Thus far we have traced the genesis, and the ultimate development, of the resurrectionist movement, and it will now be necessary to relate with some detail the connection of Burke and Hare and their female associates with the vile traffic, showing how they, by adding to the brutality inherent in it, ultimately encompassed their own ruin, and unconsciously freed medical science from restrictions tending to stiffle inquiry and prevent progress. About these people comparatively little is known, and certain it is that had it not been for the timidity of the press of the period there would have been abundance of material more or less reliable. James Maclean, a hawker, belonging to Ireland, who was well acquainted with all the parties, furnished a few particulars concerning them to the publishers of what may be called the official account of the trial, issued in 1829, but what he was able to give was very meagre. Maclean’s notes, however, have been supplemented, and, apparently, in some instances corrected, by the subsequent investigations of Alexander Leighton.
The most notorious of these great offenders against the laws of God and man was William Burke. He was the son of Neil Burke, a labourer, and was born in the early part of the year 1792, in the parish of Orrey, about two miles from the town of Strabane, County Tyrone, Ireland. Receiving a fair education, he, though of Catholic parentage, first went as servant to a Presbyterian minister, but becoming tired of that kind of employment, he tried in succession the trades of a baker and a weaver. Maclean, however, makes no mention of these two attempts, and says Burke’s “original trade was that of a shoemaker or cobbler.” None of these trades suited his taste, and ultimately he enlisted in the Donegal militia in the capacity either of fifer or drummer—probably the former, as he was known in after life as an excellent player on the flute. During this time he was the personal servant of one of the officers of the regiment; and he married a young woman belonging to Ballina. When the regiment was disbanded he went to live with his wife and family, and he was engaged as the servant of a country gentleman. Here an event occurred which may be regarded as the turning point of what had hitherto been a life of respectability. Burke was anxious to obtain the subtenancy of a piece of ground from his father-in-law, but they quarrelled over the matter. How this dispute came about is unknown, but it was of sufficient severity to cause Burke to leave his wife and family and emigrate to Scotland, and sufficient to prevent him from returning again to his native land. He arrived in this country about the year 1817 or 1818, when the Union Canal, between Edinburgh and the Forth and Clyde Canal, near Camelon, was in the course of construction. Making his way eastwards, Burke obtained employment as a labourer on this important undertaking, and while so engaged he resided in the little hill village of Maddiston, a mile or two above Polmont. It was here that he met Helen Dougal or M‘Dougal, the partner of his guilt, and his fellow-prisoner at the great trial. This woman was born in the neighbouring village of Redding. The record of her career up to her meeting with Burke is not altogether good. In early life she made the acquaintance of a sawyer of the name of M‘Dougal, to whom she had a child during his wife’s life-time. When M‘Dougal became a widower the young woman went to live with him, and though they had never gone through a regular marriage ceremony, cohabitation was sufficient to constitute them man and wife, and she bore M‘Dougal’s name. After a time the couple left Maddiston for Leith, where M‘Dougal worked at his trade. Here he was struck down by typhus fever, and his illness terminated in death in Queensferry House. His female companion and her two children returned to her old place of abode, a loose and dissolute woman, even more so than when she went away. At the time of the trial, in 1828, it was reported that she had had two husbands, one of whom was then alive, but that is uncertain. This, however, is an outline of her life up till the advent of Burke in Maddiston, when she was living there with her two children, a boy and a girl. Burke and she threw in their lot together, and lived as husband and wife. This irregular life came to the knowledge of the priest of the district, who advised Burke to leave M‘Dougal and return to his lawful wife and to his family in Ireland; but he refused to do so, and as a consequence was excommunicated. The early religious training of Burke made him feel uncomfortable under the displeasure of the church, but he would not, nevertheless, carry out the dictates of his priest or of his own conscience. He continued to live with M‘Dougal, not a very happy life, certainly, both of them being somewhat given to drink, but they appeared to have taken a liking for each other which kept them together through every difficulty. For some reason or other, probably because employment in the neighbourhood of Maddiston had become scarce, Burke and his companion removed to Edinburgh, and took up their quarters in what was known as “The Beggar’s Hotel,” in Portsburgh, owned by an Edinburgh worthy of the lower class, Mickey Culzean by name. Here Burke reverted to the trade of shoemaker or cobbler, and whether he was bred to it or not is a small matter, for he seems to have been able to make use of it, when in need, in the way of gaining a livelihood. He was in the habit of buying old boots and shoes, and repairing them; after which M‘Dougal hawked them among the poorer classes in the city, and in this way they were able to make from fifteen to twenty shillings a week.
