Henry Haley Holm:
A Young Surgeon’s Scandalous Behaviour in a Hendon Churchyard

At about half-past seven on the morning of Saturday 13 September, in the year 1828, John Armitage of Hendon noticed something that struck him as rather odd. He was a blacksmith by trade and he was walking through the parish churchyard. What had caught his attention was an open burial vault with three men lurking inside. But the parish clerk, William Charsley, was also in the churchyard, so Armitage saw no need to interfere.

At much the same time on the same Saturday John Connolly was strolling through the churchyard. He was a hairdresser, and, like Armitage, a resident of Hendon, and he had no doubt walked past St Mary’s, the parish church, on countless occasions without seeing anything untoward. Which is why the sight of three men inside one of the family vaults made him wonder what was going on.  

A third local man just happened to be passing through the churchyard that morning between the hours of seven and eight. His name was James Birch and he was a servant. His account of what he saw corroborated those of Armitage and Connolly. Three men were up to something in a vault that hitherto had been sealed off to guard those resting in peace inside against the unwelcome activities of strangers.

A lucrative trade

Although Hendon now shares with many parts of London the distinction of having a station on the Northern Line, in 1828 it was little more than a Middlesex village some seven miles north and west of what was then the capital. All around lay pleasant countryside with enchanting walks, lush meadows, and, of course, a rustic stone bridge spanning the local river. Some pretty distinguished individuals lived there at one time or another. One was Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. Another was the abolitionist William Wilberforce. A third was Lord William Russell, who was executed for treason in the reign of Charles II.

St Mary’s Church was a spacious building with elaborate gothic windows and a square tower adorned with battlements. Alongside it ran Hall Lane, which took you out of the village in a northerly direction. On the other side the graveyard looked out over Thistley Downage and First Sunny Hill, where cows and horses chomped the grass, and the good folk of Hendon enjoyed wholesome country air..

Of course, even in this peaceful setting odd activities in the graveyard would have raised concerns. The stealing of corpses by resurrectionists, who supplied medical schools with material for dissection, was a lucrative trade. Interestingly, only weeks after the three men were spied in the Hendon parish churchyard, the murderers William Burke and William Hare, who sold the bodies of their victims to an anatomist, would go on trial in Edinburgh. And it would not be long before the London Burkers rose to prominence for trafficking corpses, and for killing Carlo Ferrari, the so-called Italian Boy, in Bethnal Green.   

A knife and a blue bag

So who the three men acting suspiciously in the vault? One was a young surgeon. His name was Henry Haley Holm and he was twenty-two years old. Another was the parish clerk’s son, Charles Charsley, who was twenty. The third was James Wood, a master bricklayer. He was about fifty years of age.

The three witnesses were in broad agreement as to what happened next. Wood and Charsley forced open the lid of a coffin on the left side of the vault, releasing a very strong and unpleasant smell. Holm appeared to be in charge of the operation and he now told the two men that they were no longer needed. Propping open the lid of the coffin they emerged from the vault, leaving the young surgeon to get on with whatever he was planning to do.

And what he did was this. He reached inside the coffin and pulled the burial shroud down so as to reveal the top half of the body. With this done he jammed a piece of wood under the neck. Then, arming himself with a knife, he cut off the head, wrapped it up in a white handkerchief, and unceremoniously deposited it in a blue bag. One of the witnesses, Connolly the hairdresser, noticed that the severed head still had flesh on it, and, appropriately enough, strands of hair. Holm went away with his grisly trophy but came back shortly after to remove a second head from a coffin on the other side of the vault.

A passion for science

Now the vicar of St Mary’s was the Reverend Theodore Williams. He first heard that a vault in the churchyard had been broken into, and two heads removed, from one of his servants, who brought him the shocking news that afternoon. Over the next day or two he was aware that word had got out and that his parishioners were disgusted at what they saw as an act of desecration. And so on the Monday he travelled up to London with one of the churchwardens to consult Dr John Haggard, an ecclesiastical lawyer and a fellow of Doctors’ Commons. Haggard advised him to bring the matter to the attention of the authorities, and sure enough, on the Wednesday of the same week, Holm and his two accomplices found themselves face to face with Sir Richard Birnie, the chief magistrate for Middlesex, at the police court in Bow Street.

