Eat Thy Neighbour (9 page)

Justice, when it came, was swift and merciless. Because their guilt was so obvious there seemed no need for the expense and delay of a trial. Certainly the nature and extent of their crimes had been witnessed by the king himself and as all justice was meted out by the king, a trial would have been superfluous.

After spending a single night in the Edinburgh Tollbooth, the Beanes were taken to Leith, now the site of Edinburgh’s Leith docks. There, while the women were forced to watch, the men
had their arms and legs struck off with axes and were left to bleed to death. The women were then chained, in groups, to three great stakes and burned alive like common witches. To the very end the half-savage Beanes expressed no sign of remorse for their crimes; rather they died shrieking curses at those who had finally brought an end to their horrible, twenty-five-year reign of terror.

Some versions of the story report that one of the grandchildren, a girl who was only one year old, was spared the flames to be fostered out to a home where she was brought up without any knowledge of her horrible beginnings. But medieval justice was harsh and unforgiving. When the girl reached the age of eighteen she was arrested, informed of who she was and where she had come from before she, too, was consigned to the flames.

No one knows how many men, women and children fell victim to the Beanes over the two and a half decades they roamed Galloway, if, indeed, they ever did, but the number stated in the legends is always 1,000. Considering the number of people in the clan, and the length of time they were active, the figure is not at all out of line.

Dreadful as this tale is, the legend of the Sawney Beanes has remained alive and still finds as many new and innovative ways of being adapted as it did while it was evolving into the story related above. In 1969 the tale was turned into a stage play,
Sawney Bean
, by Robert Nye and in 1977 horror-meister Wes Craven adapted Sawney’s legend into the low-budget cult-classic film
The Hills Have Eyes
. There is currently a rock band using Sawney’s name and the Scottish tourist industry busily markets the site of the Beane cave. According to the Ayrshire Tourist Board, if you travel along the A77 for 2½ miles south from Lindalfoot, you will come to a parking area. There you will find a sign leading down a steep trail to the half-submerged seaside haunt of the Beane clan.

There is also a traditional Scottish poem entitled ‘The Ballad of Sawney Bean’, which does a masterful job of preserving the legend. It is printed here in its entirety.

Go ye not by Gallowa

Come bide a while, my frein

I’ll tell ye o’ the dangers there –

Beware o’ Sawney Bean.

There’s naebody kens that he bides there

For his face is seldom seen

But tae meet his eye is tae meet your fate

At the hands o’ Sawney Bean.

For Sawney he has taen a wife

And he’s hungry bairns tae wean

And he’s raised them up on the flesh o’ men

In the cave of Sawney Bean.

And Sawney has been well endowed

Wi’ daughters young and lean

And they a hae taen their faither’s seed

In the cave o’ Sawney Bean.

An Sawney’s sons are young an’ strong

And their blades are sharp and keen

Tae spill the blood o’ travellers

Wha meet wi’ Sawney Bean.

So if you ride frae there tae here

Be ye wary in between

Lest they catch your horse and spill your blood

In the cave o’ Sawney Bean.

They’ll hing ye ap an’ cut yer throat

An’ they’ll pick yer carcass clean

An’ they’ll yase yer banes tae quiet the weans

In the cave o’ Sawney Bean.

But fear ye not, oor Captain rides

On an errand o’ the Queen

And he carries the writ of fire and sword

For the head o’ Sawney Bean.

They’ve hung them high in Edinburgh toon

An likewise a their kin

An the wind blaws cauld on a their banes

An tae hell they a hae gaen.

Six

The Proof of the Pudding is in the Tasting: Margery Lovett and Sweeney Todd (1789–1801)

O
ccasionally a mythical character becomes so ingrained in the collective consciousness that we simply accept at least the possibility that they were real people: King Arthur, Robin Hood and, to some lesser extent, Sherlock Holmes all fall into this category. It is a rare thing, however, for flesh and blood people to become so mythologised and distorted by subsequent retellings of their lives, that the public at large assumes they had never been more than creations of fictional literature. But this is precisely what has happened in the case of Mrs Margery Lovett and her homicidal lover Sweeney Todd. How this reversal of reality took place is unclear, but maybe it has something to do with the fact that there was just a little too much ‘flesh and blood’ involved in their flesh and blood existence for them to remain comfortably among the habitués of reality.

