The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  Before discharging their driver, May and Bishop dashed to Richard Grainger’s private anatomical school in nearby Webb Street and tried to make a sale of the Thing—telling the porter there that it was “a rare fresh Subject”—but without success. Then they rejoined Williams, May paid the driver his ten shillings, and the three went to a nearby pub before hiring another coach to take them back to the Fortune of War for more drink.

  Thomas Wigley, a porter at the Cross Keys Inn in Cheapside, was a regular drinker at the Fortune of War. He watched as Bishop entered the pub at about half past seven, followed a short while later by May. Wigley had been at the pub since about half past six, sitting in a corner of the taproom drinking beer. He knew both Bishop and May by sight, but not to speak to. Bishop came and sat down next to Wigley, and May sat opposite Bishop—both with a glass of “rum-hot.”6 Wigley heard Bishop say to May, “What do you think of our new one? Didn’t he go up to him well? I told you he was a stanch one—don’t you think he’s a stanch one now? Do you stick by me and I will stick to you. I know the other one is all right, he’s nothing but a good one.”*

  About an hour later, Williams came into the pub. As he entered, Bishop said to May, “There he is. I knew he would come. I knew he was a game one,” to which May replied, “I don’t know what you mean.” Bishop said, “That’s all right then.”7 Bishop, who appeared to Wigley to be more drunk than either May or Williams, then said, “You know what I mean,” and May replied, “I am going home.” Bishop said, “We are all going the same road,” to which May said, “I shall stop a bit,” and picked up a newspaper and began to read as Bishop and Williams walked out. It’s likely that Bishop and Williams did not leave the Fortune of War at this point but simply left the taproom of the pub, which appears to have been a separate area, since May did share part of the journey home with Bishop and Williams.

  Later in the evening, shortly before nine o’clock, May went up to the bar of the Fortune of War, poured some water over something he was holding in a handkerchief, and began rubbing it. Henry Lock, the barman, took a look and saw that May was cleaning blood and flesh from a set of human teeth. Lock remarked to May that they looked like the teeth of a young person and would no doubt be worth something, and May boasted that he expected to get two pounds for the set.

  Bishop, May, and Williams left the Fortune of War together sometime after nine, stopping off for another drink in Golden Lane, May treating the coachman to a drink too. Farther east, in Old Street, May got out of the coach and said he was going home—home was south of the river—handing over a loan of three shillings to Bishop and three to Williams. The men agreed to meet up the next morning at Guy’s Hospital and parted ways. Bishop and Williams took the coach on to the corner of Union Street and Kingsland Road in Bethnal Green, paid the driver, and walked the rest of the way home—not a great distance, but it is possible Bishop and Williams did not want their address to be known to the coachman, who may well have deduced how they made their living. There’s another, more mundane explanation: they may have been attempting to save a few pennies; while the fare from Old Bailey to Kingsland Road was two shillings, to proceed any farther east would have pushed it up to three.8

  James May, meanwhile, was meeting up with one of several sweethearts, Mary Ann Hall, joining her outside the Alfred’s Head pub—a large inn that faced the Elephant and Castle—at around half past eleven, before going back to the lodgings they shared nearby.

  * * *

  At around nine o’clock the next morning, James May entered the shop of dentist Thomas Mills in Bridge House Place, not far from May’s rooming house. He showed Mills a set of twelve teeth that still had portions of gum attached; a small piece of jawbone clung to the lower set. Mills pointed out that one of the front teeth had a chip in it and did not look as though it belonged with the others, but May swore that all the teeth had been taken from the same mouth and that, furthermore, the body had never been buried. Mills thought they looked like a woman’s teeth but May replied, “The fact is, they belonged to a lad about fourteen or fifteen years of age. Upon my soul to God, they all belonged to one head not long since.” May said he was looking to receive a guinea, but Mills—though he considered them a fine and fresh set—would pay only twelve shillings.

