London’s watch houses
On a recent
walk around Bermondsey and Rotherhithe I came across some interesting small
buildings, situated next to churches but too small, I realised, to be rectories.
They turned out to be watch-houses, several of which survive in London from the
18th century. An early form of local police-station (there was no proper
force until 1829), they were deliberately built close to church graveyards as a
first line of defence against body-snatchers, known as the Resurrection Men. Body-snatching, illegal but widespread, reached its peak
in the 1820s and most of London’s watch-houses date from this period.
In the history of European
medicine, Italy was always way ahead of other countries. Its medical students had
been using corpses for dissection since the 14th century. In
England, by contrast, records show that Henry VIII only allowed the guild of barber-surgeons
four bodies a year from the Tyburn gallows for this purpose.
It wasn’t until the 18th
century that anatomy schools began to spring up, such as Guy’s and St Thomas’s.
By this time some corpses were available legally for teaching purposes, but only
those of criminals who had been condemned by a court to death and dissection.
Fortunately for the medical
profession, the Georgian period was a golden era for capital
punishment. You could be put to death for the theft of as little as five
shillings. At one time, there were over 200 individual offences carrying the
death penalty. Very handy for those in the market for fresh cadavers!
But as the 18th century
drew to a close, fewer capital punishments were being handed down to criminals,
with many more being sentenced to transportation to Australia for their sins. As
the supply of corpses began to dry up, body-snatching became a lucrative ‘trade’.
Newly-buried bodies would be dug out of graves in the dead of the night and sold
on to surgeons.
And they were able to do this almost
with impunity. The punishment for stealing corpses was not particularly severe –
either a fine or a very short spell in prison – as it was classed not as a
felony but as a mere Common Law misdemeanour. However, they were very careful
only to remove the bodies from the graves; any valuables or jewellery they
found were left behind as stealing goods was
a felony that could lead them to the gallows!
The ‘Resurrection Men’, as they came
to be known, tended to congregate in the pubs around Smithfield, as they were
close to the hospitals. One of these was the Rising Sun (still trading) in
Cloth Fair, near St Bart’s. Another was The Fortune of War (demolished 1910),
which had been officially declared as a place ‘for the reception of drowned persons’ by the Royal Humane Society. The
landlord had a special room lined with benches for the cadavers so that
surgeons from St Bartholomew’s could come and look over the corpses before
making their choices!
Over time, the resurrection business grew more
sophisticated. Freakish or unusual bodies could command higher prices, children
under three feet tall were priced by the inch, and there was a separate trade
in teeth. In one case it emerged that the surgeon client had been prepared to
pay “for each adult corpse, if not green
or putrid, two guineas and a crown”.
A one-time resurrectionist described in his diary of 1811 how he and his
associates would often take five bodies a night from assorted cemeteries and
sometimes many more small corpses.
Some gangs became particularly notorious.
The Borough
Gang, employed by the eminent physician
Naturally, the general public were extremely perturbed
by this situation. When body-snatching was at its height, it was not uncommon for
relatives to place markers in their loved-ones graves to check for any
disturbance. Some even rigged booby traps! Soon it was decided that the only
way to counteract this growing menace was to mount round-the-clock surveillance
to catch the perpetrators in the act. And so the building of watch-houses across
London began in earnest. Most (but not all) were in the vicinity of churchyards
and manned by teams of local householders and/or appointed officials.
Below are some examples of watch-houses I have come
across recently:
(Left)
Watch-house on corner of Bermondsey St and Abbey St, built to protect the
graves of St Mary Magdalen. Now a café.
(Below) Grade II-listed Rotherhithe watch-house adjoining the churchyard of St Mary’s, built 1821. Administered by a beadle, a constable and 14 watchmen, operating in shifts during the day and night. There is a cell in the basement for holding suspects.
(Below left) Adjacent
to St Matthew’s, this is the only one of Bethnal Green’s two watch-houses to
survive. Built 1754, it was later enlarged to the rear to accommodate a fire
engine. A permanent watchman was appointed in 1792 and paid ten shillings and
sixpence a week. A reward of two guineas was paid for apprehending body-snatchers
and the watchman was provided with a blunderbuss and permission to fire from an
upper window, once a rattle had been sounded three times. The churchwarden who
lives there today still holds this right under the terms of his lease, and the
blunderbuss and rattle are still in existence. In 1965, the watch-house gained
notoriety when fascist leader Oswald Mosley stood on its steps to give his last
open-air public speech.
In the end, however, it wasn’t
the success or otherwise of the watch-houses that led to the demise of the
grave-robbers. It was the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act which
legalised the use of corpses of paupers and people who had died ‘friendless’ (i.e. no-one came to collect
their body) to be used for dissection. This effectively put the body-snatchers
out of business overnight, although documentary evidence exists to suggest that
the practice in fact continued into the 20th century.
References:
Georgian
London: Into the Streets Lucy Inglis (2014)
A History of
London in 100 Places David Long (2014)
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