A REVIVAL of resurrectionism revolted Tayport at the end of the 19th century. Graves were opened and the remains of the departed transported through the streets in midnight processions. Some of the deceased had been at rest for nearly a decade and the state of decay was so advanced that body parts could be found next to ransacked lairs.
This unholy practice was condemned by John Jolly, a member of Tayport burial board, in a series of letters to this newspaper in 1891.
He was outraged at the invasion of graves, the uplifting of “putrescent human remains” and their triumphal parading.
Tayport residents had resorted to grave opening when the old burial ground was closed and a new one commissioned. Families did not want to be split, even in death, so loved ones were spirited out of the old cemetery to the new under cover of darkness.
Mr Jolly was determined to end this “sickening business” for the sake of public health and respect for the dead. His fear was that resurrectionism would continue in Tayport until the old ground was half empty.
“The last body that was taken up had been at least nine years in the old burying ground,” Mr Jolly wrote. “To take up what remains after that time and cart it through the streets in a common cart is showing no respect and no feeling for the departed.
“It is the mystery about these midnight processions which makes everybody uneasy and uncomfortable. There is a universal feeling about these processions.”
Mr Jolly said he had visited the scene of a grave opening where he saw a bit of a coffin, a bit of a skull and a small curl of hair.
He interviewed four families of resurrectionists and found there had been no disinfection of themselves, their cart, the earth or their ghoulish canvas bundles.
But Mr Jolly was not without his critics. An anonymous correspondent wrote in defence of disturbing the dead. He gave examples of the remains of deceased wives being exhumed with decorum and reinterred.
“The desire to sleep one’s last sleep beside the dust of dearest kin is a sacred feeling,” wrote Anti-Jolly.
He also attacked Mr Jolly for advocating the storing of the bodies of drowning victims washed up at Tayport in the bierhouse next to the spirit shop in Whitenhill.
A year or so after the Tayport correspondence, a warm eulogy of Geordie Mill, the sexton at the old Howff in Dundee was published.
It praised him as a worthy but other articles published around the time of the Dundee cholera epidemic of 1832 were not quite so complimentary.
He had been suspected of links to the anatomy professors in Edinburgh who were short of raw materials following the hanging of William Burke in 1829.
Nothing was proved. But I came across a history of anatomy in Dundee, written in 1970 by RR Sturrock, which clearly names Mill as a body snatcher. I think he merits further study for a future column.