Digging in the Dark
To Alison, who has (once again) been the level head in our household whilst the author in the dungeon has managed to escape reality on a regular basis. My skills dont reach far enough to put my love and appreciation into words.
Also, to my Mum, Jacqueline, who has (once again) acted as my proofreader and critic. Your constant help and enthusiastic support have been invaluable.
And to my friend, Trevor Stockbridge, who has (once again) played a huge part in the completion of this book. Your driving and photography skills will always be greatly appreciated.
Finally, thanks to my immediate and extended family, who have shown so much enthusiasm and much-needed moral support since the beginning of my writing career, especially my dad, John, who has added book seller to his long list of family duties.
Digging in the Dark
A History of the Yorkshire Resurrectionists
Ben Johnson
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
Pen & Sword History
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS
Copyright Ben Johnson, 2017
ISBN 978 1 47387 817 4
eISBN 978 1 47387 819 8
Mobi ISBN 978 1 47387 818 1
The right of Ben Johnson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.
Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Archaeology, Atlas, Aviation, Battleground, Discovery, Family History, History, Maritime, Military, Naval, Politics, Railways, Select, Transport, True Crime, Fiction, Frontline Books, Leo Cooper, Praetorian Press, Seaforth Publishing, Wharncliffe and White Owl.
For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
PEN & SWORD BOOKS LIMITED
47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, S70 2AS, England
E-mail:
Website: www.pen-and-sword.co.uk
Contents
At the sight of that horrible human charnel-house, its fragments of limbs, its grimacing faces and cloven heads, the bloody cesspool in which we walked around, the revolting odour it exhaled, the swarms of sparrows fighting over scraps of lungs, and the rats in the corners gnawing bleeding vertebrae, such a feeling of horror possessed me that I leapt out of the window, and ran panting home as though Death and all his hideous crew were at my heels. I spent twenty-four hours stunned by this first impression, wanting to hear no more talk of anatomy, or dissection, or medicine, and meditating on a thousand mad schemes to extricate myself from the future that menaced me.
Hector Berlioz, French Composer
on discovering the dissection suite at a medical school
Prologue Descent into Darkness
The darker the night, the brighter the stars. The deeper the grief, the closer is God.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment
T he macabre matter of grave-robbing, or body snatching, is something which, thankfully, is rather uncommon in todays world, save for a handful of distasteful acts which occur sporadically in the deep and dark corners of our planet.
The subject itself is one that brings with it a guilty fascination, rather like that which accompanies the reading of a particularly gruesome historic crime report. We know that the words we are processing in our already crowded minds spell out the goriest details of a terrible event, but the passing of time walks hand in hand with a feeling of innocent detachment from the subject in question.
In such cases, we tend to see the victims as names on pages, rather than lives that were tragically lost to acts of unrivalled violence and evil, as we picture the scene in our minds; a distant land we call the past , a place which bears no more familiarity to us than the surface of the moon.
We picture dark alleyways and gas lamps, squalid hovels inhabited by toothless, feckless and entirely disposable beings framed by candle-lit rooms and foggy nights. It is no more reality to us than a Tim Burton film set, deliberately created to be as grotesque and stylised as our imaginations allow.
Yet, these shadowy beings that either populate the pages of the history books, or have lost their identities to the ravages of time, were just like us. They lived their lives under the same sky, and walked upon the same ground as that which we tread upon today.
Their suffering was as real as their existence, yet throughout our fascination with the macabre and gloomy past, we forget that real tears were shed, real blood spilled, and real lives lost. Perhaps we should spend as much time imagining the feelings of the past as we do picturing the scene and losing ourselves in the altered reality conjured by our own imaginations.
The subject matter for this book is undeniably as dark and gloomy as that of any depraved murder, yet on the face of it, the cases of which you are about to read seem to be missing something extremely important a victim.
The theft of a body, already declared and interred as no longer living, would seem to indicate a victimless crime; a merely distasteful practice in which the no longer inhabited shell of a former person is traded for a handful of coins, and a chance to perform exploratory procedures which could never have been attempted upon the living.
Yet, we forget that for every cadaver which was to end up being unceremoniously dragged from its final resting place and displayed on the cold, sterile examination slabs of the medical schools, there were families left without a place to mourn, and loved ones robbed of their fond memories of the deceased, with only the uncertainty of what had become of the remains of their parents, lovers and children.
It is with this in mind that I have made every attempt to document the identity of the deceased, in order for their names to live on, as well as those of the people who committed terrible crimes against their defenceless remains, and probably dont deserve to be immortalised in black and white.
There are also, admittedly, certain passages and stories within this compendium which will no doubt illicit a smile from many readers. However, rather than make light of these terrible occurrences (apart from one truly distasteful story title), it is important to tell them as they were, and often, in the depths of despair, come moments of unintentional laughter.
Therefore, while we imagine these terrible, yet fascinating, and sometimes even darkly humorous events, perhaps we should spare a moment to put ourselves in the minds of those who suffered at the hands of the resurrectionists, and remember that their victims were not the dead, but the living.
Introduction A Cruel Deliverance
History is a cyclic poem; written by time upon the memories of man.