On November 5, 1831, two east Londoners turned up at King's College School of Anatomy in The Strand with the body of a young boy to sell.
Gruesome though it was, their deal was not unusual. John Bishop and James May along with Thomas Williams, who lived in Nova Scotia Avenue in Shoreditch, were Resurrection Men who made a living answering the needs of the anatomy schools.
As a new exhibition at the Museum of London attests, the economics were grim but undeniable - demand outstripped supply.
The hospitals and private schools needed 5,000 cadavers a year for dissections. In 2006, the Museum of London Archeology uncovered a cemetery at the Royal London Hospital in use between 1825 and 1841.
The skeletons found there showed evidence of dissection, from craniotomies to severed limbs.
Surgery was something of a bloody lottery but lack of training material hampered would-be surgeons further - they were left to share bodies or study wax models.
Thomas Wakley, founder of The Lancet, wrote in 1827: "Even at the enormous prices now demanded by the Resurrection Men an exceedingly small supply can only be obtained."
The trade of the grave robbers was necessary but reviled. Fears about entering the afterlife intact and the serial killing indignities of Edinburgh grave robbers Burke and Hare persuaded many to take precautions.
Some were buried in metal coffins (Mrs Campbell's last refuge of 1819 is on display), while others stood guard over newly-buried loved ones. Some laid mantraps in cemeteries.
But still the deals between the Resurrection Men - "burkers" - and the hospitals held firm.
So, when Bishop and May presented the corpse at the Strand school and demanded 12 guineas, it was not an unusual transaction.
And although the fresh state of the body alarmed anatomist Richard Partridge, he still handed over eight guineas.
However, his suspicions grew and he alerted police. A coroners jury offered a verdict of murder with Bishop, Williams and May the prime suspects.
On 19 November, Supt Joseph Sadler Thomas searched the cottages at Nova Scotia Gardens and found clothing in a well and one of the privies. Not just from the so-called Italian boy (believed to have been Carlo Ferrari) but from multiple murders.
Bishop, 33, Williams, 26, and May, 30, were all found guilty of related crimes. Before sentence was passed Bishop admitted that the Italian boy was, in fact, from Lincolnshire on his way to Smithfield. He had been drugged with rum and laudanum and when he lost consciousness he was pitched into a well to drown.
They also admitted to the murder of Frances Pigburn and her child who were sleeping rough in Shoreditch, and a boy named Cunningham. Williams and Bishop admitted to stealing up to 1,000 bodies over 12 years.
They were hanged at Newgate on December 5, 1831, before a crowd of 30,000 with May respited because he had no knowledge of the murders.
The case of the "Italian boy" was one of the drivers of the Anatomy Act of 1832 which tried to put the Resurrection Men out of business by providing "unclaimed" bodies for dissection.
In the 100 years following the Act 99.5% of the 5,700 corpses delivered came from workhouses, asylums and hospitals. The poor paid the price but the Resurrection Men were out of business.
These days, 1,000 bodies are needed a year. They are provided mostly by donors but, still, demand outstrips supply.
And the bodies of May and Williams? They were removed the same night - for dissection.
- Doctors, Dissection And Resurrection Men at the Museum of London. Go to museumoflondon.org.uk.
Saturday, 10 November 2012
Stage review: 55 Days, Hampstead Theatre
STAGE
55 Days
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Two charismatic actors reveal the compelling contrasts of two celebrated historic figures in Howard Brenton's nuggety Civil War clash.
REVIEW
Hampstead Theatre has been reconfigured. The seats are placed on either side of the stage which creates some awkwardness (backs to the audience, darling) but promotes the idea of division; a Parliament of opposites.
Which is the theme of Howard Brenton's marvellous new play set at the tail-end of the English Civil War when battle fatigue could have tipped the country back into the kind of tyranny it had spent years trying to escape.
The 55 days of the title is the time (1648-49) between the rampant Army purging parliament of latent royalists and the moment when this most bloody chapter of English history was brought to a close with an axe.
"We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country," declares Oliver Cromwell.
And the sticky business of nation-building - of compromise and idealism - is the theme that excites the playwright.
The Roundheads are winning the war but likely to lose the peace as, yet again, brother is set against brother over the meaning of victory and the interpretation of God's will.
Amid the chaos, however, two characters (then as now) take centre stage and both are embodied by actors equal to the challenge.
King Charles I is prissy and self-righteous, the only one dressed in historical garb - with the familiar lace and flounces - and with a lilt of Scottish to his precise voice as he calls upon his position as heaven's sacred anointed to scare the bejesus out of his God-fearing opponents.
