On this day in 1752

While Burke and Hare may be Scotland’s most famous bodysnatchers, they weren’t they first. Almost 80 years earlier, Jean Waldie and Helen Torrence had been plying a similar trade in Edinburgh’s streets.

Students in the city were in need of a regular supply of fresh cadavers for dissection as part of their studies for medical degrees. However, bodies weren’t always easy to come by, which made grave robbing – and murder – a profitable trade.

Get rich quick scheme

Jean Waldie, who had been tasked with watching over a child that was close to death, hatched a plan for making a quick profit. When the child died, she would hide its body and put an equivalent weight in its otherwise empty coffin to convince the authorities that it had been boxed up for burial. The body could then be sold to university students who could use it however they chose.

It seems that the child’s parents had been aware of the plan and, at least initially, happy for it to proceed. Perhaps they would get a cut of the proceeds. However, they changed their mind, which left Waldie with waiting customers but nothing to sell them.

Waldie and Torrence turn to murder

Not wanting to lose a sale, Waldie and her accomplice, Helen Torrence instead murdered John Dallas, a young child who lived close by, by getting him drunk, then suffocating him. They presented his body to the students who agreed to go ahead with the purchase.

However, when the students later dumped the body and it was discovered, attention turned to Waldie and Torrence, since they already had a history of kidnapping children. When they were arrested, they argued that, while they may have sold the body of a dead child, there was no proof that they were responsible for the death itself.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this line of defence didn’t convince the court. They were convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged in the Grassmarket on 18 March 1752. William Burke met the same fate, at the same location, early the following century.

 

...and on this day in 1854

Alexander Allan started with nothing and built up what became the world’s largest privately owned shipping empire. He originally trained as a shoemaker, but went to sea in the early 1800s and, just a few years later, was already part-owner of his first ship.

He set up a regular freight shipping route between Scotland and Canada, which was more involved than the equivalent job would be today. As well as plotting a route and piloting his ship from one end of the journey to the other, he was also responsible for selling the cargo on behalf of his customers.

Allan’s own ships

Over the next few years he commissioned several ships to increase the size of his fleet and its capacity to transport cargo. His sons joined the company, eventually giving Alexander the opportunity to step back from active involvement in the cargo transport itself, while keeping a close association with the company on land.

The sons continued to build the company following his death in 1854 and, two years later, it was awarded the Royal Mail contract to carry post to and from North America.