o
prevent them from going off to rival schools, caused the teachers to offer
large prices, and thus made it worth while for men to devote themselves
entirely to obtaining bodies for this purpose. At first the trade was
carried on by a very few men, and without any public scandal, but the
inducements mentioned above enticed others into the business; these were
of the lowest class, often professed thieves, and the fights and disputes
of these men, one with the other, in churchyards, often made really more
scandal than the actual stealing of the bodies. It was stated by the
police in 1828 that the number of persons who, in London, lived regularly
on the profits of exhumation, did not exceed ten; but there were, in
addition to these, about two hundred who were occasionally employed. These
latter individuals were thieves of the lowest grade, and the most
desperate and abandoned class of the community. The men worked generally
in gangs, and would do anything to spoil the success of their opponents in
the business. If a body were bought by one of the teachers from an outside
source, the regular men would sometimes break into the dissecting-room and
cut the body in such a manner as to make it useless for anatomical
purposes. If this could not be done, they would give information to the
police that a stolen body was lying in a certain dissecting-room. Joshua
Brookes, the proprietor of the Blenheim Street, or Great Marlborough
Street, School, was a victim in this way; a body, for which he had paid 16
guineas, was taken away from his school through information of this kind,
and the police officer who carried out the business was, as a reward for
his efforts, presented with a silver staff, purchased by public
subscription. Brookes seems to have got on very badly with the
resurrection-men; at one time, because he refused five guineas as a
douceur at the beginning of the session, two dead bodies, in a high state
of decomposition, were dropped at night close to his school by the men
whom he had thus offended; one of these bodies was placed at the Poland
Street end of Great Marlborough Street, and the other at the end of
Blenheim Street. Two young ladies stumbled over one of these bodies, and
at once raised such a commotion that, had it not been for the prompt
assistance of Sir Robert Baker and the police, Brookes would have fared
very badly at the hands of the mob which soon collected. The fact of his
house being near to the Marlborough