Excerpt
Workhouse master Alfred Feist’s troubles with the law began on 10 December 1857. On that day two distraught men arrived at the Lambeth Police Court to seek a magistrate’s help in locating a corpse that had mysteriously disappeared from the St Mary Newington parish dead house.
A woman had been admitted to the workhouse infirmary a month earlier to receive medical care, as her family was too poor to pay a doctor’s private fees. But soon after arriving inside that grim institution she had heard disturbing rumours about activities in its dead house, which were then being investigated by the Poor Law Board.
Mrs Parsley, who was dying of tuberculosis, heard of the investigation and was terrified. When her husband and brother arrived to see her on visiting day she begged them to swear that they would take her body out of the workhouse when she died. They promised that they would, which meant that they must somehow find the money to bury her privately. Then the two men took the precaution of informing the workhouse authorities that this was their intention. Perhaps unknown to them, they thus set in train that section of the Anatomy Act of 1832 under which such a formal declaration of a wish not to be dissected could be made. When that happened, the body was to be sent to its grave intact.
One week later Mrs Parsley died. True to their word her grieving relatives came to the workhouse to collect her body, well within the forty-eight hours the Act gave them to do so, yet it was nowhere to be found. The two men confronted Alfred Feist, who told them that Mrs Parsley’s body had already been buried – in mistake for that of a man named Bazeley. This news made no sense at all to Mrs Parsley’s relatives. How could a young woman’s body be mistaken for that of an old man? And if it had, where was Mr Bazeley’s corpse now?
They went directly to see the parish constable, who accompanied them to the Lambeth Police Court to inform the magistrate that the workhouse was in a state of uproar. The neat system under which Feist and undertaker Robert Hogg had been disposing of paupers’ bodies was about to be dramatically exposed.
This entrepreneurial pair had turned the institution’s dead house into little more than a body-processing facility. Some of their actions were lawful under the Anatomy Act. When no relatives arrived to claim a corpse, Feist signed the anatomy inspector’s official notice making it available for dissection and sent the notice via Hogg to Inspector John Bacot’s office. In return Hogg received from the inspector a warrant permitting him to remove the corpse to a medical school. That is how things were meant to work under the Act.
Feist and Hogg went much further. Hogg found bodies where he could, bringing them into the institution’s dead house – people who had died outside the workhouse, even some who had died outside the parish. In addition he brought into the dead house the remnants of dissected bodies he had been paid to remove from Guy’s Hospital medical school. At any given time there were three or four shells or coffins containing human remains in various stages of decomposition lying in that busy place.
The men’s ingenious system for converting these bodies into cash was relatively simple. On the morning of a funeral, after relatives had viewed the body in its coffin, they were sent from the dead house to the waiting room across the yard while Hogg or Feist nailed down the coffin lid. A little later the relatives were called and told to step into the funeral carriage while Hogg’s men lifted a coffin into the accompanying hearse. That coffin contained someone else’s dissected remains. Then both carriage and hearse set off north, back past Guy’s Hospital, crossing the Thames at London Bridge and driving through the streets to Victoria Park Cemetery in Bethnal Green, where the relatives unknowingly witnessed the burial of a dismembered stranger. And that evening at the dead house, under cover of darkness, Hogg’s men collected the body of the person who was meant to have been buried that day and carted it to Guy’s medical school, accompanied by the anatomy inspector’s warrant making it available for anatomical examination.
It could be that Feist and Hogg had convinced themselves that nobody suffered from their scheme. Relatives were unaware that they were following a stranger to the grave. Guy’s medical students were learning their anatomy well, on a supply of bodies that made them the envy of London’s other schools. Anatomy Inspector John Bacot was content, as each of his forms had been filled in and was neatly filed. All Feist and Hogg were doing was balancing an unfortunate mismatch between demand and supply, for which they surely deserved some reward. Hogg received it by way of the two payments he claimed for the same burial, one from the St Mary Newington parish, the other from Guy’s Hospital medical school. Feist’s reward came in the form of the gratuities he received from Guy’s together with occasional sums from the undertaker.
Were it not for Mrs Parsley’s persistent relatives, revelations about the scheme might have been kept away from the public. But it was exposed in the Lambeth Police Court a case against Feist eventually made its way all the way up to the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey), resulting in the first legal test of the Anatomy Act.
Regina v Feist (1858) had far-reaching ramifications. Its practical result lay in having established that a person who had legal possession of a dead body may send it for dissection with impunity, provided that relatives did not ‘in express words’ dissent. This was notwithstanding the fact that they might not have been asked for their consent, and might even have been deceived into believing that the body had been buried in the ordinary manner. Although such trickery might outrage public opinion, it did not contravene the Anatomy Act, which empowered workhouse masters, hospital surgeons, keepers of asylums and gaols among others to send bodies to anatomy schools without needing to inform anyone of the Act’s existence or of the provisions that enabled a formal protest.
This was the Act’s etiquette.