Body Snatching in SheffieldThe resurrection men, the watchers and the riots

In the early nineteenth century, Sheffield's dead were not always left in peace.

The town's medical school on Surrey Street, founded in 1828, needed bodies for anatomy teaching, and the law supplied almost none. The gap was filled by the resurrection men, who dug up the newly buried at night and sold them to the surgeons.

Sheffield people fought back. Families watched over the graves of their dead, and watch houses were built, like the one that still stands in the churchyard at Bradfield. When word got out that a grave had been robbed, crowds gathered. The Anatomy Act of 1832 changed the law, but it did not end the story.

Almost every name in this book comes from a newspaper column, a court register or a parish record.

• January 1829A rumour that a grave at St Paul's had been opened brought a crowd to Surrey Street, and the Medical Institution was stoned.
• 1830Joseph Hall was sent to prison for six months for attempting to steal a body from the churchyard at Bradfield.
• November 1831A Sheffield constable stopped Alexander Lyons in Arundel Street carrying the body of William Hopkinson, taken from the chapel yard at Attercliffe. Lyons was sentenced to two months' imprisonment.
• 1835A crowd destroyed the Sheffield School of Anatomy.
• June 1862Rumours that bodies were being taken from Wardsend Cemetery ended in a riot, and the sexton's house at Burrowlee was burned. No body was ever shown to have been sold, but the sexton, Isaac Howard, was imprisoned for three months for disinterring the dead.

Eleven chapters in four parts, each one led by Sheffield:

• The Road to Sheffield: how anatomy came to need the dead, from Alexandria to Georgian Britain.
• Sheffield in the Age of the Resurrectionists: the tools and trade of the resurrection men, the Surrey Street school, Burke and Hare’s shadow over the town, the Anatomy Act of 1832 and the riots of 1835.
• Sheffield After the Act: legal anatomy, lingering fear, the Wardsend scandal of 1862, and the long road from the workhouse to the body donor.
• Sheffield and the Wider World: watchmen, mortsafes and coffin torpedoes, and how Sheffield compares with Scotland, Ireland, America and the body brokers of today.

With a Sheffield timeline, a map of the town’s resurrection sites, a guide to researching the records yourself, a glossary, and photographs of the places as they are now.

The book is drawn from original sources: the Sheffield Independent, Iris and Telegraph, Home Office criminal registers, West Riding Quarter Sessions indictment books, parish burial registers, the 1841 census, old trade directories and the newspaper cuttings at Sheffield Local Studies Library. Where the sources disagree, the book says so.

I would like to hear from anyone with:

• family stories of body snatching, grave-watching or riots in Sheffield and the surrounding villages
• old photographs of churchyards, watch houses, mortsafes or the Surrey Street Medical Institution
• letters, diaries or other papers that mention the resurrection men

Send a message

Or email glynnmay-author@pm.me.

Glynn May is a Sheffield historian and lorewright. He spent 25 years in NHS Management at all six of Sheffield’s NHS hospitals, working alongside senior medical staff. One of his roles was selling surplus medical assets at auction for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, from a pair of forceps to a gamma camera, which gave him a first-hand knowledge of the instruments of medicine.

Body Snatching in Sheffield is his second book, and comes on the back of the success of his first, The Sheffield Royal Hospital: A History of a City’s Quest for Healthcare, published by 1889 Books in November 2026. More about Glynn · What is a lorewright?

Tell me when it’s published