From crime to collection: Burke and Hare at the Library

In 1828, Edinburgh was shocked by a series of crimes known as the West Port murders. Named after the west end of the Grassmarket area of the city where most of them took place, these crimes are now better known by the names of their perpetrators - Burke and Hare. These men murdered and sold the bodies of their victims to the anatomist Professor Robert Knox.

As the events of the West Port murders became known, journalists, printers and publishers were quick to meet the demand of a public both horrified and fascinated to know what had happened. Columns of newspaper reports, portraits of the victims and perpetrators, broadside ballads, accounts of the events, and satirical cartoons are all represented in the Library's collections. The Rosebery Collection and the Lauriston Castle Collection in particular hold material concentrated into just a few volumes that show the intense popular interest in the crimes.

The need for bodies

Edinburgh's reputation as a leading centre for the study of anatomy was well established by the early 19th century. Teaching required anatomists to dissect bodies during their lectures which called for a continual supply of cadavers. This demand could be legally met by using the bodies of executed criminals.

As demand outstripped supply, anatomists came to rely on the illicit trade of 'resurrection men' or 'body snatchers' who would exhume recently buried people. In response to a wave of grave robberies, graveyards began to be guarded. Mortsafes, an iron cage around the grave, were used to make sure graves were not disturbed. These interventions successfully made cadavers more difficult to acquire but also resulted in people looking at alternative ways to supply bodies.

Who were Burke and Hare?

Both William Burke and William Hare came to Scotland from Ireland to work on the Union Canal which opened in 1822. Burke came to Edinburgh with his partner Nelly McDougal in 1827. Hare arrived in Edinburgh in the mid-1820s, and took up lodgings with a Mr Logue and his wife Maggie at Tanner's Close. After Logue's death Hare moved in with and married Maggie in 1826.

Burke and Hare met while working on the harvest at Penicuik in 1827 and became friends. The two couples then moved in together into Hare's house at Tanner's Close just beyond the west end of the Grassmarket. Shortly after this, the murders started.

As events unfolded, people wanted to put a face to the names they read about in the reports of the West Port murders. Numerous portraits of Burke, Hare, and others involved were produced and are held as part of our collections. These vary in quality and accuracy depending on the time taken to produce them and the intended market.

The West Port Murders

The first body Burke and Hare sold to the anatomist Robert Knox wasn't the result of a murder. On 27 November 1827, a lodger who owed Hare rent died of natural causes. To recover his money, Hare, with Burke's help, decided to sell the body to an anatomist. They had initially planned to sell the body to another anatomist at the University of Edinburgh but were offered more money by one of Knox's students who directed them to his rooms in Surgeon's Square.

Knox was one of the most skilled anatomists in Britain at the time. When accepting bodies brought to him from Burke and Hare and paying for them, Knox was doing what many other contemporary anatomists did in order to be able to teach their subject. However, he was negligent in not enquiring more thoroughly into how they acquired them.

Burke and Hare realised how much money could be made supplying Knox. But bodies were becoming harder to come by. Between January or February 1828 and 31 October 182, over 14 murders took place in the old town of Edinburgh. Potential victims were often lured by Burke, who was considered the more presentable of the two men, with offers of accommodation. They were then plied with drink until unconscious.

Though Burke and Hare were sometimes aided by their partners, the women were reportedly absent from the room while the murders were committed. Burke and Hare suffocated their victims to leave no visible wounds. They then delivered the bodies to Knox or his assistants who purchased the corpses.

Most of the victims were poor local women. The three most well-known victims are those whom Burke and Hare were ultimately charged with murdering: Mary Paterson, James Wilson (known locally as 'Daft Jamie'), and Margaret Docherty, the final victim. Before the culprits could move it, Docherty's body was discovered by other residents. As the residents left to inform the police, Burke and Hare were able to deliver what would be their final body to Knox.

Arrest, trial, and execution

Burke and his partner Nelly McDougal were questioned after the discovery of Docherty. Their differing accounts raised suspicion. The next morning, police discovered the body at Knox's dissecting rooms. On 3 November 1828, Burke, McDougal, Hare, and his wife Maggie were detained, and after forensic specialists had examined Docherty's body, they were charged with murder.

