The Body-Snatching ‘Borough Gang’ of London

Bears wasn't wrong. I'm Maria T. Marquis and I'm Holly Fry and this season is going to be all about the lives and fates of those who engaged in the grizzly business of digging up fresh corpses from graveyards. And this first episode of the season is about when and why they sold those corpses to anatomists and medical schools across London for dissection and research, and how this could

be a pretty lucrative business to be in. Of course, just as in previous seasons, we are continuing to look at what really went down and the context of it all, and if maybe any of these historical activities might look different through our modern perspective and spoiler alerts. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But to talk about this subject, we're going to start outside of London and with Leonardo da Vinci.

This may seem like a strange place to begin because many of us think of da Vinci as the painter of some very famous works of art, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. And yes he was that, but he was more than a painter. He was also an engineer, a scientist, a theorist, a sculptor, and an architect. And he was also an anatomist who completed hundreds of drawings and thousands of notes documenting his findings about how

the human body worked, and his work was groundbreaking. He produced to the first accurate to pay action of the human spine, and his notes document the earliest known description of cirrhosis of the liver. He made structural and functional discoveries about the human heart, and he was the first anatomist known to correctly note the number and root structure of human teeth. He did all of this with the use of cadavers. In fact, in total, da Vinci dissected

more than thirty corpses. So where might one get more than thirty corpses for study during the fifteenth century, might wonder? Many were likely procured by body snatchers, and the first recorded case of body snatching is attributed to four medical students in Bologna, Italy in thirteen nineteen, so a bit before Da Vinci's time. Then if we skip ahead of fifteen thirty six, we find anatomist, physician and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, Andreas Vesalius,

exhuming corpses from cemeteries around Paris to study human anatomy. Okay, so that we have established that there has been this tradition of digging up bodies for science in the Western world. This episode finds us in the early eighteen hundreds, where body snatchers, or resurrection men as they were known in London at the time, were at the service of anyone who needed a corpse and was willing to pay for it.

Resurrectionists worked in groups in secret in the middle of the night, exhuming or resurrecting, as their name suggests, freshly interred corpses from grave sites. As sinister as this sounds, this was a business, and bodies were a commodity, and this was a low overhead business to get into because all you needed for body snatching were a few basic things a shovel, a lantern, a large bag, and a wheelbarrow for the hall. Knowing where the fresh graves were

wasn't hard. Either. You could stake out the local burial grounds, or you could bribe the grave digger or someone in a local hospital to get you inform should you needed. A skilled gang of body snatchers needed less than thirty minutes to exhume a body, and those who are really good at what they did could score a dozen or

more bodies in one night. You also, of course, had to be strong, because this work included not just a lot of digging, but also hauling a corpse or sometimes even a coffin, and it surely was better if you had a strong stomach as well. We're going to take a break for a word from our sponsor, and when we're back, we're going to talk about the increasing demand for cadavers and why supply couldn't meet that demand. Welcome

back to Criminalia. Before we get into who supplied bodies to whom, let's talk about what happened to the body snatching business between the Murder Act of seventy one and the end that of the Act of eighteen thirty two. The demand for bodies in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain was created by anatomy professors, surgeons and medical students for both dissection and for use in anatomy classes at medical schools. In the seventeen forties, the way London teaching hospitals and

private anatomy schools taught medical students changed. Instead of would have been commonplace a single cadaver displayed and dissected by an instructor in anatomy lectures, a new way of instruction, known as the Paris method of dissection became the popular practice. This new method was much more hands on, as each student was given parts of the cadaver to study. That meant every dissection at every school now needed not just one corpse to work on per class, but potentially dozens.

Add that up across Britain and the numbers grow quickly. All parts of the corps were dissected and used for teaching and anything unusual such as a tumor, congenital abnormality or a surprising cause of death was preserved in alcohol in a glass jar. When Parliament passed the Murder Act of seventeen fifty one, it legalized the medical dissection of convicted killers as a kind of posthumous execution. But because the only bodies legally available for medical dissection were the

remains of executed criminals, demand pretty quickly outpaced supply. Body snatching in London peaked between eighteen hundred and eighteen thirty two, and medical schools often paid a hefty price for the product that the body snatchers provided. Up until the enactment of the Anatomy Act of two in Britain, which we'll talk about in just a minute, stealing a corpsmate grave was not itself illegal, as the Corps had no legal standing and was not considered to be owned by anyone.

The punishment if a resurrectionist was caught was relatively minor, and that was for a couple of reasons. One evidence, in these cases it was hard to collect those bodies had been dissected, and without a body there really wasn't a crime. There was a fresh but empty grave. But because corps has disappeared fast, usually the same night they were interred, all that could be prosecuted in court was the desecration of a grave. Authorities were known to make

arrests if something other than a body was stolen. For instance, a body snatcher could be punished for the theft of the burial clothing of the corpse, but not the theft of the corpse itself. Most often, though, authorities just turned a blind eye to the whole business, and most often because they were bribed either by the buyer or the seller, or by both. Unlike the police, though families did care.