Mark Gatiss is clever in the court scenes and intriguing in isolation with the poignancy driven solely by his predicament and never from his glassy heart.
Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell is the charismatic and flawed pivot of the piece.
Cromwell had no official leadership position but provided the moral heft and Henshall shows us the dithering and the decisiveness in a mesmerising and nuanced performance.
What Brenton calls the "obligation" scene - the fictional meeting of the two men - is as nourishing and accomplished as the long build-up demands with Cromwell urging Charles to see sense and "come to terms" and the king preparing serenely and doggedly for martyrdom.
The scene is topped by the trial where the brightest legal minds make law on the hoof to counter the king's mix of canny insight, blind intransigence and unexpected populism.
Director Howard Davies stages all this amid flanks of filing cabinets, with tiny ties and tinny typewriters conjuring the thin gruel of post-war squabbling.
Simon Kunz, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Daniel Flynn and Gerald Kyd provide solid support in a rewarding work; a reminder that the institutions we take for granted were carved, with blood and blister, from stubborn stone.
Until Nov 24. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.
55 Days
Hampstead Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Two charismatic actors reveal the compelling contrasts of two celebrated historic figures in Howard Brenton's nuggety Civil War clash.
REVIEW
Hampstead Theatre has been reconfigured. The seats are placed on either side of the stage which creates some awkwardness (backs to the audience, darling) but promotes the idea of division; a Parliament of opposites.
Which is the theme of Howard Brenton's marvellous new play set at the tail-end of the English Civil War when battle fatigue could have tipped the country back into the kind of tyranny it had spent years trying to escape.
The 55 days of the title is the time (1648-49) between the rampant Army purging parliament of latent royalists and the moment when this most bloody chapter of English history was brought to a close with an axe.
"We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country," declares Oliver Cromwell.
And the sticky business of nation-building - of compromise and idealism - is the theme that excites the playwright.
The Roundheads are winning the war but likely to lose the peace as, yet again, brother is set against brother over the meaning of victory and the interpretation of God's will.
Amid the chaos, however, two characters (then as now) take centre stage and both are embodied by actors equal to the challenge.
King Charles I is prissy and self-righteous, the only one dressed in historical garb - with the familiar lace and flounces - and with a lilt of Scottish to his precise voice as he calls upon his position as heaven's sacred anointed to scare the bejesus out of his God-fearing opponents.
Mark Gatiss is clever in the court scenes and intriguing in isolation with the poignancy driven solely by his predicament and never from his glassy heart.
Douglas Henshall as Oliver Cromwell is the charismatic and flawed pivot of the piece.
Cromwell had no official leadership position but provided the moral heft and Henshall shows us the dithering and the decisiveness in a mesmerising and nuanced performance.
What Brenton calls the "obligation" scene - the fictional meeting of the two men - is as nourishing and accomplished as the long build-up demands with Cromwell urging Charles to see sense and "come to terms" and the king preparing serenely and doggedly for martyrdom.
The scene is topped by the trial where the brightest legal minds make law on the hoof to counter the king's mix of canny insight, blind intransigence and unexpected populism.
Director Howard Davies stages all this amid flanks of filing cabinets, with tiny ties and tinny typewriters conjuring the thin gruel of post-war squabbling.
Simon Kunz, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Daniel Flynn and Gerald Kyd provide solid support in a rewarding work; a reminder that the institutions we take for granted were carved, with blood and blister, from stubborn stone.
Until Nov 24. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com.
Film review: Skyfall (12A)
FILM
Skyfall
(12A) 142mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Fifty years on and still no-one does it better - and this Bond spectacular ranks among his finest, and most personal, adventures
REVIEW
The 50th anniversary of this most rewarding of franchises demands a suitably sharp and explosive response.
Skyfall is just such a response. Director Sam Mendes has created a gritty and personal story which has a fair smattering of exotic locations (Shanghai is de rigueur for a blockbuster these days) but is mostly set close to home. Very close to home.
Play Bond bingo with the recognisable locations including, obviously, the District line and, less obviously, the swimming pool above the Four Seasons in Canary Wharf. (Less obviously because its been transposed to China.)
But the geographical location is nothing compared to the proximity of the plot to the heart of the protagonist (simmering Daniel Craig).
The past returns to haunt melancholic M (a peerless Judi Dench) and Bond must track down and destroy the threat before the threat gets there first.
