Auld, Dark Reekie

The Cabinet Of Deacon Brodie

“There’s something in hypocrisy after all. If we were as good as we seem, what would the world be? The city has it’s vizard on, and we – at night we are our naked selves.” - Robert Louis Stevenson, from his play: Deacon Brodie or, The Double Life (co-written with William Ernest Henley).

Anyone who lives in Edinburgh for any length of time will become familiar with the darkness inherent in the city. What may surprise even the most long-standing resident is how influential the Scottish capital’s past has been on the horror genre.

This influence has much more to do with city’s reputation as one of law, learning, politics and culture - “The Athens of the North”* - than the superstitious spookery of one of those ‘Haunted Edinburgh’ tours. Take the legendary Scottish cannibal Sawney Bean for example. Bean was supposedly born in East Lothian in the 16^th Century, headed a clan of 48 members in South Ayrshire and was eventually captured, brought in chains to the Tollbooth Jail in Edinburgh and then hung, drawn and quartered without trial at nearby Leith. It’s a great story, a raw slice of bloody history to thrill the tourists and draw the punters at Edinburgh Dungeons – it’s just not true.

* Edinburgh’s standing attracted many a prominent person in the 19^th Century. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor (en route to the Orkneys to create a ‘bride’ for his monster) was taken by “the beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle and its environs, the most pleasant in the world”. Bram Stoker also stopped here on his way up to his regular holiday retreat of Cruden Bay on the North East coast of Aberdeenshire which is where he planned and wrote much of Dracula. The nearby Slains Castle is now generally agreed to have served as the model for Dracula’s residence.

Sawney Beane at the entrance of his cave

A rather dapper Sawney takes the air outside his Ayrshire abode: note the woman carrying a severed leg in the background. She must be about to put dinner on.

Edinburgh has had strong links with the English government for centuries now. While the Bean story was once assumed to be an invention of the English to slander the Scots it was almost certainly widely circulated to prejudice the Scottish populace against crofters.

At the time, clan-leaders were required to provide bonds – payable in Edinburgh - for the conduct on anyone in their territory. This led them to think of themselves as landlords – and rather civilised, Edinburgh-based ones at that. When the agricultural revolution started in England these “landlords” began to seriously think about maximising “their” land’s potential. Fortunately, for them Edinburgh’s legal professionals were more than willing to draft new Scots laws to aid them in what eventually became known as the Lowland Clearances – an immediate precursor to the Highland ones. 

Sawney was merely the bogeyman to preclude sympathy for crofters and their ilk - a longpig eating phantasm. It’s fitting that he supposedly died in Edinburgh because he was almost certainly born there – dreamed up in some politician or lawyer’s office and reported as fact in the press. He never existed but his myth lives on; Wes Craven used the story as the basis for his 1977 film THE HILLS HAVE EYES which was remade in 2006 and spawned a sequel the following year. Good myths never die as long as the box-office takings are healthy.

Two villains, who definitely did exist, Irish labourers William Burke and William Hare, are even better-known than Bean but their real crimes far exceed their grisly reputations.  Commonly – and incorrectly – referred to as body snatchers, Burke and Hare never robbed a grave in their life, they were, that most modern of monsters, serial killers.

In the early 19^th Century, Edinburgh University’s medical school was one of the most advanced in the world. As science progressed so did the demand for cadavers but the only bodies that could be legally used for experimentation were executed criminals. A sharp drop in capital punishment at the time meant that only a handful of corpses were available for study. Opportunity knocked for Burke in 1827 when he was living with his common-law-wife Helen MacDougal in a boarding house in Tanner’s Close in the West Port. One of Hare’s lodgers – an old army pensioner – died owing £4 in back rent. Seeking reparations the pair stole the body from its’ coffin before it could be buried and sold it to local anatomist, Dr Robert Knox, for £7 and 10 shillings. 

The likely lads circa 1827.

Emboldened by selling  a dead tenant the pair then moved on to a sickly one, Joseph the Miller, who they got drunk on whiskey before Hare sat on his chest while Burke suffocated him – a modus operandi so successful they went on to employ it regularly - it’s now known as “burking”. Since none of Hare’s other tenant’s looked particularly sickly the pair began luring pensioners, prostitutes and sundry other acquaintances in for a dram before killing them.

They claimed 17 lives before people began to get suspicious. Dr Knox’s reputation suffered – unsurprisingly – as people claimed he disfigured the victim’s faces before anatomy lessons to obscure their identities from his students. Finally apprehended in November 1828, Hare turned King’s evidence at the court’s invitation because of a lack of a rock solid case. Immune from prosecution he gave up the goods and Burke was hung in January the following year. A rather stylish wallet made from his skin is still on display at the Royal College of Surgeon’s in the Southside – a grim irony that even the makers of the SAW movies would be proud of.

Obviously, there’s no mitigating circumstances in Burke and Hare’s murders but it’s worth bearing in mind that they were simply filling a gap in the market and both Dr Knox and Edinburgh’s medical establishment have to shoulder some of the guilt. Whatever happened to “first do no harm”, eh?

The Riddle Of The Coffins – The Legacy of Burke and Hare

In 1836 a group of boys found 17 small wooden coffins, each containing a small figure, in a cave just below the summit of Arthur’s Seat. No-one knows who made them or why but the most likely theory is that they were put there in memory of the victims of Burke and Hare.  Amazingly, at the time, no-one made the connection. Taking a firm grasp of the wrong end of the stick, The Scotsman newspaper, Edinburgh's journal of record, described the tomb as a “Satanic spelmanufactory” and speculated that a coven of “weird sisters” had “worked these spells of death by entombing the likenesses of those they wish to destroy”.

