There are numerous accounts in the Victorian newspapers of of thieves and other miscreants getting their just comeuppance at the hands of honest and law abiding citizens, and, in this blog, I want to cover one such case.
It concerns a groups of dastardly body snatchers.
Now, bodysnatching was close to endemic in the early part of the 19th century. Indeed, in a previous article I covered the story of body snatchers at the Ten Bells on Commercial Street.
However, for the following story, which appeared in The Kirkintilloch Herald on Wednesday the 8th of March, 1893, we are heading to Scotland.
THE BODYSNATCHERS’ FRIGHT
Donald Fraser lived in a small cottage adjoining the parish burying ground.
He had a sharp young son, about eleven years of age, whom familiarity with the churchyard had deprived of all superstition.
Renwick – for that was the boy’s name – often got into scrapes, for which he always got punished by his father when on his way to bed.
HE STOLE MONEY FROM HIS MOTHER
On one occasion be took sixpence of his mother’s without her consent.
This Renwick knew to be a grave offence, and he went upstairs, ere bis father, who was late, came home.
HIS FATHER ARRIVED HOME
Fear prevented him falling asleep till he should know the upshot of his crime.
HE HID IN THE CHURCHYARD
The sound of his father’s foot on the stair was ominous in Renwick’s ears; and so he quickly jumped up, hid behind the door, and when his father went forward to the bed, he rushed downstairs, and out into the churchyard, with nothing on save his night-shirt.
There he hid beneath a table-like gravestone.
He preferred to stay there all night, rather than go home to the thrashing which he knew awaited him.
THREE MEN ARRIVE
Shortly after the clock struck one, he heard a gig approach, an unusual thing in such a place and at such an hour.
Renwick lay still.
The gig stopped at the gate, and three men jumped down, took a couple of spades and a pick out of the boot, and were coming in at the gate, when one of them said, “Which of us is to hold the horse?”
HIS OFFER OF HELP!
Renwick heard this, and, seeing an easy way out of the scrape, he jumped from underneath the stone, and exclaimed, “I’ll hold the horse for sixpence.”
The suddenness of his appearance, and whiteness of the apparition, startled the three men, and at once they threw down their spades and pick, and were soon galloping away at 16 miles an hour.
Renwick ran after them and shouted, “Ye needna run away, I am no dead; but they heard him not.”