Burke and M‘Dougal, however, were not long resident in the “Beggar’s Hotel,” when it was burned to the ground, and all their goods were destroyed. Among their possessions so lost were the books belonging to the Burke, and these were—Ambrose’s Looking Unto Jesus, Boston’s Fourfold State, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Booth’s Reign of Grace. It has been said that this little library of theological works belonged to Burke, but, it may be suggested, that they were not of the type to be owned by an excommunicated Roman Catholic; they rather appear, judging from their character, to have belonged to M‘Dougal, for they are all of the kind affected in most Scottish homes of the period. It is worth remembering, however, that Burke was a man of a naturally religious turn of mind, though not bound up in any particular form of faith, and that in all his after actions, brutal and godless though they were, the inward warning voice never left him at peace, except when his senses were steeped in drink.
Culzean, after this disaster, hired new premises in Brown’s Close, off the Grassmarket, and Burke and M‘Dougal moved there with him. Here religious matters attracted Burke’s attention, and for a time his actions to a certain extent were modified by them. He attended services in an adjoining house, and even went the length of an endeavour to reform his landlord, who was an inveterate swearer. This appearance of better things did not, however, continue long, and the old course of life was renewed. It would be difficult to say what would have been the course of Burke’s life had M‘Dougal and he never met; in all probability it would have been less guilty, and would have had a happier result. Had their paths been separate, they might never have been heard of, and a series of crimes disgraceful to humanity might, possibly, never have been committed. But as it happened, it is to be feared that the influence of the one upon the other was for evil. Maclean described Burke as a peaceable and steady worker when free from liquor; and even when intoxicated he was rather jocose and quizzical, and by no means of a quarrelsome disposition. M‘Dougal, on the other hand, was of a dull, morose temper, sober or otherwise. Quarrels between them were of frequent occurrence. One point of dispute between them, and which gave rise to at least one severe disturbance, was Burke’s relations with a young woman, a near friend of M‘Dougal, who became jealous of her. The three lived in the one room, and one occasion the two women fell out so seriously that they sought to settle their differences by force. The man did not interfere until he saw that the younger woman was being worsted. Then he turned on M‘Dougal and beat her most brutally, until, indeed, it was thought she was beyond recovery.
Notwithstanding their apparent incompatibility, the couple kept well together, and when trade in Edinburgh grew dull they removed to Peebles, where Burke wrought on the roads. By this time his habits had not improved; his whole moral character, never very robust, though not without a susceptibility to religious impressions, was on the decline; and gradually he became the associate of men and women whose experience of wickedness was greater than anything to which he had yet sunk. In the autumn of 1827, Burke and M‘Dougal wrought at the harvesting near Penicuik, and returning to Edinburgh, they went to lodge with William and Mrs. Hare, the companions and participators in the crimes that afterwards made them amenable to the laws of the country. Burke met Mrs. Hare, with whom he had previously been acquainted, and over a glass of liquor he mentioned to her that he intended going to the west country to seek for employment. She urged that he and M‘Dougal should take up their abode in her house in Tanner’s Close, Portsburgh, where he would have every facility for carrying on his trade of a cobbler. To this he consented, and he again set up business in a cellar attached to the house, in which Hare, who was a hawker, kept his donkey. Thus were these two men brought into contact, and from this accidental meeting arose that close and intimate connection which enabled them to originate and carry out their diabolical plans against their fellow-creatures.