Late eighteenthcentury London was a hard place to get ahead in. The city’s population had doubled and redoubled over the course of the century as industrialisation drove workers off the farms and sent them swarming into filthy, disease-ridden slums in search of work. To escape the horror of their lives, tens of thousands turned to drink – mostly gin – which was so cheap it was advertised as making you ‘drunk for a penny,
dead drunk for two’. With rampant poverty and alcoholism inevitably comes rampant crime and, again, London was the criminal’s ideal haunt. Greasy smoke from factory chimneys and cooking fires combined with the mists rising from the Thames to blanket the city in a fog so dense that between early November and late March even a passing glimpse of the sky was considered a minor miracle. Thieves, robbers, cutpurses and murderers could ply their trade at will, slip around a corner and simply disappear under the heavy grey blanket of foetid air. Those criminals who were caught were dispatched with almost medieval brutality. In 1785 alone nearly 100 offenders were sent to the gallows at London’s Newgate prison, most of them for such heinous crimes as stealing a loaf of bread or a piece of meat; lifted to keep themselves and their families from starving.

Among the budding denizens of this blighted underworld of crime and depravity was a youth with the unlikely name of Sweeney Todd. During the late 1770s, while still in his middle teens, Todd had already done time as a youthful offender in Newgate prison. Here he was assigned to serve as an apprentice to the prison barber in the hope that learning a useful trade would keep him off the streets and allow him to earn an honest living. Eventually the plan would work . . . at least in part.

Barbering during the eighteenth century consisted of far more than knowing how to give a man a shave and a haircut. Haircutting, in fact, was the least of the trade because most men simply cut their hair short and wore a powdered wig. Integral to the trade, however, were a variety of surgical procedures. Pulling teeth, ‘bleeding’ patients as a curative for a wide variety of minor ailments, as well as an array of lesser surgical procedures, which licensed physicians still thought to be beneath their dignity, were all in the purview of the barber-surgeon. To advertise their surgical abilities, barbers of the period displayed a pole with alternating red and white stripes;
the red representing blood, the white the bandages used to dress wounds. If this diverse bag of talents meant nothing else to Sweeney Todd, it provided him with both the knowledge of how to use a surgical knife and the perfect cover for his future occupation as homicidal maniac. A barber seen wearing a blood-spattered apron would not attract the least amount of public attention.

By 1785, Todd was out of prison and busily establishing himself in his dual occupation of barber and murderer. It was probably in this same year that he opened up his shop at 186 Fleet Street. The shop was located immediately east of St Dunstan’s church; a short walk from St Bartholomew’s hospital and only a few dozen yards from the Royal Courts of Justice. The courts were located at the point where Fleet Street changes its name to The Strand at the junction where it crossed a tiny alley known as Bell Yard. As was true of so much of London during this era, the area around the royal courts was a mixed bag comprised of regal splendour and abject squalor. The Strand, where the courts stood, was the home of the best and finest legal minds which London society had to offer. Less than 100 feet away, in Bell Yard and on Fleet Street, crime was so rampant that it was a heavy competitor with disease and rats as the most effective means of population control.

It was in this claustrophobic mixture of haves and have-nots that Sweeney Todd made a name for himself. His name, in fact, was painted over the door of his shop at 186 Fleet Street and beneath it were the words ‘Easy shaving for a penny – as good as you will find any’. Almost as soon as the shop door first opened, Todd began practising his homicidal skills, but initially he did so off the premises. The first murder ascribed to him was committed at nearby Hyde Park Corner and the second, which took place on 13 April 1785, was boldly carried out on the pavement in front of his shop. An article in the next day’s
Daily Courant
ran as follows:

A Cut-Throat Barber

A horrid murder has been committed in Fleet Street on the person of a young gentleman from the country on a visit to relatives in London.

During the course of a walk through the city he chanced to stop to admire the striking clock of St Dunstan’s Church and there fell into conversation with a man in the clothing of a barber.

