A Sink of Atrocity: Crime in 19th-Century Dundee Read Online Free Page B

he had dug up a grave in the Howff, word was sent to the Dundee Procurator Fiscal, who sent men to search the fresh graves.
    Sure enough, an elderly lady had been buried on the previous Friday but now the coffin was empty. It is impossible to gauge the feelings of the relatives upon discovering the theft of their bereaved, but some travelled south on the Fife ferry. The Magistrates at Kinghorn greeted them in person and when they confirmed the identity of the body, the old lady was reburied in the graveyard in Kinghorn. Rather than a lonely, sad affair, the funeral was well attended, not only by the relatives but by local people who showed their support and sympathy for the bereaved.
Defending the Dead
    Although it was unusual for a Resurrectionist to be caught actually carrying the body, the people of Dundee had taken precautions to protect their dead. There were two doughty men standing guard over the burial ground at Logie, and for night after dark night they waited with nothing happening, and then in early May 1824 the body snatchers struck. Rather than sneak in to quietly dig up a grave, they jumped the wall of the graveyard and attacked the watchmen. There was a desperate struggle around the tombstones in the dim of the summer night, but the watchmen held their ground and chased the Resurrection men away. There was little time to celebrate their victory, however, for only the following night the body snatchers returned, but once more the guard fought them off, and Logie rested secure, at least for a while.
    There were other, more ingenious methods of ensuring the peace of the deceased. Throughout the nineteenth century the death rate among children was shockingly high. A visitor to any old graveyard only has to read the inscriptions on any random selection of gravestones to realise that many were erected for children from a few minutes to a few years old. It was natural that the parents wanted their children to rest in peace, undisturbed by the Resurrectionists, and in July 1823 one Dundee father went further than most. When his child’s coffin was lowered into the grave, the mourners noticed an array of lines and cables criss-crossing the lid. The father explained that the cables were connected to an explosive device, so if any grave robber attempted to steal the body, they would be blown to pieces.
    Perhaps there was a bomb in the coffin, or perhaps the bereaved father had merely tacked on cables in the hope of bluffing the body snatchers. Either way, the sexton was fearful as he looked down on the tiny coffin at the foot of the newly dug grave. Scratching nervously as the pile of earth that lay on top of the grass, he dropped the first shovelful, panicked and jumped back, with many of the mourners immediately joining him. He could hardly be blamed: if the coffin was rigged to explode if a Resurrection man grabbed it, what result might a spadeful of earth bring?
    Although the anatomists were probably more interested in dissecting adults’ bodies, children were certainly not immune from Resurrectionists’ predatory claws. In October 1824 a child’s body was stolen from the burial ground at the Howff, and the magistrates of Dundee offered a reward of twenty guineas for its recovery or information about the thieves. Twenty guineas was about twice the going rate for a fresh body, but still, there was no follow-up notice of a capture so it seems these particular body snatchers escaped. The theft of a child must have been particularly distressing for the parents, and there were a few incidents in the town that reveal just how high feelings ran and how fearful people were of these ghouls who prowled the graveyards.
    The first scare came in April 1826 when George Law, a shoemaker in Baltic Street, a short street between the Wellgate and the Meadows, investigated a thump at the door. Finding his nine-year-old son on the doorstep in a state of near paralysis, he carried the boy inside and rushed for a doctor, who took a