Vennel Steps ( Burke & Hare 2)

This is Vennel Steps.  They featured in the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, when Maggie Smith took her “gels” for a walk through Old Town.  
But turn back the clock to the year 1827 and Tanners Close opens onto the Vennel. (It means an alleyway between buildings).  It’s a very poor area of Edinburgh since the rich moved out to New Town in the 1700s.  William Burke and William Hare were Irishmen who had come for work building the Union Canal.  Now unemployed,  Hare had moved in with the widow Margaret Laird who ran a boarding house in Tanner’s Close.  Burke, came to the city with his companion Helen McDougal, and was lodging with the Hares. Newspapers later described the boarding house as an “abode of profligacy, vice and drunkenness,” which made it no different from much of the neighbourhood.

In November of 1827 one of the Hares’ lodgers died of apoplexy.  Mr Donald, an army pensioner; overweight and prone to gout, owed his landlady £4 when he died. Since they wouldn’t get the money any other way, Hare decided to sell the corpse knowing he could get £7 -£10. Burke agreed to help him for a share of the profits.  The two men replaced Mr Donald’s body in the coffin with a load of bark, and saw it safely buried. That night, they took the dead man out to sell. With little notion of how to go about it, or whom to take it to, they set out for the University.  The story will continue…….

Tanners Close was demolished in about 1903 but if you walk up the steps at night with a good imagination...............................