to have been an element of having it both ways in regard to Irish migration – accepting the advantages but resenting the extra call on resources.
The prejudice towards the Irish could be seen in the newspapers. Many of the lower classes lived in a similar way as them but did not suffer the same prejudice. The Irish poor were studied hard by concerned Georgians, but mostly in an effort to condemn. Newspaper reports of the period suggest that they were prone to violence; that they were under the control of Catholic priests and that by definition, their loyalty to the protestant state was in doubt. When violence happened and Irish immigrants died, the amount of coverage could be insultingly small. This was the complete article on 25 June 1815 in the Leicester Chronicle, buried on an inside page:
An alarming riot took place on Monday afternoon, among a party of the lower orders of Irish in St Giles, in which several have been killed and wounded.
When violence was sectarian, the newspapers were particularly scathing, although they were exactly the same divisions that had been deliberately stirred up in Ireland to allow the protestant minority to rule.