The Black Book of Secrets (22 page)

Obadiah Strang was not alone in the grisly business of
bodysnatching. In his day it was a common problem, to
the extent that sometimes guards were paid to watch
over the newly buried to ensure they remained underground.
The human body was a source of great mystery
to people. Although ordinary folk were too busy trying
to survive to worry about its secretive workings, there
were others, scientists and doctors, who were intrigued
by the riddle of bone and flesh and they knew the only
way to find out more was to probe deeper.

There was only so much probing you could do with
a live body. For a more thorough investigation you
needed a dead one. There were laws: only the bodies of
executed criminals could be used in this sort of
research, but it would seem that these were not in
sufficient supply to meet demand. Thus emerged the
business of bodysnatching. At one time it was possible
to make a good living selling wickedly procured corpses
to doctors and surgeons who would dissect them alone
or under the curious gaze of anatomy students.

Jeremiah was shocked when his bodysnatching
henchmen suggested that Ludlow would provide a fresh
corpse, but they would not have been the only ones to
think in such a way. Some years later two fellows,
William Burke and William Hare, became infamous for
just such a thing. They saw in bodysnatching a marvellous
business opportunity, but not for them the hard
labour of digging up a corpse. The wily pair decided to
bypass the grave altogether and to murder people
instead. Their first victim was a lodger in Hare’s guest-house.
A case of bed but no breakfast, I suppose.

When the Sourdough brothers suggested that Horatio
Cleaver put ‘man meat’ in his pies they were joking, but
it puts me in mind of another man who was deadly
serious about his pies: Sweeney Todd, the infamous cutthroat
of Fleet Street.

Sweeney lived in London some years after Horatio
was butchering in Pagus Parvus. Abandoned by his parents
at an early age, Sweeney was apprenticed to a Mr
John Crook, a cutler by trade who fashioned, among
other things, razors. It is highly probable that Crook
forced Sweeney to steal for him, not an uncommon
arrangement between master and apprentice, so it is not
surprising that Sweeney eventually ended up in Newgate
prison. Sweeney had developed a keen instinct for survival
by then and managed to persuade the prison
barber, who shaved the prisoners in preparation for execution,
to take him on as a soap boy, a perk of which job
was the opportunity to pick pockets. When Sweeney
emerged from prison he was well equipped with the
skills to indulge in the evil inclinations that were to earn
him a place in history.

He set up a barber shop in Fleet Street, an insalubrious
place in those days, and yielded wholly to his
thieving and murderous desires. When you sat in
Sweeney’s barber chair, by all accounts you sealed your
own fate. Its design was such that at the touch of a lever
the chair would drop into the basement below to be
replaced by an empty chair that came up. Whether
Sweeney slit the throat of his customer and robbed him
while he was in the chair, or carried out his crimes after
the victim had dropped into the basement, is unclear.
What
is
certain is that if you went into his shop there
was no guarantee you would come out.

The problem with murder is that inevitably there is
a body that requires disposal. As luck would have it,
Sweeney’s shop was built on the site of an old church
complete with underground tunnels and catacombs.
One of these tunnels led further down the street to the
basement of his accomplice, a certain Mrs Lovett. Mrs
Lovett also had a shop on Fleet Street.

A pie shop.

It would appear that she and Sweeney came to a
gruesome arrangement that suited them both rather
well. Sweeney solved that problem of the bodies; and as
for Mrs Lovett, well, suffice it to say it was reported at
the time that her pies were much sought after on
account of their quality and taste.

Perhaps if Sweeney had lived in Pagus Parvus he too
would have been knocking at Joe’s door. Certainly his
confession would have put Horatio Cleaver’s into the
shade.

You may remember in the coffin maker’s confession,
Septimus Stern recalled a case where a young man had
been buried alive and discovered too late by his family.
One wonders how often this did happen in Ludlow’s day
– after all, the doctors at the time lacked the medical
knowledge or expertise that we have today to determine
whether a person really was dead. A certain Count Kar-nice-Karnicki,
alive and kicking in the 1800s, had such
little faith in the medical profession that he designed a
device to prevent his ever being buried alive. In a similar
fashion to the coffin maker, he attached a tube to a
coffin and ran it to the surface. If there was any movement
after burial, breathing perhaps, the rising and
falling of the chest, a flag would be activated above
ground and a warning bell would ring. By no means was
the Count alone in his fear. Around the same time a Mr
Martin Sheets designed his own tomb to include a telephone
so he could summon help were he to wake up
buried but not yet dead.

Finally, we cannot finish without mention of Barton
Gumbroot, the notorious tooth surgeon of Old Goat’s
Alley. Tooth rot was a serious problem in Ludlow’s day
and dentistry was a less sophisticated and more brutal
affair than it is now. False teeth were available in a wide
range of materials, including hippopotamus and walrus
teeth, elephant ivory and of course human teeth. There
was also the option of a tooth transplant (as Ludlow
found out). It had been discovered that when transplanting
a tooth, the fresher the donor tooth the better
chance it had of taking root in the receiving gum. Widespread
poverty meant there were those willing to
surrender teeth for money but, unfortunately for
Ludlow, Barton Gumbroot didn’t always wait for willing
volunteers. Jeremiah had thought to sell corpses’
teeth at one stage but, unsurprisingly, such teeth failed
to take.