William Brodie

William Brodie (28th September 1741 - 1st October 1788), the son of Francis Brodie a cabinetmaker and Cecil Grant, was a respected citizen of Edinburgh, a skilled tradesman, a member of the Town Council and deacon (head) of the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons. He mixed with the gentry of Edinburgh and is known to have met Robert Burns and the painter Sir Henry Raeburn. However, Brodie also led a gang of burglars.

Let us take the Road. Hark! I hear the Sound of Coaches! The Hour of Attack approaches, To your Arms, brave Boys, and load.

See the Ball I hold! Let the Chymists toil like Asses, Our Fire their Fire surpasses, And turns all our Lead to Gold.

verses from "The Beggar's Opera", a favourite of Brodie's, that he had been singing on the night of the ill-fated Excise House raid.

Deacon Brodie had inherited more than £10,000 on his father's death; but he also acquired two mistresses (Anne Grant and Jean Watt, neither of whom knew of the other's existence) and five illegitimate children by them, a gambling habit (despite his alleged use of loaded dice), and a love of cock-fighting.

He seems to have first turned to crime in 1768, when it is believed that he took advantage of his employment as a locksmith to take wax impressions of the keys to the counting house of Johnstone & Smith, bankers in the city. His robbery netted him more than £800. Emboldened, he recruited an English locksmith, George Smith (the demon grocer), and between them set about plundering the city, even stealing Edinburgh University's silver mace. By 1786 Brodie had recruited two more members to his gang, Andrew Ainslie and John Brown (alias Humphry Moore).

His downfall was a raid on His Majesty's Excise Office in Chessel's Court, on the Canongate. The gang were disturbed, and barely escaped, in panic and confusion and subsequent recrimination. One of the gang, Brown, decided to accept the large reward offered by the town council and turned King's Evidence on the rest of the gang. When Ainslie and Smith were arrested, Brodie escaped to the Netherlands, but he was arrested in Amsterdam and returned to Edinburgh for trial. The jury found him and Smith guilty and they were hanged at the Tolbooth on 1st October 1788. He died on a gibbet that he himself had only recently redesigned; he proudly boasted to crowd that the gallows upon which he was about to die was the most efficient of its kind in existence.

In his prison cell, awaiting execution, Brodie made a full confession, wrote letters with wit and kindness, and seems to have accepted his fate with the charm that had endeared him to so many intact; he referred to his impending end as "a leap in the dark". Because his possessions had been confiscated, he had "nothing else to dispose of but my good and bad qualification"; so to one friend he left "all my political knowledge in securing magistrates and packing corporations," to his landlord his "whole stock of economy, pride, and self-conceit." His betrayer earned "my dexterity in cards and dice" and to "my good friends and old companions, Brown and Ainslie, I freely give and bequeath all my bad qualities, not doubting, however, but their own will secure them a rope at last."

Brodie however may have hoped not to die; a story circulated that he had bribed the hangman to ignore a steel collar he was wearing, in the hope this would defeat the noose. But although he had arranged to have his body quickly removed following the hanging, it seems thathe could not be revived. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the Parish Church in Buccleuch.

Brodie's story is said to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson, whose father owned furniture made by Brodie, to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde.

Deacon Brodie is commemorated by a pub of that name on Edinburgh's Royal Mile; Brodie's close off the Royal Mile is named not after William, but after his father, Francis.