The Anatomy Act of two was enacted by Parliament in direct response to public outrage at the theft and sale of corpses, and it also addressed the legality of dissecting a corpse. It was designed to stop the body snatchers by basically legislating a new and legal and free source of corpses. It regulated the supply of cadavers for medical research and anatomy teaching. Under this new act, anatomists were

given access to what we're called unclaimed bodies. Those were people who had died without anyone to claim them for burial. Before this legislature, as we said, just a moment ago, only the bodies of executed criminals could legally be used for dissection under the Murder Act of seventeen fifty one,

so this move was really quite a big change. The Anatomy Act also allowed for personal donations of a body by the individual or the next of kin to medical science, and regarding the dissection itself, the Act required doctors and anatomy teachers to obtain licenses to legally dissect donated corpses. The Act did do what it intended. It increased the number of bodies supplied to London medical schools from an estimated three hundred per year to six hundred per year,

and those were all legally sourced cadavers. So it's a little bit early, but we're going to take a break for word from our sponsor. When we're back, we'll introduce you to the infamous Borrow Gang and talk about their influence on the corpse supply chain. Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's meet Ben Crouch and the Borrow Gang in eighteen tens, so roughly twenty years before the Anatomy Act was in place.

The Borrow Gang or the Borough Boys as you'll sometimes see them referred to, with London's most notorious group of body snatchers. The district of central London known as Southard had been known as the Borough since the sixteenth century, and it's there where the gang ran their business and stole many bodies from graves. Benjamin Crouch led the group during its first years in practice, and during his time as a resurrectionist, he became known by the evocative sobriquet

of the Corpse King. Ben's background didn't exactly telegraph that he'd turned to a career of digging up bodies for quick cash. He was the son of a carpenter and was a well known prize fighter in his day. He's described as a tall, flamboyantly dressed man with a pox marked face, who loved to wear gold jewelry, especially gold rings. He could be violent and intimidating, especially if he'd been

at the pub. Members of the Corpse King's gang included Bill Harnett, Jack Harnett, Joseph Naples, Daniel Butler, and a man referred to as Hollis. This is perhaps Bill Hollis, but that particular detail is a little bit fuzzy. Over more than a decade, members of this group came and went, and a man named Patrick Murphy eventually succeeded Ben as the Borough Gangs leader. But we're going to focus on

the group's beginning. When Ben Crow, which was involved in heading up the operation, anatomist sir asked they Cooper, it said, may have introduced Ben Crouch to body snatching at the time when Cooper had been appointed Professor of Comparative Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, position where he would have needed a steady supply of cadavers from Cooper. Ben learned that it could be quite a lucrative business, and Cooper, It's thought, kept Crauch busy and probably intervened

on his behalf if anyone came around asking questions. There's was. It appears to be a symbiotic relationship. The Borrow Gang identified their targets, often through connections that gave them information, but also just by loitering around graveyards and funerals because there were always corpses that were about to be buried. They would wait until the cover of night to dig up the grave, break into the coffin, and refilled the

site with dirt to conceal their theft. Ben had formerly worked as a porter at Guy's Hospital and other and certainly still had connections on the inside who could share when and where to find the freshest corpses, both in the hospital burial site and beyond its yards. Bun Ill Burial Ground also known as Bunner or Bunner Fields, has been a burial ground in cemetery going back for centuries

before our resurrectionists. That name actually comes from bone Hill and the grounds were a prime target for London's resurrectionists due to the proximity to St Bart's Hospital in the Smithfield area of London, conveniently for us. One of the gang's members, Joseph Naples, kept account of the gang's business a kind of diary slash ledger of their work in eighteen eleven and eighteen twelve. Joseph, unlike Ben, was considered civil, with respectful manners and a pleasant way about him. Let's

take a look at his records. Adult bodies were referred to as largest and children were smalls. Fetis and bodies with any kind of abnormality both fetched high prices, as did teeth, which were sold to dentists to be used to make dentures for the living. Hair, too, could be sold to wigmakers for a tidy sum. A sample entry from November eighteen eleven. Talies up one night's work like this Wednesday fourth at night, went out and got ten whole.

Went to Green and got four Black crib one Butnerfield's five. On another night in eighteen twelve, Joseph recorded that the gang stole a total of thirteen adult corpses and two children. Writing quote December two, eighteen twelve, met at Vicker's Pub, rectified our last account. The party sent out Me and Ben to St. Thomas's crib, got one adult. Bill and Jack went to Guy's crib, got two adults, but one of them opened, took them to St. Thomas's, came home.

