The Italian Boy – A Drinker’s History of London

*Meat porters at Smithfield in the 1920s; the market was a bit less bloody by then.*

What follows is a mid-19th century description of The Great Day at Smithfield; that is, the Monday before Christmas, when the Christmas dinner was bought.

‘It presented an agitated sea of brute life. Drovers were scurrying hither and thither, carrying flaming torches in their hands, and arranging the cattle in rings and sheep in pens. The poor cattle, could not, from very want of room, be tied up in rows … In one place was a group of brown-coated Devons; in a second a group of bulky Herefords … a mass of black Scottish cattle diversified the picture in one spot; … a small number of rugged-coated monstrously horned Spanish cattle … Here, at one place, was an ox towering over all the rest, and having the reputation of weighing 300 stones; and there, at another spot, was a pig of 40 score, a weight at least equal to that of an average Smithfield ox. … The salesmen, drovers and butchers, many of them booted to the thighs, dashed in amongst the dense masses, and after incredible difficulties separated the animals sufficiently to enable the butchers to inspect them before purchasing. … Great cruelty was practised, the poor animals being goaded on the flanks and struck on the head before they could be marshalled in their proper places.‘ (Unsourced quote: I got it from Smithfield Past and Present, Forshaw and Bergstrom, Heinemann,1980.)

Thirty thousand animals, driven from all over the country (Highland cattle would have been on the road for three weeks), were crowded into a four acre space, beaten through narrow medieval streets by brutal City corporation drovers and lining the pavements with mud and shit. The fact that Smithfield was home to other trades besides butchery was a source of endless tension between the meat merchants and the other local shopkeepers, who bemoaned the mayhem of the cattle trade, the damage to their premises by rogue animals, and so on. Stray animals were constantly turning up in bizarre places, and were occasionally rescued from the Fleet or even the Thames. Contemporary newspapers covered the ‘accidents’ at Smithfield: in 1828 a woman looking in a jewellery shop window in Hatton Garden was killed by a bullock that had been goaded by a group of boys. Market days were great opportunities for pickpockets, who would sometimes attack the drovers and scare their animals, using the ensuing stampede as cover (and this is what the boys who scared that bullock may have been doing). On one day in the 1830s, there were reports of a gentleman gored by a bull in Kingsgate Street, a young lad trampled by a bullock in Long Lane, and of a rogue pig who got into a house in Turnmill Street and attempted to eat a baby. (Urban myth alert: there are other stories about a baby-eating pig that lived hereabouts, so I suggest that this latter item should be taken as a bit of period sensationalism.)

*Smithfield live market circa 1830: note the gate to St. Bart’s hospital at rear right.*

Apart from live animals causing disturbances, the chaotic conditions in which livestock was butchered lent a hellish, blood-spattered character to Smithfield’s streets. In Oliver Twist, Dickens describes the locale thus: ‘Through the filthy lanes and alleys no-one could pass without being butted by the dripping end of a quarter of beef, or smeared with the greasy carcase of a newly-slain sheep.’ An entire industry of slaughtering, flaying, rendering, dressing, tanning, soap making and tallow making was based in Smithfield, right up until the market was abolished in 1855. The district was peppered with slaughterhouses in basements, yards and even ordinary houses, unlicensed killing pits whose greasy entrances opened onto the street and into which pigs and sheep were flung to their doom. Cowcross St. was known for its knackers’ yards, each one of which would slaughter and boil down as many as sixty worn-out horses per day; this process was known in the trade as ‘melting’. Naturally, they weren’t just trading in old horses, as horse theft was endemic; a gentleman’s horse could be stolen, sold to a slaughterhouse and have its throat cut before its owner noticed it was gone. Sharp’s Alley, a meandering tributary of courts off Cowcross St., was home to Atcheler, ‘knacker to his Majesty’, alongside a ‘bladder-blower’, several cat-gut dealers, a manufacturer of cart-grease and various butchers of diseased cattle. There were furriers who specialised in rabbit and even cats’ fur, often taken from stolen cats, and who flayed the animals whilst still alive so as to preserve the quality of the pelt. Perhaps not coincidentally, the rats in Sharp’s Alley were said to be the biggest and fiercest in London.