As evidence was assembled, the Lord Advocate Sir William Rae chose to focus on just one of the accused to extract a confession which could then be used to prosecute the others. Hare was selected and turned King's evidence. This meant he was offered immunity if he provided details of the murders that would lead to the prosecution of Burke and McDougal. By law he could not be forced to testify against his wife who was granted an exemption.

The events of the trial were reported in great detail in newspapers, and more succinctly in broadsides. Both of which were collected into the Rosebery Collection and Lauriston Castle Collection volumes.

The trial began on Christmas Eve and ran without break until the jury delivered its verdict just under 24 hours later on Christmas morning (Christmas was not a public holiday in Scotland at this time). The charges against McDougal were not proven. Burke was found guilty and taken to the Calton Jail. On 28 January 1829 he was publicly hanged in the Lawnmarket in front of a large crowd. One of them was Sir Walter Scott who had a view from a window. Burke's body was dissected and put on display. Today his skeleton is kept at the University of Edinburgh's Anatomy Museum.

Aftermath

McDougal was released after the trial and left Edinburgh two days later. It is not known what became of her after that. Maggie Hare went to Ireland but nothing is known of her later life either. William Hare was released from prison on 5 February 1829, where he had been kept for his own protection. Not much is known for sure about Hare's later life after that. It is reported that he found work at a lime kiln, but was thrown into the lime and blinded when they learnt who he was.

Remarkably, Knox was not called to give evidence at the trial nor charged with any crime. Nevertheless, his reputation suffered greatly and, despite being sure of his own innocence in the matter, he was considered guilty by association both by the public and by many of his peers who thought he closed his eyes to events that should have raised suspicion. Knox did not escape the violence that hounded the other conspirators out of Scotland. On 12 February 1829, a crowd hung an effigy of him outside his home. He was savagely caricatured, more so than Burke and Hare, but was able to continue lecturing in Edinburgh before gradually being frozen out of the city's academic circles.

Evidence of this is found in both the Rosebery Collection and Lauriston Castle Collection volumes. They show that the West Port murders captured the attention of Edinburgh's wealthier classes through a series of more sophisticatedly produced engravings. These were aimed at a more affluent and educated audience and centred on Knox's culpability.

The Library's collections

Many broadsides in our collection relating to the West Port murders can be viewed on our The Word on the Street site. Broadsides were printed on one side of a single sheet of paper. They could be produced cheaply on demand so were the best medium for printers to quickly react to events as they unfolded in real time.

The broadsides containing news reports or 'ballads' that would have circulated around Edinburgh's Old Town focused more on the characters of Burke and Hare and were sympathetic to their victims, particularly 'Daft Jamie' They often contained simple woodcut portraits of these people.

One volume in the Rosebery Collection holds over 50 items and is perhaps the single most useful volume for gaining a view of the range of material relating to the murders. The volumes in the Lauriston Castle Collection, principally L.C.1570 to L.C.1574 and L.C.Fol.62 bear the bookplate of George Ritchie Kinloch, a ballad collector. He worked in Edinburgh as a legal clerk and may well have collected the material as it was published.

There's a note at the front of L.C.1570 by John A. Fairley, a later collector from whom these volumes passed into the Lauriston Castle Collection. It narrates the book's journey from the sale of Kinloch's books in 1877 through a series of dealers and collectors. It also shows the keen interest in the material, the care taken to preserve it and to add to it, long after the events described within. For example, Fairley noted that he added extra material and had the collection re-bound.

In the Rosebery and Lauriston Castle volumes, the voices, images and impressions of 1820s Edinburgh sit side by side, capturing the immediacy of the city's response to the murders. The many forms of print sparked by the murders survive as a compact record of public reaction, from broadsides and ballads to portraits and reports.

Documenting the events as they unfolded back then, these curated scrapbooks of a turbulent moment continue to open doors for research into crime, print culture and the uneasy intersection of medicine and morality. These collections not only preserve the story but invite ongoing research into how it was told, shared and remembered.