A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

In February 1828, a female vagrant named Abigail Simpson was lured to the house and made
drunk. On this first occasion, Burke and Hare lost their nerve, and she was still alive the next
morning. But they got her drunk again, and Hare suffocated her, while Burke held her legs. Again,
the corpse was sold for ten pounds. And over the next eight months, they despatched eleven more
victims by the same method. Some of the victims were never identified - like an Irish beggar
woman and her dumb grandson; Burke strangled her and broke the boy’s back over his knee. Dr
Knox probably became suspicious when he was offered the body of an attractive little prostitute
named Mary Paterson and one of his students recognised her as someone he had patronised. His
suspicions must have become a certainty when Burke and Hare sold him the body of a well-known
idiot called Daft Jamie, but he preferred to keep quiet.
The downfall of Burke and Hare came through carelessness; they left the corpse of a widow named
Docherty in the house while they went out, and two of their lodgers located it. On their way to the
police, they were met by Burke’s common-law wife, who saw from their faces that something was
wrong and fell on her knees to beg them to keep quiet. The tenants allowed themselves to be
persuaded over several glasses of whisky in a pub, but finally went to the police anyway. A search
of the house in Tanner’s Close revealed bloodstained clothing. Hare quickly turned king’s evidence
and was not tried. Burke was sentenced to death, and hanged in January 1829. Hare left Edinburgh,
and died, an old blind beggar, in London.
This was by far the most gruesome case in British criminal history; yet it was perhaps a little too
horrifying for the British public, which preferred tales in which beautiful girls were seduced. So the
case of Burke and Hare never achieved the same widespread popularity as the Red Barn murder, or
the case of Ellie Hanley, the ‘Colleen Bawn’ (‘white girl’), a pretty Irish girl who had been married
and then murdered by a young rake in 1819. But it undoubtedly helped to reconcile the British
public to the first appearance of the British bobby (so called after the founder of the force, Sir
Robert Peel) in September 1829. The new police were told to be firm but conciliatory, respectful,
quiet and determined, and to maintain a perfectly even temper. They followed these instructions to
the letter, with the result that the public gradually lost its distrust of its new guardians.
But it took some time. During these early years, the major problem for the British bobby was
simply that he wore uniform and looked ‘official’. This tended to arouse automatic resentment in
the slums of England’s major cities. In June 1830, Police Constable Grantham saw two drunken
Irishmen quarrelling over a woman in Somers Town, north London, and when he tried to separate
them was knocked to the ground and kicked in the face with heavy boots. He died soon afterwards,
the first British policeman to die in the execution of his duty; the murderers walked away and were
never caught. Six weeks later, a policeman named John Long became convinced that three
suspicious-looking characters in London’s Gray’s Inn Road were contemplating burglary, and
accosted them. Two of them grabbed him by the arms and one stabbed him in the chest. There was
a hue and cry, and another policeman who came on the scene caught a man who was running away.
He proved to be a baker called John Smith, who had a wife and six children, and he protested that
he had heard a cry of ‘Stop thief and joined in the chase. His story was disbelieved and he was
hanged a few days later. Under the circumstances, it seems likely he was innocent, and that the
early police felt it was better to hang an innocent man than no one at all.
In 1833, the murder of another policeman revealed that the English attitude towards authority
remained ambivalent. A mildly revolutionary group called the National Political Union called a
meeting in Coldbath Fields, which was promptly banned by the police commissioner. The ban was
ignored, and a crowd gathered around a speaker on a soap box. Eight hundred policemen and troops