The two men came to an argument and of a sudden the barber took from his clothing a razor and slit the throat of the young man, thereafter disappearing into the alleyway of Hen and Chicken Court and was seen no more.

Since this entire grisly episode took place immediately in front of Todd’s shop, one can only wonder why the constabulary of the time – the Bow Street Runners – failed to grill Todd, especially since he already had a criminal record and had served time in prison. Whatever the reason, it seems he was never questioned about the matter. Although Todd skated away from his first two murders, he must have sensed that if he continued his homicidal activities in public, sooner or later someone would see him and report it to the authorities. A change of venue, and tactics, was obviously called for.

How Todd came to discover that his shop stood over the old crypts of St Dunstan’s church, the fact that the crypts and vaults were connected to a series of old catacombs and how he came to invent his notorious revolving barber’s chair, are all matters open entirely to conjecture. What we do know is that before the end of 1785 he had installed the mechanism which would eventually make him infamous. Into the floor of his shop Todd fitted a trap-door, arranged so it would revolve on a centrally located pivot. The swinging section of floor was held in place by an iron bar that slid back and forth beneath the floor. When a lever in the back room of the shop was pulled,
the bar withdrew, allowing the trap-door to fall open. On to this revolving floor panel Todd fixed two wooden barber’s chairs – one on each surface – so that when the trap was sprung, one chair would fall backwards, heading downwards towards the basement vaults, while its twin would swing upwards to take its place.

The first customer known to have test-piloted Todd’s chair was Thomas Shadwell. Shadwell was a local beadle, or watchman, employed by St Bartholomew’s hospital. He was well known, well liked and well respected; he also had a particularly expensive watch and made the mistake of showing it to Todd. Had Shadwell been a regular at Todd’s shop, or had it been a sunny day with lots of people milling around outside in Fleet Street, he might have had his shave and wandered off to work as he did every other day. Sadly, it was late evening, it was raining, a heavy fog blanketed the area and since Shadwell had never been to Todd’s before, it was unlikely that anyone would ever connect him with the place. After settling his customer in the chair and complimenting him profusely on his fine watch, Todd excused himself, walked into the next room and pulled the lever attached to the bar beneath the floor.

Thomas Shadwell must have been more than a little surprised when the floor in front of him suddenly tilted upwards . . . his head and shoulders flew violently back, pitching him towards the floor. But of course the floor was no longer there. Shadwell – as would so many others over the years to come – fell backwards into the darkness of a subterranean crypt, landed on his head and broke his neck. Just in case a victim survived the fall, which about one in three did, Todd raced to the basement and slit their throat with his razor.

Initially, Todd stashed the carcasses of his victims in a series of vaults which led off the crypt beneath his shop, once he had removed their valuables, clothes and wigs, but this soon presented a problem. The bodies were beginning to pile up. A
better method of disposing of them had to be found. Enter Mrs Margery Lovett.

Although no records exist to confirm the facts in the case, it is probable that Margery Lovett was born and bred in the same London ‘stews’ that created her associate, Sweeney Todd. What separated her from most members of the underclass of her day seems to have been her charm and determination to rise above her surroundings. Physical descriptions of her vary considerably; some reports say she was already plump, greying and middle-aged by the time of her arrest, while others say she was tall and slender with a mass of dark, curly hair and a fine, pale complexion. Whatever the case, it is beyond argument that she possessed charm and was more than ready to cash in on it to improve her social condition.

While still in her teens she had married a baker named Joe Lovett and learned his trade, which included making meat pies. When Lovett died unexpectedly a few years later, she took up with a ‘Major’ Barnet who dumped her when he fled London with the law nipping at his heels. Later, she became the mistress of a rich merchant who rented a house for her in the fashionable Covent Garden area. Sometime between 1786 and 1787 she took up with Todd who had already become rich on the booty left behind by the victims of his revolving barber’s chair. Quick to recognise a golden opportunity when he saw one, Todd realised that Margery Lovett’s talent as a pie maker could add more money to his already growing pile of cash while simultaneously providing an efficient means of disposing of his victims.