The campaign to legalise open-air funeral pyres in Britain reached the High Court this week, with a judicial review to determine whether the laws confining the burning of the dead to crematoria are a violation of Hindus’ human rights.

Yet nothing in this current debate is half as bizarre as the court case that permitted cremation in Britain in the first place. Between the Dark Ages and the 19th century the Christian custom of burying the dead went almost unchallenged. But after Siemens devised furnaces capable of efficient human incineration in the 1870s, Queen Victoria’s surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson, founded the Cremation Society, which argued for reducing bones to ashes as a “sanitary precaution”.

Legally, burning corpses was considered a grey area, and its opponents included bishops and the Home Secretary, R. A. Cross. Still clinging to the hope of eventual legislation, the Cremation Society’s leaders backed away from testing the existing law for fear of prosecution. They were, however, unprepared for the actions of a selfprofessed Welsh Druid.

In Llantrisant near Pontypridd opinion divided over whether Dr William Price was eccentric or certifiable. His interest in Hindu customs and Welsh culture manifested itself in his growing a long white beard, declaring himself an Archdruid, forsaking shoes and traipsing around in a fox-skin headdress.

At 84 he fathered a child by his housemaid (who was in her twenties). Announcing the boy as the Messiah, he named him Jesus Christ Price. However, five months later the boy died. On Sunday, January 18, 1884, the villagers emerged from their respective churches and chapels and looked up to the nearby hill in horror. There was Dr Price burning his dead infant on a coal funeral pyre.

Led by their clergymen, the villagers rushed up the hill and, amid scuffles, extracted what remained of Jesus Christ Price. His father was brought to trial. However, the presiding judge, James Fitzjames Stephen, issued a landmark ruling: “A person who burns instead of buries a dead body does not commit a criminal act unless he does it in such a manner as to amount to a public nuisance at common law.”

The Cremation Society went from fearing that Price was just the sort of lunatic who would harm its cause to acknowledging that he had effectively won it a crucial legal victory.

Dr Price celebrated by fathering two more children, a daughter, Penelope and a son, Jesus Christ II (who later changed his name to Nicholas) and died in 1893, with the parting request: “Give me champagne.” According to his own instructions, he was cremated outdoors. The deed took eight hours and drew a crowd of 20,000 sightseers. Little wonder, perhaps, that legislation in 1902 made cremation a private, indoor, affair.

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