  At around the same hour, Bishop and Williams were at the Fortune of War, hiring Michael Shields, over pints of beer, to carry a heavy load between various hospitals for a fee of half a crown. Shields had known Bishop for eight or nine months; he did not know Williams. Bishop asked Shields to get hold of a hamper, but Shields refused, so Bishop went across the street himself to take a hamper from just inside the gates of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. This was not an act of theft; one of several matters that were to embarrass the medical profession during the hearings was the fact that hospitals would “leave” hampers lying around their precincts where resurrection men could easily pick them up in order to deliver their produce.

  Bishop, Williams, and Shields set off for Guy’s Hospital—crossing the brand-new London Bridge—where they met May, as arranged. Williams and Shields went to a pub while Bishop and May again unsuccessfully tried to persuade the dissecting-room porters at Guy’s and then at Grainger’s school to buy the boy. Bishop and May joined Williams and Shields for more drink (May having stopped a passerby and asked, politely, for money for drink, whereupon the stranger handed him six pennies from his purse); then the pair set off to try to strike a bargain at King’s College, crossing the Thames by ferry to the imposing new building at the eastern end of Somerset House in the Strand—so new a bricklayer was still at work as they rang the bell of dissecting-room porter William Hill shortly before noon. Hill knew Bishop and May well; they had been among his most prolific suppliers in one of his earlier jobs, at George Dermott’s private anatomy school in the West End. They asked Hill whether King’s professors and students needed a body. Hill replied, “Not particularly,” but asked, “What have you got?” and, on hearing the reply, went to fetch anatomist Richard Partridge to double-check on the medical school’s supply. Hill told Bishop and May that there was a good fire blazing in the grate downstairs, why didn’t they come down and warm themselves? Richard Partridge entered the room where Bishop and May were warming up and said he didn’t need a Thing; but then he took Hill aside and told him to offer nine guineas for the body, which he did. May, visibly drunk, shouted at Hill, “I’ll be damned if it should go under ten guineas!” But when May stepped outside to urinate, Bishop murmured to Hill that he would be able to persuade May to accept nine guineas. “He is tipsy,” explained Bishop. “I’ll bring it in for nine.” Then Bishop and May left by cab for the pub near London Bridge where Williams and Shields were still drinking, and the four men had lunches of steaks and beer.

  There was a kind of desperation about Bishop’s attempts to sell the corpse—this relentless traipsing from school to school and from one side of the river to another as the produce became less and less desirable. He was about to earn only one more guinea than Joseph Carpue had offered the day before, and from that additional guinea, deductions for fares and drink would leave him worse off than if he had delivered to Carpue as arranged. Back at Guy’s once more, the four men packed the sacked-up body into the hamper and placed it on the porter’s knot on Shields’s head. Bishop warned Shields to be careful not to stumble and fall; like the others, Shields had been drinking since nine o’clock in the morning. Williams and Shields walked together, Bishop and May following in a cab, though sometimes edging slightly ahead. They reached King’s at around a quarter past two. Shields carried the hamper into an anteroom to the anatomy theater and was greeted as an old acquaintance by William Hill, who even mentioned that it had been a while since the two men had met. May clumsily tipped the body out of the sack and onto the floor. While Shields and Williams loitered outside in the courtyard, Bishop and May asked Hill to make out to Williams that just eight guineas was being paid for the body—Bishop and May would split the remaining guinea between them, g
iving Hill half a crown as reward for his part in the deceit.

  King’s College/Somerset House seen from the river; the building, across from the industrial south bank, was accessible by boat.

  Hill noted that the body appeared to be that of a boy between fourteen and sixteen years of age, and unusually fresh; its left arm was awkwardly twisted above its head and the left hand was clenched. Bishop and May told Hill this body was “a good ’un,” and Hill agreed that it was. He asked what the child had died of, and May replied, “I neither know nor care,” and Bishop added, “It is quite indifferent what he died of, for here he is, stiff enough.”9 Pointing out a cut on the boy’s forehead, Hill was told by Bishop that the wound had just occurred as the body was tipped from the sack. Hill was not convinced, nor did he believe the body had ever been buried, despite the marks of clay on its thighs and torso, which would indicate resurrection.

