Biography

Not too long after the end of the Second World War, he proposed a film subject to a British film company concerning Burke and Hare, the notorious "resurrection men" who had sold dead bodies illegally to the famous Edinburgh surgeon Dr. Knox in the years after the Napoleonic Wars, so that he could use them in his anatomy classes. Rather than go to the trouble of unearthing corpses from their graves, they simply began murdering people in the city slums and were arrested and tried for multiple murder in 1820. (Dr. Knox, who almost certainly knew about their crimes, was ruined). Taylor worked out a rough treatment of the idea and planned to produce, but he hired the poet Dylan Thomas to write the screenplay. The project was, greatly to the chagrin of both men, canceled because of censorship reasons (and perhaps because of Robert Wise's 1945 film "The Body Snatcher", although this was not shown in Britain for many years). Thomas's screenplay was, however, published after the poet's death in 1953, and was hailed by critics as a brilliant piece of writing - Taylor was credited with the "story". The script was entitled "The Doctor And The Devils", and a film of that title, based on Taylor's subject-matter, was made in 1985. However, Thomas's screenplay was largely rewritten.