Sarah Wise’s terrific book The Italian Boy includes a chapter on the character of Smithfield in the 1830s and mentions The Bear and Ragged Staff, a tavern that used to stand at the north-eastern side of the market, which functioned as a combination pub and slaughterhouse. Market inspectors reported finding a putrefying cow’s carcass hanging up in the doorway, prior to being transformed into the cheapest of cheap meat products: cattle feed. (Even in the 1830s there was concern that feeding any meat – let alone diseased meat – to herbivores was an outrageous practice, yet it wasn’t disallowed until after the BSE crisis in the 1980s.) The Italian Boy is the story of how ‘resurrection men’ ensured that the medical schools of early 19th-century London had a regular supply of fresh meat to work with. This loathsome trade in the dead was centred around Smithfield and the Fortune of War pub, which stood on Giltspur Street, handy for St. Bart’s hospital (and near Newgate Gaol, almost within sight of the public executions held outside the prison’s Debtors Door). Smithfield, a place of slaughter since the 1200s, had evolved its own shadow trade in human corpses. In Great Expectations, Pip calls Smithfield ‘the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam […]’; but, like any provincial market town, the area was well-served by pubs: the index to The Italian Boy also lists The George, The King of Denmark, The Bell, The Three Tuns … hostelries where traders in flesh of all kinds could take refreshment between deals and bloodshed. And, in August, Smithfield played host to Bartholomew’s Fair, an ancient cloth fair, est. circa 1180, which functioned as an annual Londoners’ holiday. The rowdiness of Bartholomew’s Fair was celebrated by Ben Jonson in his titular play, celebrating the event as a microcosm of English society. (But that’s for another post.)

Despite the distaste of Charles Dickens and the public at large, private interests kept the live market at Smithfield going until 1855, after which it was moved a much bigger site north of Islington. The noble Victorian City Corporation buildings that comprise today’s Smithfield market constitute a (successful) bid to sanitise the consumption of animal flesh. The City Corporation suppressed Bartholomew Fair at the same time as they closed the live market; but for those who seek contemporary excitement, there’s always the nightclub Fabric, opposite the Corporation market buildings on Charterhouse St., which hosts a distinctly 21st century bacchanalia.

*Christmas display at Smithfield Market; note the illuminated crib fashioned from lard. From ‘Panoramas of Lost London’, Philip Davies, pub.: English Heritage.*

*The Fortune of War, circa 1900. Note the **Golden Boy**.*

Every trade has its pub. And The Fortune of War, Giltspur Street, Smithfield, was a speakeasy for the bodysnatching fraternity. At one time, it was said that the pub accommodated its clientele to the extent that the landlord allowed customers to leave corpses under the benches – with tags attached – whilst they went to try to strike a deal with the surgeons at St. Barts, just around the corner (the porters at Barts left empty hampers outside the hospital, a tacit invitation for them to be taken and filled with fresh ‘specimens’ by those in the ‘resurrection’ business’). And if Barts didn’t want what you were offering, there were plenty of other places you could try.

Saturday 5th November 1831. A ferry carrying two men arrived at the riverside entrance of Robert Smirke’s handsome new King’s College (so new that a mason was still working on site) to enquire whether the resident surgeons might be interested in a body – or, as they said in the trade, a ‘Thing’. The two men, one of whom was drunk, were trying to sell a ‘Big Small’, and wanted ten guineas for it. (A dead child was a ‘Small’; a ‘Big Small’ was a dead adolescent. Ten guineas would be worth something in excess of £1,000 today.) They had been trying to sell the Thing since the previous day and had traipsed all over London in search of a good price (as well as hospitals, there were private academies where anatomy was taught), fortified by frequent visits to the pubs en route. The surgeon said he might be interested – but would only offer nine guineas. The men went away and returned later with two accomplices and a hamper containing the body of a boy of about 14, which they tipped onto the floor. ‘It’ s a good ‘un’, said one of the men trying to make the sale. The dissecting room porter and the college anatomist were suspicious of the freshness of the corpse and called in the Covent Garden police.

