DESCRIPTION:
Joe Topping (guitar)
Scott Poley (pedal steel)
Filmed at TwickFolk, Twickenham Feb 2016

Joe says "In the mid 18 hundreds, grave-robbing (by resurrectionists) was rife. Fresh bodies were dug up and sold to the surgeons at Edinburgh University who would do autopsies to further scientific knowledge. The Irish immigrants, William Burke and William Hare first got involved with this trade when one of Hare's elderly lodgers died. They faked a funeral and sold his body to the surgeons. After that, they decided to cut out the middle man and started murdering people. They would get a vulnerable person drunk and then suffocate them, leaving a perfect corpse. This method of killing people became known as Burking. The surgeon implicated in buying this steady supply of bodies was Robert Knox.
They were eventually caught but there was still insurficient evidence to convict them. William Hare was convinced to give evidence (turned Kings witness) against William Burke in return for immunity. William Burke was hung and subjected to a public autopsy and souvenir pocket books were made from his skin, one of which you can see along with an account of his execution in the surgeons museum in Edinburgh"