The Cremation of Iesu Grist

Dr William Price

Dr William Price (1800-1893) of Pontypridd, South Wales was a remarkable character. Price was a medical practitioner and an antiestablishment freethinker who, in his day, was considered at best eccentric and at worst a raving lunatic. With the benefit of hindsight, Price was probably a visionary and many of his `eccentricities' would not seem so out of place nowadays. He declared himself to be an Archdruid and dressed accordingly. Price championed such causes as vegetarianism and naturism. He denounced such things as the wearing of socks, marriage and the Christian religion and he outraged the good people of the South Wales valleys by naming his (illegitimate) child, fathered in his eighties, Iesu Grist, which is Welsh for Jesus Christ. Price also railed against the practice of earth burial and in 1884 he performed an act that caused him to be vilified locally and resulted in his arrest and trial. The five month old Iesu Grist died and Price cremated the body in what many saw as a provocative act of blasphemous paganism.
Price believed burial to be the antithesis of all that was aesthetic, hygienic, and scientific, resulting in "wastage of land, pollution and danger to the living" and so...

`Three days after death he took the tiny body of Iesu Grist...wrapped in white linen to the top of a nearby hill [Caerlan fields, Llantrisant]. He gently placed it in a barrel of paraffin oil [a case report states `ten gallons of petrolium'] and set it alight. People returning from chapel were astonished to see the fire and thick black smoke and rushed to the spot. The partially consumed body was snatched from the burning pile and the crowd threatened to mob Price. The arrival of the police prevented this, and Price was placed under arrest. Conducting his own defence at Cardiff Assizes, William Price was acquitted of the charges against him. Cremation was deemed lawful, provided that it did not constitute a public nuisance. The proceedings attracted international interest. Price's next scheme was to build a public crematorium locally, but he was unable to finance this. He demanded that he be given the body of his own child and, determined and fearless, he succeeded in carrying out his cremation unmolested three months later, when he burned the body in a half ton of coal.'

This rather macabre tale was of immense historical importance however. What Price did horrified devout non-conformist Wales but the cremation of Iesu Grist was something of a landmark in that it clarified the legality of cremation in Britain thus paving the way for the cremation act of 1902 and the popularisation of this practice thereafter.

When Price himself died (at the ripe old age of ninety-three), in accordance with his instructions, a makeshift crematorium was filled with two tons of good quality Welsh anthracite. His mortal remains were placed in a cast-iron coffin which baked in the intense heat for several hours. Apparently some 20,000 curious onlookers, most of whom were opposed to the practice of cremation, gathered to witness this odd spectacle.

Bone Idle