Deacon Brodie
William Brodie was a respected man about town in late-18th-century Edinburgh. He was a cabinet maker and locksmith, and also served as a deacon of a trade guild and as a city councillor. What people didn’t know was that Brodie was also a degenerate gambler who broke into houses partly to pay for his debts, and partly for the sheer fun of it. Like Major Thomas Weir (possibly) before him, Brodie lived a successful double-life for many years, but was caught after an audacious attempted robbery failed in 1788, shocking the city of Edinburgh to its very core.
Part of Brodie’s effective camouflage came from his ancestry. He was the son of a successful businessman, and grandson to 2 prominent lawyers, and thus had a misleadingly-bourgeois reputation. Being a cabinet maker and locksmith was also vital. Brodie would design and build furniture for his wealthy clients, giving him intimate knowledge of where valuables could be stored, and was also the city’s premier locksmith, which meant that he could make wax impressions of keys, get duplicates made, and rob his unsuspecting customers. As well as his gambling debts, Brodie also had 2 mistresses and 5 children to support.
Though it is thought that his first robbery was of £800 from a bank in 1768, Brodie’s criminal career only really took off in summer 1786 when he formed a gang with 2 other thieves to launch a campaign against businesses and the city’s richest denizens. Brodie’s downfall came when he bungled the armed robbery of the Excise Office in Edinburgh. His accomplices were bribed to give him up, and Brodie was tracked down hiding in the Netherlands. A staggering 40, 000 people turned out to see him hanged in October 1788; testament to a bloodthirsty and punitive age.