Odd this day
On this day, William Price, Chartist, doctor, homeopath, anti-vivisectionist (and wearer of fox fur), Archdruid, nudist, and pioneer of cremation, died at the end of what you may not be surprised to hear was an eventful life.
According to John Michell’s 1984 book, Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, Price “drew attention to himself at an early age by walking about the country naked”, something of which the local clergy did not approve, perhaps because Price was himself the son of a clergyman. Thankfully, young William eventually started to wear clothes. Unfortunately, they took the form of a white tunic, green trousers and a red waistcoat, and he also had long, plaited hair, wore the head and skin of a fox on his head, and had a long straggly beard. He had, to be fair, joined a neo-druidic group, the Society of the Rocking Stone, in Pontypridd, and become one of their leading lights.
By this time, according to Dean Powell’s 2007 biography, Dr William Price — Wales’s First Radical, he was also a doctor, and had “devised an embryonic national health system where workers paid him when they were well and he treated them for free when they were ill”. On the debit side, he was opposed to inoculation, although given that that was still in its infancy, perhaps we can forgive him.
After the Chartist Rising of 1838, in which 4,000 people marched on Newport to demand silly things like the right to vote and an end to political corruption, he fled to France (disguised as a woman, according to legend). The rising had been met by armed soldiers, hence the fleeing — and it was in Paris that things started getting really colourful.
Price declared himself Archdruid of Wales, and saw a 2,000-year-old Greek stone in the Louvre which, he said, prophesied that his first-born son would rule the Earth. He also announced that “All the Greek Books are the Works of the Primitive Bards, in our own Language!!!!!!!… Homer was born in the hamlet of Y Van near Caerphili. He built Caerphili Castle… the oldest Books of the Chinese confess the fact!!” (quoted in Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain, 2009). I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, while I’m not an expert, I’m not altogether sure about either his claims or his punctuation.
He soon returned to Wales, and continued doctoring and druiding, but legged it again 20 years later on becoming bankrupt. Finally, he returned and settled in Llantrisant as a doctor again — and was popular with his patients, despite his appearance and many eccentricities.
One of these was his decision to marry a woman 59 years his junior and name their son Iesu Grist (which, yes, is indeed Welsh for Jesus Christ). Mind you, he had already had a daughter called Gwenhiolen Hiarhles Morganwg (Gwenllian, the Countess of Glamorgan).
Rather tragically, the boy died at less than five months old, so William took him to the top of a nearby hill and built a pyre. This, to put it mildly, attracted attention. A crowd gathered, and Price was arrested.
A post-mortem found that the boy had died of natural causes, so the charges were cremating a baby whose birth had not been registered, before an inquest could be held into its death, and causing a public nuisance. He defended himself and was discharged, because the judge agreed with him that cremation was neither legal nor illegal at the time, just new and frowned upon.
This made him something of a hero, and he made some cash by coining 300 medals, decorated with a cosmic egg (and the snake which had apparently laid it) for 3d. each. He gave talks, too, but these were less popular, because no one understaood a bloody word he said (I paraphrase slightly). He had two more children (one of them also named Iesu Grist), and when he snuffed it, had just necked a glass of champagne.
You can find much, much more about him in any of the sources above — or, indeed, on Wikipedia, because his entry there is quite extensive, as you might imagine.
He wasn’t just a random eccentric footnote to history, though. The publicity attached to his attempt to cremate his son was one of the factors that helped to establish it as an acceptable practice, and the Cremation Act was passed in 1902. The first official cremation had happened in 1885 — so when Price died eight years later, his body was burned, too, according to his wishes – not in a crematorium, though, of course, but on the hillside he favoured in Llantrisant.
I’ve barely touched the surface of his long and eccentric life – and I have, I confess, not done enough research to know his views on the afterlife, but it seems to me a good job there isn’t one. His still young wife remarried, left Druidism behind to become a Christian, and renamed Iesu Grist II… er, Nicholas. And, oddly enough, Nicholas did not go on to be the second coming of Jesus, or reign over the earth in any capacity. Ah, well.