These coffins – which can be seen on display at The Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh - partially inspired the 2001 Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel, The Falls. Each hand-carved figure was wrapped in a coloured cloth, Rankin noted: “one was in a green and white striped shroud – I like to think of it as a tribute to an early Hibs supporter.”

Burke and Hare might have remained minor figures in local history if they had not captured the imagination of the young Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1881 – at the age of 31 – he wrote his first “crawler” (his own pet name for horror stories) The Body Snatcher. He initially shelved the tale “in justifiable disgust, the tale being horrid” but relented three years later when it was published in the Christmas 1884 edition of The Pall Mall Gazette.

Karloff! Lugosi! Edinburgh!"Corpses Carved! Stalking Ghouls!"

Oddly, director Robert Wise went on to make The Sound Of Music, which featured none of these elements.

The story of Burke and Hare has been filmed many times over the past decades – obviously they didn’t call these guys “resurrectionists” for nothing. All of the films (including 1985’s The Doctor and the Devils – based on a screenplay by Dylan Thomas) lingering in well-deserved obscurity. The sole exception is Val Lewton’s 1945 production, The Body Snatcher – an adaptation of Stevenson’s tale. Boris Karloff is the grave robber while fellow old pro Bela Lugosi plays a dim-witted servant in this excellent movie (directed by Robert Wise) which does a bang-up job of recreating 19^th Century Edinburgh on Hollywood soundstages. 

The most recent version of the story, John Landis’s black comedy BURKE & HARE was released in 2010 and plays so fast and loose with the facts of the case (for alleged comedic effect) that it’s almost a complete waste of time. Although it does boast some excellent use of Edinburgh locations and an unusually strong cast (including Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis as B&H).

Stevenson, of course, is responsible for the most famous “fine bogey tale” to come out of Auld Reekie and, like the Body Snatcher, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is closely based on another of Edinburgh’s darker denizens.

William ‘Deacon’ Brodie (1741-1788) was an Edinburgh city councillor, respected cabinet maker and deacon (Scots word for chairman) of the trades guild – by day. By night, he was a thief, a gambler who had five children by two mistresses – who knew nothing of each other.

William 'Deacon' Brodie.

Brodie used his day job – which gave him access to some of the richest homes and banks in Edinburgh - to make wax impressions of his customers’ keys. Brodie finally came a cropper when he organised an armed raid on an excise office in Chesser’s Court in the Canongate with two accomplices. One was captured and turned King’s evidence but Brodie had already escaped to the Netherlands (from where Brodie was planning to travel to New York). However, Brodie was captured brought back to Edinburgh and hung on (oh, the irony) a gallows that he had helped design and finance the construction of.

Billy Connolly and Siobahn Redmond in BBC Scotland's 

uninspired Deacon Brodie (1997)

Brodie’s story is a real ripping yarn but, oddly, it’s only been filmed once – a 1997 BBC Scotland TV movie with Billy Connolly as Brodie. For some reason (Connolly’s limitations as an actor?) the makers opted to portray Brodie as a “lovable rogue” rather than a debauched hypocrite and gave their travesty of the tale a “happy” ending. At the end (SPOILER ALERT) Brodie fakes his own death on the gallows using a steel collar and a silver tube (to be fair, this ending is derived from one of the many apocryphal versions of the tale told in Edinburgh pubs for decades after the event). After his execution Brodie was rumoured to have been seen in Paris years later – this is probably horseshit but his name lives on as a famous pub on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and – curiously – another in New York.

Deacon Brodie's Tavern on Edinburgh's Royal Mile yesterday.

Without Brodie, there would be no Jekyll & Hyde. From the age of six Stevenson lived in Heriot Row in the new town. In his bedroom – where he spent much of his time due to illness – there was “a cabinet – and a very pretty piece of work it was too – from the hands of the original Deacon Brodie”. Young Stevenson’s nurse “wove – with her vivid Scottish imagination – many romances” (as Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, recalled) around the furniture for her charge’s amusement. The effect, Stevenson claimed, was to give him lifelong nightmares, which is where his stories were born. “All I dreamed about Dr Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being.”

Dr Jekyll’s potion (a device RLS dismissed as “so much hugger-mugger”) has always been in plentiful supply in Auld Reekie too. As a young man Stevenson was fascinated by the back streets and closes of the old town and the “dregs of humanity” he encountered. The hostelries there also gave him the opportunity to observe the appalling changes alcohol wrought on his close friend Walter Ferrier. If you want to meet any number of Edward Hydes, just take a walk down Lothian Road on a Friday or Saturday night as the pubs are shutting – if you dare. It’s far, far scarier than any ghost tour in the city.

"More tea, Doctor?"

A rare publicity shot of Frederic March, director Rouben Mamoulian and Miriam Hopkins 

from MGM's 1931 production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can be interpreted any number of ways but Stephen King (who knows a thing or two about this stuff) wrote that it’s: “a close study of moral hypocrisy – its causes, its dangers, its damages to the spirit”. 

And where did Stevenson witness this hypocrisy? Edinburgh - where the old and new towns co-existed like two sides of the same coin - where poverty and prostitutes proliferated under the watchful eyes (and occasional custom) of Procurator Fiscals and dodgy doctors.

Horror is still a disreputable genre. It’s routinely dismissed as morbid nonsense (or “so much hugger-mugger”) by literary critics and film reviewers who regard it as an offense to their finer sensibilities. Yet, it’s enduringly popular – John Landis once observed: “no-one ever lost money by making a horror movie” – and it positively prospers in times of economic austerity and social conservatism. It’s rarely fooled by outward appearances and is eternally suspicious of people’s motives – forever digging up the rock simply to see what is crawling underneath. Perhaps it’s little wonder that Edinburgh has had such a disproportionate influence on the genre.