If there was a cause you weren't supposed to support in the 19th century, then Dr William Price supported it. He was a Chartist, a Welsh nationalist, a Druid, anti-vivisection, anti-vaccination, anti-tobacco, an opponent of established medicine and established religion, vegetarian, a pioneer of cooperatives, in favour of abolishing marriage, and at one point had to flee the country dressed as a woman to avoid arrest by the secret police.
But he is of interest to this particular column because his personal tragedy is one of the main reasons that cremation is so common in the UK today.
Burning bodies instead of burying them was a controversial idea in Christian countries in Victorian times. Most Christian churches opposed it on the grounds that God would be unable to bodily resurrect the dead if they no longer had bodies. The secular authorities opposed it largely, in my opinion, because it was generally supported by radicals, reformers, democrats and allied troublemakers.
Not all the Establishment were against cremation, though. Sir Henry Thompson, Queen Victoria's personal surgeon, was the leading British advocate of the practice during its great revival as a concept in the 1870s. The growth in population meant that land for burial was harder to find, but Thompson's chief concern was that cremation killed diseases, while burial could spread them. Other arguments in favour were that cremations would be cheaper than traditional funerals, and shorter in duration, avoiding mourners standing around in the rain and snow catching their death of cold; urns weren't subject to vandalism in the way that gravestones were; cremation prevented premature burial; and the ashes could be used as agricultural fertiliser.
A campaigning Cremation Society was formed in 1874. It bought a piece of land in Woking, built an experimental furnace, and cremated a horse to prove that the job could be done. Some locals weren't best pleased, however, and appealed to the Home Secretary who ordered that the crematorium be mothballed. He was opposed to cremation on the perfectly sensible grounds that it meant bodies could not be exhumed for examination during murder investigations.
The ensuing stalemate was broken in characteristically controversial fashion by William Price (1800-93).
His contemporaries seem to have viewed Price as belonging to the category of brilliant but mad (or perhaps brilliant and mad). He was certainly, by all accounts, a fine doctor, and a man of considerable intellectual ability. It's also true that his eccentricities became more extreme in his late 40s, as he mostly swapped radicalism for increasingly bizarre patriotic and quasi-religious ideas.
Convinced that he had discovered the truth about prehistoric Welsh Druidism, he wasted no time in explaining it to the nation in a form of ancient Welsh known, as it happened, only to him. As a self-appointed Arch Druid, he dressed in a fox-skin headdress, what appears to be a green onesie, and with hair and beard unbarbered. He would wear only Welsh fabrics, and attended Chartist demonstrations in a carriage pulled by goats.
In his 80s, Price decided that he needed a male heir to continue his Druidic work. This was Iesu Grist ("Jesus Christ" in Welsh), born in 1883. Sadly, Iesu died at five months old. Dr. Price decided to cremate his son at the top of a hill on his own land. Police raided the attempted cremation, snatched the corpse from the flames, and arrested Price for what they considered an unlawful act.
Price's defence was that, while there was no law in England and Wales which allowed human cremation, there was likewise no law forbidding it. The court agreed with him, and it was this precedent which allowed the first unquestionably legal cremation in Britain in modern times to take place on 26th March 1885, in Woking. The deceased was Mrs Jeanette Pickersgill, a scientist and artist. The idea didn't catch on very quickly: in 1945, for instance, less than 8% of funerals in the British Isles were cremations. As of 2021, that figure was 78%.
Dr Price himself was, of course, cremated, in front of a crowd of many thousands. Apparently his final act on this earth, when he lay on his deathbed and knew the end had arrived, was to ask for, and drink, a glass of champagne.
*
Sources:
www.cremation.org.uk/Our-History
Perish the privileged orders by Mark O'Brien (New Clarion Press, 2009)
https://biography.wales/ (Dictionary of Welsh Biography)
Brewers' rogues, villains & eccentrics by William Donaldson (Cassell, 2002)
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5233/the-business-of-death-in-a-growing-world
www.cremation.org.uk/progress-of-cremation-united-kingdom
Rebel Britannia
That is a very kind thought, James - thank you very much. At the moment I'm not running anything like that, but if any reader wanted to make a modest donation to the Morning Star (where I get a lot of the inspiration for Rebel Britannia!) I'd really appreciate it. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/page/support-us
Hi Mat, do you have any sort of “gift” thing, like “buy me a coffee “ or pateron or whatever it’s called? Like to say thanks for this and your other work like Mythconceptions too. Keep up the good work! Regards James