At the start of the 19th century the science of anatomy advanced and the ‘bloody code’ of the 18th century receded, resulting in fewer executions and, thus, fewer bodies available for study. Surgeons had to make a queasy compact with those who were prepared to furnish subjects by illegal means, and prices were high. But although the trade aroused public revulsion, it was seen as a relatively trivial crime, as a human body was not considered to be anyone’s actual property. The commonest method of obtaining a body was simply to dig up a newly-dug grave, but other ruses included posing as a relative of the recently deceased to claim their remains, or stealing them from homes where they were awaiting burial. But some in the trade resorted to murder, and the notoriety of Edinburgh’s Burke and Hare in 1828 exposed the medical profession’s indifference to the sources of their research material. In London in 1831 the murder of ‘The Italian Boy’ threw the furtive relationship between body- snatcher and man of science into sharp relief, and shone a searchlight into London’s darkest corners.

John Bishop, the ringleader of the gang collared at King’s College (and who claimed to have sold over five hundred Things), later confessed that the ‘Italian Boy’ was actually a drover from Lincolnshire that he had picked up on market day in Smithfield and enticed back to his family home in Nova Scotia Gardens, Bethnal Green: a swampy, semi-rural slum. There, Bishop and his son-in-law accomplice Thomas Williams stupefied the boy with rum and laudanum, then drowned him in a well at the back of the house. Bishop admitted to using this method on another child and a woman. (In his confession Bishop exonerated his grave-robbing colleague James May of knowledge of the murders. The party who carried the body to King’s was a Covent Garden porter and sometime corpse-hauler who was not charged in connection with the killings.) It is at least possible that the real number of Bishop and Williams’s victims was far greater but no-one was in a position to prove it. Many women and children went missing in the capital but institutions kept very few records of their transactions with bodysnatchers, and human remains were totally consumed by dissection. As no-one reported a Lincolnshire drover missing, the corpse was formally identified as Carlo Ferrari: the lost ‘Italian boy’, trafficked from northern Italy by a ‘master’ who sent him out to exhibit animals for pennies on London’s streets.

Sarah Wise’s magnificent book on the case depicts London in that nameless age in the reign of William IV, the same city that terrified the young Dickens and formed the setting for his greatest novels.* An unlit, unpaved, undrained, festering town that has more in common with Hogarth’s London than the city of the high Victorian era. A stinking metropolis of rookeries and public executions, of cattle driven to slaughter through busy streets, overflowing cesspools, vagrant children and numberless poor. In this context the body-snatchers sound like almost any other street trader, hawking their wares around the teaching hospitals and schools of anatomy before the produce went off. What is really striking is the social aspect of the trade in the dead; as Ms Wise comments, convivial drinking was central to the enterprise, and a pub like The Fortune of War was a safe space for those in the trade to share tips and compare notes on the going rate for a Thing. On Friday, the day before the trip to King’s and during one of the gang’s many trips to the pub, James May stood at the Fortune’s bar rinsing blood and flesh from a set of teeth he produced from his handkerchief. The teeth belonged to the dead boy, and he nonchalantly discussed their potential value with the barman: May was confident that he could get two pounds for them. (He managed to sell them to a dentist before his arrest; the dentist later displayed them in his window as ‘the teeth of the murdered Italian Boy’.) The Fortune of War was only a few yards up the hill from Newgate Gaol, and it was outside the Debtor’s Door of that prison that Bishop and Williams were hanged before a large crowd on 5 December, 1831, just four weeks after their arrest. Their bodies were promptly handed over for dissection. James May was sentenced to transportation to Australia, but died on board a prison ship before the voyage began. The Fortune of War was demolished in 1910.

* Sarah Wise suggests that Dickens might actually have been present at the Old Bailey for the climax of the trial of the Bishop gang: an anonymous published account of the reading of the verdict bears a striking resemblance to Fagin’s court appearance in Oliver Twist.

Smithfield’s Great Day

Flogging A Dead Thing