The fact that the threat comes in the form of bitter blond bombshell Silva ups the ante for he is one of the cleverest, slimiest, creepiest villains of the canon, with Javier Bardem licking his lips as he gets to create a camp horror straight from Gotham City.
As Bond and M fight a rearguard action against this most formidable of foes (they resort to Home Alone/A Team style make-do-and-mend which is always fun if not spectacular) the snarky but affectionate relationship between the matriarch and the bad boy is filled out in sparse and wry exchanges.
All this happens between gloriously OTT action set pieces, captured by imperious director of photography Roger Deakin who shoots acts of destruction like works of art.
"What's going on! Report!" says the glacial M listening in from HQ.
"It's rather hard to explain ma'am," says Bond's sidekick.
And so it is with this Bond which is packed with talking points and plot twists that, by next week, will have set Twitter alight but until then remain under embargo.
Suffice it to say we get to meet new characters, Eve (Naomie Harris), Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) - remember those names - as well as the new beetle-browed Q (Ben Wishaw) who gives Bond nothing more fancy than a gun and a radio.
"Not exactly Christmas," snarls Bond.
"Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that any more."
And so it goes. Ribbing the formula. Destroying the formula. Embracing the formula. Renewing the formula.
Throughout there are hat-tips to Bonds past, beautifully and lightly done - the DB5! - but nothing gets in the way of the muscle-crunching action that culminates in a fittingly intimate finale hurling us straight into the next 50 years.
Can't wait.
Skyfall
(12A) 142mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Fifty years on and still no-one does it better - and this Bond spectacular ranks among his finest, and most personal, adventures
REVIEW
The 50th anniversary of this most rewarding of franchises demands a suitably sharp and explosive response.
Skyfall is just such a response. Director Sam Mendes has created a gritty and personal story which has a fair smattering of exotic locations (Shanghai is de rigueur for a blockbuster these days) but is mostly set close to home. Very close to home.
Play Bond bingo with the recognisable locations including, obviously, the District line and, less obviously, the swimming pool above the Four Seasons in Canary Wharf. (Less obviously because its been transposed to China.)
But the geographical location is nothing compared to the proximity of the plot to the heart of the protagonist (simmering Daniel Craig).
The past returns to haunt melancholic M (a peerless Judi Dench) and Bond must track down and destroy the threat before the threat gets there first.
The fact that the threat comes in the form of bitter blond bombshell Silva ups the ante for he is one of the cleverest, slimiest, creepiest villains of the canon, with Javier Bardem licking his lips as he gets to create a camp horror straight from Gotham City.
As Bond and M fight a rearguard action against this most formidable of foes (they resort to Home Alone/A Team style make-do-and-mend which is always fun if not spectacular) the snarky but affectionate relationship between the matriarch and the bad boy is filled out in sparse and wry exchanges.
All this happens between gloriously OTT action set pieces, captured by imperious director of photography Roger Deakin who shoots acts of destruction like works of art.
"What's going on! Report!" says the glacial M listening in from HQ.
"It's rather hard to explain ma'am," says Bond's sidekick.
And so it is with this Bond which is packed with talking points and plot twists that, by next week, will have set Twitter alight but until then remain under embargo.
Suffice it to say we get to meet new characters, Eve (Naomie Harris), Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) - remember those names - as well as the new beetle-browed Q (Ben Wishaw) who gives Bond nothing more fancy than a gun and a radio.
"Not exactly Christmas," snarls Bond.
"Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really go in for that any more."
And so it goes. Ribbing the formula. Destroying the formula. Embracing the formula. Renewing the formula.
Throughout there are hat-tips to Bonds past, beautifully and lightly done - the DB5! - but nothing gets in the way of the muscle-crunching action that culminates in a fittingly intimate finale hurling us straight into the next 50 years.
Can't wait.
Stage review: You Can Still Make A Killing
STAGE
You Can Still Make A Killing
Southwark Playhouse
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Nicholas Pierpan's morality tale watches the Masters of the Universe struggle to move on with their feet of clay following the Lehman Bros collapse.
REVIEW
Remember the man who walked out of Lehman Brothers bearing a box and a shell-shocked expression? This is his story. Sort of.
This is the story of all of them - what happened following those end-of-days in 2008: who won, who lost and the price they paid, in terms of kudos, yoga mats, lattes and souls.
Writer Nicholas Pierpan puts a human face to the Masters of the Universe, takes them home and makes them sheepishly explain their actions to their peevish wives.