Met at St. Thomas's. Me and Jack went to Tottenham, got four adults. Ben and Bill went to St. Pancras, got six adults, one small and one fetus. Took the Tottenham mott to Wilson, the St. Pancras lot to Bart's. It was Ben who handled the gang's negotiations and transactions with the surgeons and anatomists. By most accounts, the gang charged two or three guineas for an adult corpse, which was considered to be a body measuring taller than three feet.

They collected up to one guinea for an infant or a child. Some accounts report that Ben was smart and a pretty ruthless businessman who secured upfront fees of up to fifty guineas for a corpse to be delivered at a later time. A guinea for any of us who aren't sure, is no longer legal tender, but one guinea is roughly equivalent to one pound and five pence in modern currency. You could make good money in the body

snatching business, but the business was rough. Rival gangs would rat on each other, hoping the others would be jailed. Gangs were also rough with their clients. In one reported incident in eighteen sixteen, the Borough Gang overwhelmed surgeons and anatomists at St Thomas's Hospital, intimidating them, or, as the gang saw it, reminding them that they were the only gang the hospital was allowed to work with when it came to supplying fresh corpses. It wasn't the only visit

of that nature they made around the city. Then claimed to have secured monopoly of corpse delivery to at least half the teaching hospitals in London, including his former employer Guy's hospital. I mean, who are we kidding? He probably did. Sometime in or around eighteen seventeen, Ben got out of the resurrection business, although not really all the way. Out of the business of bodies and giving body parts to people for money, Ben and a fellow resurrectionist named Jack

Harnett got into the business of teeth. Teeth they considered were just as profitable as whole corpses, if not more so, and the pair collected jaws from corpses. Many records suggest they traveled with the British Army and scavenged teeth from the bodies of dead soldiers. These records also suggests that the men's stole and sold things like buttons and epaulets

from uniforms for pretty good money. Ben, having saved enough money, bought himself or possibly built or possibly invested in this is a bit fuzzy, a small seaside hotel in Market. But word of his former unpopular occupation as a resurrection man got out, and it didn't take long before his empty hotel failed broke. Ben fell back into the tooth trade, but things did not go as well this time around.

Some of the records that came up in research suggests that Ben, in a pretty desperate situation, embezzled money from Jack Harnett and was imprisoned for a year as punishment. Ben did not die in jail, nor was he executed for any crime, but he did die in poverty and his body was found in the tap room of a pub near Tower Hill in London, and according to his legend, he was still sitting upright on his stool. So, Holly, this is our first season. In our first season, cocktail,

what do you have for us? So I think this time around we're going to just call our cocktail segment embalming Fluid. It's pretty obvious and on the nose, but you know what, I like it, so we're doing it. It's better than mine. It was just tapped out. This one to start off with comes with a little bit of cocktail history because I felt like it would be a little remiss if we didn't kick this whole thing off with a commonly known cocktail, but our variation on it,

and that's the Corpse reviveror. Hey, so you have almost certainly if you have gone out for drinks, ever seen a cocktail called the Corpse Revivor on a bar or a restaurant menu. It is not actually just one drink. It's an entire category of drinks. The idea of a corpse reviveror cocktail, which is like initially air of the Dog, hangover cure, like you feel like a corpse in the morning, Drink this and you will come back to life, dates back to the mid eighteen hundreds, so a little after

these guys were working, but still historical and interesting. We don't know how many different versions of it there may have been. Initially, like I said, it is a category, so it may have been everybody had their own version. But the first one that we absolutely do know of in terms of what it contained, comes from the Gentleman's Table Guide, which was written in eighteen seventy one that

called for Brandy Maraschino Liqueur and Boker's Bidders. That's not the more famous version because those and really if you were to go into a bar today and see one on a menu, it's probably based on one of these two were about to talk about, and they come from the Savoy Cocktail Book, which was written by Henry Cradock in nineteen thirty and cratic was the bartender at the

Savoy hotel. He was also a bit of a wit, which is part of why I think his his version has called on Cradic included two different Corps Survivors in his book. They are known as number one and number two. Number one is a pretty simple drink. It's kognak, apple brandy and sweet vermouth. But number two is more of a jin sour recipe, and that's the one that really has become popular and probably is the one that you're getting if you order something in a bar that's just

called a corpse revivor. So the recipe for Corpse Revivor number two includes the note that one will wake you back up after a night of drinking, and quote four of these taken in swift succession will un revived the corpse again. So if you drink too many, you're gonna sack out. So we're going to make a variation on Corpse Revivor number two today, and the main change that we're making to the recipe here is that we are subbing out. What is called for in the recipe is

lillip blanc. That's a liqueur that was originally made using white Bordoux wine with orange peel liquor and quinine liquor, and we're going to add a component that you may alread you have on hand if you have followed along with our cocktails before, because I have used it in several So this is one ounce of gin, one ounce of lemon juice, one ounce of Quantroux or other orange liqueur. I actually used Grand Martinier, which is a little bit bitier and that was quite nice, and one ounce of