  Hill revealed his suspicions about the state of the body to Richard Partridge, who came downstairs to inspect it. Some of Partridge’s pupils came down as well, having read a notice about a London youth of around fourteen who had recently gone missing from his home in Oxford Street. Alarmed by what he saw, Partridge told the resurrectionists that as he had only a fifty-pound note, they should wait at King’s while he went to get change with which to pay them. Bishop said he would take what change Partridge had and collect the rest on Monday; May said he would take the fifty-pound note and get it changed himself, at which Partridge smiled strangely and said, “Oh no,” and left the room. Twenty minutes later he returned with Police Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas and several officers from Division F, Covent Garden’s branch of the Metropolitan Police, and the four men were taken into custody, May putting up a violent struggle when one of the constables refused to allow him to speak to Bishop. It took a number of officers to restrain May, and he entered the station house on all fours, with his smock frock over his head.

  Superintendent Thomas told May that he was being charged on suspicion of “improper” possession of a Subject. May replied, “The Subject is the property of that gentleman,” pointing at Bishop. “I only came with him to get the money.” Turning to Bishop, Superintendent Thomas asked how he had come by the body, and Bishop sneered: “If you want to know how I got it, you may find it out, if you can.” He also claimed that he was simply moving it from Guy’s to King’s. When asked whose body it was, Bishop replied, “It’s mine.” Asked what his trade was, Bishop told Thomas, “I’m a bloody body snatcher.”

  * * *

  Only Michael Shields’s testimony was at odds with this narrative, especially as concerned his role in the story, but he crumbled easily each time he was pressed on various points. He told the coroner’s court, “If I was to speak my last words, I did not know what the hamper contained.… I don’t know how Bishop got his livelihood. I don’t know as he dealt in dead bodies before this.” Shields even claimed to be unaware that the Fortune of War was a house of call for resurrectionists. In fact, Shields had carried bodies for Bishop on at least one other occasion and was deeply involved in the resurrection trade. After being dismissed from his position as watchman-caretaker at Moorfields Roman Catholic chapel for stealing silverware, Shields worked partly as a porter at Covent Garden market, partly as a gravedigger at St. Giles-in-the-Fields’ churchyard, and partly as a sack or hamper carrier for resurrectionists.10 He knew very well what sort of pub the Fortune of War was.

  He told the coroner’s court that he had accidentally met Bishop in Covent Garden on the Saturday morning, and he denied being in the Fortune of War altogether. Warned by vestry clerk James Corder, “Take care—the pot-boy is present. Don’t you recollect having any egg-hot at the Fortune of War that morning?” Shields immediately admitted that the meeting in Covent Garden on the Saturday was a lie—at which a murmur of astonishment passed around the upstairs room at the Unicorn pub. Shields claimed that when they reached King’s College, he had stood outside while Bishop, May, and Williams took the hamper into the dissecting room; but Hill had already told the coroner’s court of the friendly conversation he had had with Shields. When asked if he knew anything about the death of the boy, Shields replied, “Bishop said that the body was got from the ground, and that he knew where it was got from. He smiled as he said so, saying that if he were brought before the jury, he would give them ease about it.”

  After Shields stepped down, Bishop was brought forward and, with James Corder recording every word, said: “I cannot account for the death of the deceased. I dug the body out of the grave. The reason why I decline to say the grave I took it out of is that there were two watchmen in the ground, and they intrusted me, and being men of family, I don’t want to deceive them. I don’t think I can say any more. I took it for sale to Guy’s Hospital, and as they did not want it, I left it there all night and part of the next day. And then I removed it to the King’s College. That is all I can say about it. I mean to say that this is the truth. I shall certainly keep it a secret where I got the body. I know nothing as to how it died.” The coroner was not impressed by Bishop’s explanation and warned him that a higher court was likely to interrogate him far more closely. The coroner said it was impossible for someone to be in possession of a body that was almost warm without knowing what had happened to it. Facetious in the face of pomposity, Bishop replied that it was impossible for it to have been warm—it had passed a night at Guy’s Hospital. Bishop offered to sign his statement, though in law he was not obliged to sign; by withholding his signature, he would have been able to make subtle alterations to his version of events, to counteract any new information that might come to light during the investigation. But he chose to sign; it looked more honest. He had not created a good impression in court. A series of mocking, sardonic interjections had backfired on him. When William Hill had been giving evidence, Hill had been asked by the magistrate, “Is it customary for persons in your station to receive such presents?” with regard to the tip that Bishop had promised him. Bishop had called out, “He gets many a guinea in that way!” And Bishop had laughed when Hill told the court of his worries about the body’s freshness; the body snatcher had sneered across the courtroom, “The fact is, you are not in the habit of seeing fresh Subjects and you don’t know anything about it!”