He rips away the Gieves and Hawkes carapace and prods away at the raw nerves beneath seeing what stuff these men are made of, stripped of their expense accounts and their vacuous locker room brinkmanship.
Edward and Jack are old friends. Fidgety Jack (Ben Lee) was busy being a surgeon but was lured to the hothouses of Canary Wharf by posturing, pompous Edward, a chip-on-his-shoulder Croydon boy.
But the survival of the fittest demands swift acrobatic moral re-positioning.
So while Jack flourishes in his hard-bitten hedge fund, ousted Edward (Tim Delap) spitballs with prospects in Starbucks, sells the dream house and finally, at wit's end, joins the FRA (the fictitious FSA) where he plots his revenge against the System.
Their wives ride the same rollercoaster. Shrill Fen (Kellie Bright) abandons dreams of a third child and moves out to Acton, which might as well be Soweto until it becomes Nirvana; while sinuous Linda (Marianne Oldham) sucks up to the yummy mummies she hates. All want to conform, all want to be different.
Their fortunes change in ways that would reveal too much. (It is soapy fare, to be honest, with bombshells and declamations that don't ring true but move the plot along.)
All are despicable and honourable; all are false and honest. In short, they're human, simply reacting, shifting, settling and justifying.
Director Matthew Dunster fills the wide stage with lacquered desks and swivel chairs that become offices and coffee shops and schools while a uniformly robust cast offers plenty of treats and talent. (William Mannering as FRA foot soldier Chris nearly steals the show armed only with a bag of nuts.)
When the story of how art responded to the financial meltdown comes to be written, this smart play may only make a footnote but it does attempt a more ambitious reach than some of the more simplistic dialectic tracts.
Future versions will be shorter. Two hours 40 minutes doesn't suggest the fast-snap of a City on heat.
Instead it is a muffin-topped morality tale intent on capturing what happens when a combatant quits the trenches and is forced into no-man's-land.
- Until November 3, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
You Can Still Make A Killing
Southwark Playhouse
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Nicholas Pierpan's morality tale watches the Masters of the Universe struggle to move on with their feet of clay following the Lehman Bros collapse.
REVIEW
Remember the man who walked out of Lehman Brothers bearing a box and a shell-shocked expression? This is his story. Sort of.
This is the story of all of them - what happened following those end-of-days in 2008: who won, who lost and the price they paid, in terms of kudos, yoga mats, lattes and souls.
Writer Nicholas Pierpan puts a human face to the Masters of the Universe, takes them home and makes them sheepishly explain their actions to their peevish wives.
He rips away the Gieves and Hawkes carapace and prods away at the raw nerves beneath seeing what stuff these men are made of, stripped of their expense accounts and their vacuous locker room brinkmanship.
Edward and Jack are old friends. Fidgety Jack (Ben Lee) was busy being a surgeon but was lured to the hothouses of Canary Wharf by posturing, pompous Edward, a chip-on-his-shoulder Croydon boy.
But the survival of the fittest demands swift acrobatic moral re-positioning.
So while Jack flourishes in his hard-bitten hedge fund, ousted Edward (Tim Delap) spitballs with prospects in Starbucks, sells the dream house and finally, at wit's end, joins the FRA (the fictitious FSA) where he plots his revenge against the System.
Their wives ride the same rollercoaster. Shrill Fen (Kellie Bright) abandons dreams of a third child and moves out to Acton, which might as well be Soweto until it becomes Nirvana; while sinuous Linda (Marianne Oldham) sucks up to the yummy mummies she hates. All want to conform, all want to be different.
Their fortunes change in ways that would reveal too much. (It is soapy fare, to be honest, with bombshells and declamations that don't ring true but move the plot along.)
All are despicable and honourable; all are false and honest. In short, they're human, simply reacting, shifting, settling and justifying.
Director Matthew Dunster fills the wide stage with lacquered desks and swivel chairs that become offices and coffee shops and schools while a uniformly robust cast offers plenty of treats and talent. (William Mannering as FRA foot soldier Chris nearly steals the show armed only with a bag of nuts.)
When the story of how art responded to the financial meltdown comes to be written, this smart play may only make a footnote but it does attempt a more ambitious reach than some of the more simplistic dialectic tracts.
Future versions will be shorter. Two hours 40 minutes doesn't suggest the fast-snap of a City on heat.
Instead it is a muffin-topped morality tale intent on capturing what happens when a combatant quits the trenches and is forced into no-man's-land.
- Until November 3, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
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