Saint Germain. And that's the thing that we're subbing in for the lillip blong. And then, as with the original recipe, you're going to add this is a little bit of a choose your own adventure. A dash of absinthe is what's called for in the first one, and that makes it this interesting, very bity, citrusy drink with this like liquorice finish. But it is definitely a drink that um, that is a drink for drinkers, do you know what

I mean? Like people that enjoy the taste of alcohol and like taking a sip and discerning what's in it. That's for them. And you'll just put those all in a shaker, shake it with ice, and then you pour it into a chilled glass. However, I was like, I know, not everyone is a drinker, and even people that like the taste of alcohol sometimes want something that doesn't taste

that sharp. So I made a second version in which I got rid of the dash of absinthe and instead, because we already have all those beautiful citrus flavors, I subbed out a dash of hybiscus syrup that I see. I think I would like a one with absence, but I guarantee, Ma Maria, I have to try this one.

It's so anything. I'm like, I gotta try it, like it's so yummy, and it changes the profile so drastically, even though you're only including literally like a fraction of a fraction of an ounce, but it completely shifts the entire thing and makes it feel very tropical and yummy. So if you are into sweeter drinks, go crazy. You could literally put in almost any syrup that you like, or a liqueur that goes with those orange and lemon flavors, and same thing, shake it in the shaker with ice

board into a chilled glass. Holy Moses, delicious, just delicious, delicious. Plus I choose your an inventure drink, which are always my favorites that you do yes. Now, this one was a little bit tricky to think about how to do a mock tail around it because it's literally three different kinds of alcohol plus lemon juice and possibly a dash

of another alcohol. But here is what I came up with, and it's quite good and it does have similar it's a little different, but it's still pretty similar in profile. So first you're gonna try to replicate a little bit that says your main flavor, which has notes of like peach and hair and a little bit of honeysuckle in it. So what we're gonna do to try to get a little bit of that flavor is you're going to brew a cup of peach tea. If you want to be fancy,

I would do a little peach tea. And if you can get your hands on a pear tea or a honeysuckle tea, combine those and brew one cup together and you'll get a really nice thing. And then you want it cold, so let it soak in the fridge with some orange zest graded into it, because that's going to pick up what the quantrou would add to this drink.

So once that's chilled, then it's like super easy. You just do two ounces of your prepared tea, two ounces of a tart lemonade you don't want it very sweet at all, and then splash in the syrup of your choice. So you can do a liquorice syrup if you want that absently flavor, or you can do a hibiscus syrup like I did with the magical variation. Because any syrup that you love testamount that is going to go with a citrus and a fruit flavor like that, you can

try anything. I actually thought it might be fun with a Habba neuro syrup, but I haven't tried it, so I can't. I can't back that up with experience, but it could be fun. It could also be fun in the alcoholic version if you want to get a little if you want to really feel not the bite of

absent bite. And that's another one we've talked many times about how to make like a flavored variation of simple syrup, but literally just like one part sugar, one part water, Throw in whatever you want to flavor it with, let it all simmer for just a bit so all the sugar dissolves, and then strain out whatever the other item is. Like you're sliced halapeno, or you can do it with ginger. A ginger syrup is so good. Just pull that right

out and then you have a yummy flavored syrup. They don't last as long as the ones you would buy commercially. You gotta use that up within a couple of weeks usually, but you get some beautiful flavors. So that is our kickoff the corpse revivor Criminalia style. I didn't come up with a pithy name for that first drinking scene. Yes, it's our we'll call it like corpse reviveror number six

sixty six or something. We'll come up with a better note. Yes, but since other people have made variations and they have added numbers to them, you'll see other numbers on menus time. I need to double check and see how many numbers are officially CO ten. But it's already taken, so we can. Actually that would be a good one. We can name it after one of the years involved, like in eighteen ten or something. If you make it, I hope you love it as much as I did, especially with that

hybiscus syrup. And like I said, the mock tail is very refreshing and yummy. And complex flavors that kind of give you a nice little kick. The citrus is what wakes you up there. That's that's why it's reviving your corpse and also probably helping you if you have a hangover. So yeah, but we hope you are down for this entire season of corpse, theft and resurrection right digging up graves.

It's grim and grizzly, but in a much more enjoyable way than people being persecuted for things that they didn't do. We will be right back here again next week, and we hope you will join us. MHM Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shonda land Audio, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.