Under oath Williams told the court that on the Wednesday of the previous week, that is to say three days before the incident in the vault, Holm’s father called on him at the vicarage. The visitor explained that his son had recently bought some land in Hendon in order to establish a botanical garden. As the garden would be used for medical research and not for commercial gain, the father was hoping for a concession in the matter of tithes.   

Now Williams side-stepped the question of tithes because these fell outside the limits of his authority. However, he assured his visitor that he was supportive of his son’s plans, which had considerable merit. It was obvious that Henry Haley Holm was passionately interested in science, and Williams learnt that these interests included craniology, or the study of skulls, and that the young surgeon was a friend and pupil of the celebrated Dr Spurzheim.

Following Spurzheim

Johann Gaspar Spurzheim was a German physician who studied medicine in Vienna in the closing years of the eighteenth century. In 1800, when he was in his mid-twenties, he met Franz Joseph Gall, whose consuming interest in the structure and functioning of the brain had led him to develop theories that came to be known as phrenology, which had as its principal tenet that mental traits were measurable in the surface features of the skull. Phrenology was eventually dismissed as a pseudoscience, and in modern times it has been kept at arm’s length as having rather sinister undertones, but in the early nineteenth century it had many followers.

As we have seen, one of these followers was Henry Haley Holm, but another was his father, the John Diderick Holm who visited the vicar to discuss tithes. He too was a friend of Spurzheim and hosted him on his promotional visits to England. He also lectured on the subject, and his London homes in Gower Street and later in Bedford Square became centres of phrenological activity and education.

Young Henry was equally devoted to Spurzheim and in the course of his medical education became a resident pupil of his in Paris. But he was a talented practitioner in his own right, and in 1832, when he offered a course of instruction at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, he became the first advocate of phrenology to lecture at a recognised medical school. His achievements in the field of cerebral anatomy were widely recognised, although not all his admirers would necessarily have condoned the opening of coffins and severing of heads in a family vault in a parish churchyard.

Some extraordinary skulls

The Holms understood the importance of getting their hands, literally, on interesting heads, and they built up an impressive collection of skulls and plaster casts, many of which had once belonged either to Gall or to Spurzheim. There were some extraordinary curiosities, and none more curious than the skull of Alexander Pope, which apparently came into the possession of the elder Holm as a result of a rather shady business in the Twickenham church where the great poet was buried. The theft called for a fifty pound bribe and was pulled off by a workman, who was officially engaged in repairs to the fabric of the building, and the sexton, who covered his tracks by putting some other skull in the coffin.

The elder Holm seems to have spent a considerable sum of money on skulls, but he made full use of them in his lectures, and he would draw revealing comparisons between unlikely craniological pairs. Thus he paired Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Spurzheim himself with the murderers John Bishop and Thomas Williams, and as the latter gentlemen were London Burkers, and were hanged at Newgate for their crimes, one can only assume that Holm had a rather strange sense of humour. But the most startling illustration was the case of the boy who had been subjected by his father to eighteen months of mental ‘training’ to correct an addiction to stealing. Live casts taken before and after the treatment showed that the upper region of the boy’s head had grown noticeably.

The younger Holm employed similar methods in his own lectures. He was if anything more imaginative than his father, and he studied animal as well as human crania, offering detailed accounts of the brain of the cheetah and of other members of the feline family. But he was very much his father’s son, and in 1832 he wrote to Felix Mendelssohn asking for permission, which was refused, to take cranial measurements before and after the great man’s musical tour of England. But always the presiding genius was Spurzheim, who, as fate would have it, had died on the day that Holm started his course of instruction at the London Hospital, a remarkable coincidence that he dwelt on so movingly in a later lecture that several members of his audience were reduced to tears.

