THEY are two of the most famous – or infamous – characters in the history of Edinburgh, but very few people have ever learned of the link between Half-hangit Maggie Dickson and Deacon William Brodie ...

Maggie Dickson was hanged for the crime of killing her child in 1724, but she was revived in her coffin and lived for many years afterwards. Deacon Brodie, pillar of the community by day and leader of a gang of thieves by night, was hanged for his crimes 64 years later – he did not revive, but thereby hangs a little-told tale.

I have written about Dickson and Brodie before, but I confess I was unaware of the possible link between the two miscreants until recently.

Briefly, Dickson was a fishwife from Inveresk or Musselburgh whose husband left her or was press-ganged into the navy. Poverty-stricken, she took herself off to Kelso where she worked in an inn, with the innkeeper’s son getting the blame for her falling pregnant.

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She was arrested after the body of an infant was found by the River Tweed and she confessed but only to concealing the fact that the child had been stillborn. However, a doctor testified that the child had breathed before it went into the Tweed which made her guilty of homicide in the eyes of the jury.

It was 300 years ago tomorrow on September 2, 1724, that a large crowd gathered in the Grassmarket to see the death sentence carried out, most having no sympathy for the young woman then aged 22 or 23. Pushed off the gallows, as was common in executions in those days, Maggie appeared to die of strangulation and not a broken neck. In any case, a doctor pronounced her dead and her body went into a coffin, claimed by her relatives.

There is an old legend which I repeated that medical students fought among themselves and with the family for possession of the corpse for dissection but new evidence suggests that incident might not have taken place. In a blog on the website of Surgeons’ Hall Museum, senior research fellow Professor Ken Donaldson points out: “The time of Maggie’s hanging was a century before Burke and Hare and the university did not even have a medical faculty, it being only instituted in 1726. So no extramural anatomy schools would have existed as competition to the university and so, by implication, there was no competition for bodies for dissection.”

(Image: Peter Cord)

No battling students, then, but the rest of Maggie Dickson’s story is true – she really did revive in the coffin on the cart that rattled over the dreadful tracks between Edinburgh and Musselburgh. She became something of a celebrity especially after the authorities ruled the sentence had been carried out and she was free to live her life. The death sentence was changed to “hanged until dead” after her case.

Dickson became famous in print. The poet Alexander Pennecuik, who died in 1730, wrote The Merry Wives Of Musselburgh’s Welcome To Meg Dickson, while another anonymous poet scribbled Margaret Dickson’s Penetential Confession, containing these lines: Who found me guilty of that barbarous crime, And did, by law, end this wretched life of mine; But God . . . . did me preserve.”

More like good luck on her part – or did she really seduce the hangman to keep the noose from tightening as was rumoured?

In any case, Maggie’s survival influenced at least one other criminal to try and cheat the gibbet. Born in 1741, William Brodie became a leading citizen of Edinburgh, a councillor and deacon of one of the city’s powerful guilds. But he was leading a double life, becoming the leader of a gang of burglars, as he needed money to finance his gambling and his five children by two mistresses.

After a raid on the city’s Excise Office, one of his gang agreed to turn King’s evidence against Brodie who had fled to London and then the Netherlands. He was pursued there and brought back to Edinburgh where he was put on trial and sentenced to death on a gallows he had helped to build.

His execution was set for October 1, 1788, but Brodie was determined not to die. Legend has it that he secured a steel collar but it is an undoubted fact that he pleaded with the Lord Provost to have his body quickly put into the hands of his friends.

The letter survives: “My Lord, “As none of my relations can stand being present at my dissolution, I humbly request that your lordship will permit – to attend, it will be some consolation in my last hour, and that your lordship will please give orders that my body after be delivered to and by no means to remain in gaol; that he and my friends may have it decently dressed and interred. This is the last request of ...

“Your most obedient but most unfortunate, “Will Brodie.”

The Lord Provost granted both requests, and Brodie appears to have plotted his post-mortem escape. In his book on the trial, William Roughead wrote: “It is said, by the author of the letterpress in Kay’s Portraits (1877, vol. 1., pp. 262-3), on the authority of an eyewitness of the execution, that Brodie had been visited in prison by a French quack, Dr Peter Degravers, who undertook to restore him to life after he had hung the usual time; that, on the day preceding the execution, this individual had marked the Deacon’s temples and arms with a pencil, in order to know the more readily where to apply his lancet, and that with this view, the hangman had been bargained with for a short fall.

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“The excess of caution, however, exercised by the executioner in the first instance in shortening the rope proved fatal by his inadvertency in making it latterly too long. After he was cut down, his body was immediately given to two of his own workmen, who, by order of the guard, placed it in a cart and drove at a furious rate round the back of the castle.”

Here’s where Brodie tried to imitate Half-hangit Maggie.

Roughead wrote: “The object of this order was probably an idea that the jolting motion of the cart might be the means of resuscitation, as had once actually happened in the case of the celebrated ‘Half-hangit Maggie Dickson’.

“The body was afterwards conveyed to one of Brodie’s own workshops in the Lawnmarket, where Degravers was in attendance. He attempted bleeding [...] but all would not do. Brodie was fairly gone.”

Rumours spread that Brodie had been seen abroad, but there’s little doubt that the Deacon’s plan to emulate Dickson failed utterly.