  Stallholders selling fruit and vegetables as Covent Garden’s new market building approaches completion, in 1829, sketched by artist George Scharf

  Next, it was James May’s turn to speak. He confidently explained that he wished to tell the court everything he knew—he would speak only the truth. “I live at 4 Dorset Street, Newington. I went into the country last Sunday week and returned on the following Wednesday evening. I brought home a couple of Subjects with me. I took them to Mr Grainger’s in Webb Street the same evening, and on the following morning, which was Thursday, I removed them to Mr Davis at Guy’s and after receiving the money, went away. I went to the Fortune of War in Smithfield and I stayed there, I dare say, for two or three hours. Between four and five o’clock, to the best of my recollection, I went to Nag’s Head Court, Golden Lane, and there I stopped with a female till eleven or twelve the next day, Friday. From Golden Lane I went to the Fortune of War again, and there I stopped drinking till six o’clock, or half past. Williams and Bishop both came in there. They asked me if I would stand any thing to drink, which I did. Bishop then called me out and asked me where I could get the best price for Things. I told him where I had sold two at Guy’s and he told me he had got a good Subject, and he had been offered eight guineas for it. I told him I could get more for it. He said all I could get over nine guineas I might have for myself, and I agreed to it. We went from there to the Old Bailey and we had some tea at the watering house in the Old Bailey, leaving Williams at the Fortune of War. After we had tea we called a chariot off the stand and drove to Bishop’s house. When we came there, Bishop showed me the lad in a box or trunk. I then put it into a sack and took it to the chariot myself, and took it from thence to Mr Davis at Guy’s. Mr Davis
said, ‘You know, James, I cannot take it, because I took two off you yesterday, and I have not got [student] names enough down for one, or else I would.’ I asked him if I might leave it there that night and he said, ‘Certainly.’ Bishop then desired Mr Davis not to let any person have it but himself, for it was his own Subject, which Mr Davis said he would not, and told his man James not to let any person have it besides himself. I told Mr Davis not to let it go until I came as well, for I should be money out of pocket if it went before I came. I went home that evening, where I slept, and in the morning I went to Mr Davis and had not been there many minutes before Bishop came in, and Shields with a hamper, and took it from thence to King’s College, and there I was taken into custody.” May was happy to sign his statement. There was no mention of the clothes buying and rum drinking in Field Lane and West Street. But he did own up to the selling of the teeth: “I admit all that, and what does it amount to? I did use the brad awl to extract the teeth from the boy, and that was in the regular way of business, and in doing so, I wounded my hand slightly—there is nothing very wonderful in that.”

  For his part, Thomas Williams claimed that he had gone along to King’s only to see what the new building was like—perhaps not such an unreasonable claim: the Robert Smirke–designed college was considered a glorious new addition to the capital. “I live at Number 3 Nova Scotia Gardens and am a glass-blower. In the first place, I met with Bishop last Saturday morning in Long Lane, Smithfield. I asked him where he was going. He said he was going to King’s College. We then went to the Fortune of War public house. Instead of going to King’s College, we went to Guy’s Hospital and he came out of there and went to the King’s College. Then May and the porter met us against the gate, then Bishop went in, and I asked him to let me go in with him. A porter took a basket from the Fortune of War to Guy’s Hospital, and I helped him part of the way with it. That is all I have got to say.” Williams declined to sign this slightly different version of events.