Only tidying up

However, as Williams explained to the court, it was not only his son’s scientific pursuits that John Diderick Holm discussed with him on that fateful Wednesday morning in September, for his daughter Mary, who was only twelve years old, had just died after a two-month illness. Holm told the vicar that he wanted Mary, whose mother was his second wife, Ellen White, to be buried in the vault belonging to the family of his first wife, Hannah Maria Haley, who had died in 1809 at the young age of thirty-six. The next day Holm asked William Charsley to allow James Wood to open the vault twenty-four hours before the girl’s burial to enable him to tend to any family bones that might be lying around inside.

On hearing this Williams ordered the parish clerk not to proceed, and he had to repeat his refusal when Wood turned up at the church with his bricklayer’s tools, ready to open the vault as per Holm’s instructions. But the issue refused to go away, and on the Friday afternoon Holm accosted the vicar in the street, with his son at his side, and asked him again if he might be allowed to take care of his relatives’ bones. Williams assured the two men that he was not opposed to the idea in principle, but permission would have to be given by the Consistory Court in London, whereupon the elder Holm said that he happened to be on familiar terms with Dr Stephen Lushington, the consistory judge.

This was good enough for the vicar and he instructed Charsley to have the vault opened early the next day on the understanding that the Holms did no more than pick up bones. The coffins were strictly out of bounds. And so it was that on the morning of little Mary Holm’s burial the vault in which she was to be laid to rest was opened by James Wood with the assistance of Charsley’s son. While the two men toiled, the younger Holm stood by with his blue bag, ready to spring into action. His father was nowhere to be seen.

The feelings of the community

If all this struck the Bow Street court as rather distasteful, the worst of it was learning who occupied the coffins in the vault. One was a John Lee Haley, who had died in 1771. But the other, who had died much more recently, was Hannah Maria Haley. In other words, one of the two heads Henry Haley Holm had cut off and taken it away in his blue bag, only hours before the burial of his step-sister, was that of his mother.

The young surgeon defended himself robustly against the charge of heinous and unnatural behaviour. He explained that his family was afflicted with an inherited mental disorder, and it was in the hope of discovering its cause by phrenological means, and maybe even of finding a cure, that he had removed his mother’s head. He added, rather generously, that Wood and Charsley had been ignorant of his intentions. They had merely opened the vault for him, and, if the court decided that there was a case against them, then he would pay for their defence out of his own pocket.

However, the court still ruled that the three men were guilty of a misdemeanour, and they were ordered to stand trial at the Middlesex Sessions House in Clerkenwell. There the prosecution argued that cutting off the head of one’s mother, even though she had been dead for almost a decade, constituted a violation of the feelings of the community. The defence countered this first by stressing Holm’s scientific and medical motivation, and then by producing testimonials from five medical gentlemen as to his good character, all of which must have impressed the bench mightily, as the chairman, Francis Const, let the defendants off with fifty pound fines.

The end of the Holms

Henry Haley Holm’s remarkable brush with the law did not seem to harm his career and he continued to phrenologise with vigour. He even formed a private association of trusted practitioners in order to protect the science from the administrative incompetence of the wider professional community. In 1843 he married Eliza Coke, a seaman’s daughter, but his was not to be a long and happy life, for in 1846, at the age of forty, he died.

He had been taken ill as long ago as 1834. It is not clear what his illness was, but his recovery must have been slow, as he was forced to abandon his hospital lectures. His phrenological practice also suffered and it received a further setback when in 1844 he experienced a paralytic seizure. Again he seemed to be recovering, albeit with difficulty, but it was in vain, and on the morning of 20 February, while chatting with Eliza, he was subjected to another sudden seizure and breathed his last.

Not only did he leave Eliza a widow but he predeceased his father by many years. John Diderick Holm would die ten years later in 1856. He was in his mid-eighties. He had been blessed with eight children, and no doubt they served him well as living subjects whose heads, still attached to their bodies, must have given him hours of worthwhile practice.