This William Hare, whose name afterwards came to be so indissolubly connected with that of Burke, was about the same age, and was also a native of Ireland. Brought up without any education or proper moral training, he rapidly slipped into a vagabondising kind of life. His temper was brutal and ferocious, and when he was in liquor he was perfectly unbearable. Before leaving Ireland he was employed in farm work, but better prospects across the Channel made him come to Scotland, where he became a labourer, like his companion in later life, in the construction of the Union Canal, though there is no evidence that they met each other until the year 1827, in Edinburgh. Hare afterwards worked as a “lumper” with a Mr. Dawson, who had a wharf at Port-Hopetoun, the Edinburgh terminus of the canal. While so engaged he became acquainted with a man of the name of James Log, or Logue, who has been described as a decent, hard-working man. Before this time Log had held a contract, on the canal near Winchburgh, at which his wife, a strong-minded, able-bodied woman, laboured along with the men in her husband’s employment, wheeling a barrow as well as the best of them. After this Hare turned a hawker, at first with a horse and cart, but latterly with a hand-barrow. In the interval, Log and his wife, Mary Laird, had opened a lodging-house at the back of the West Port Well, whence they removed to Tanner’s Close, and with them Hare, on his change of employment, took up his abode. A quarrel with his landlord, however, made him seek other quarters; but when Log died in 1826, he returned, and, as Maclean puts it, “made advances to the widow,” and she consenting, the couple were regularly married. Mrs. Log, or Hare, as she had now become, had had one child to her previous husband. Her character, while before not beyond reproach, had been further blackened by her notorious misconduct with a young lodger in the house. This man left her, and Hare stepped in to fill his shoes. The lodging-house, into possession of which Hare had entered on his marriage with the widow of its previous landlord, contained seven beds; and the earnings from his new property gave him the means of drinking without the necessity of working. He took full advantage of his position, became more and more dissolute, and went about bullying and fighting with all and sundry. His wife was not exempt from his brutality, but then she was as ready for drinking and quarrelling as he was himself. With these people Burke and M‘Dougal went to reside, after their return from Penicuik.
Two stories are related by Maclean, who knew all the parties well, which serve to illustrate the characters of Burke and Hare. In the autumn of 1827, Maclean, Hare, Burke, and some others, while on their way from Carnwath, in Lanarkshire, where they had been at the shearing, went for refreshment into a public-house a little to the west of Balerno, a few miles from Edinburgh. The liquor was served, and the party clubbed together to pay the reckoning. The money was placed on the table, and Hare coolly picked it up and put it in his pocket. Burke, knowing the temper of the man, and desiring to avoid a disturbance, paid for the whole of the liquor consumed out of his own pocket. Maclean, however, was more outspoken, and on leaving the house told Hare that it was a scaly trick for him to lift the money with the intention of affronting the company. Hare knocked the feet from under Maclean, and kicked him severely on the face with his iron-shod caulker boots, laying his upper lip open. Mrs. Hare, again, was equally brutal. Once, when returning from his work at the canal, Hare found his wife very tipsy. He remonstrated with her, and then lay down on his bed. She lifted a bucket of water and emptied the contents over him. A desperate struggle followed, and, Maclean adds:—“As usual with her she had the last word and the last blow.”
Helen McDougal.
(From a Sketch taken in Court.)
Before concluding this chapter it may be of interest to give the description of the personal appearance of Burke and his wife, as furnished by the Caledonian Mercury of Thursday, the 25th December, 1828. It refers to their appearance at the trial, but it may be taken as generally relating to their looks at the time they entered upon their course of crime:—“The male prisoner [Burke], as his name indicates, is a native of Ireland. He is a man rather below the middle size, and stoutly made, and of a determined, though not peculiarly sinister expression of countenance. The contour of his face, as well as the features, is decidedly Milesian. It is round, with high cheek bones, grey eyes, a good deal sunk in the head, a short snubbish nose, and a round chin, but altogether of a small cast. His hair and whiskers, which are of a light sandy colour, comported well with the make of the head and complexion, which is nearly of the same hue. He was dressed in a shabby blue surtout, buttoned close to the throat, and had, upon the whole, what is called in this country a wauf rather than a ferocious appearance, though there is a hardness about the features, mixed with an expression in the grey twinkling eyes, far from inviting. The female prisoner [Helen M‘Dougal], is fully of the middle size, but thin and spare made, though evidently of large bone. Her features are long, and the upper half of her face is out of proportion to the lower. She was miserably dressed in a small grey-coloured velvet bonnet, very much the worse of the wear, a printed cotton shawl and cotton gown. She stoops considerably in her gait, and has nothing peculiar in her appearance, except the ordinary look of extreme poverty and misery common to unfortunate females of the same degraded class.”