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Sherds was intrigued to encounter two interesting items recently that have to do with the treatment of human remains. (Anyone who is grieving or has suffered a recent bereavement might like to skip over these reports.)
The first was an advertisement for a Victorian Society field trip to Woking Crematorium, the first building of its kind in the UK, designed in 1885 for the Cremation Society of Great Britain.
The proposed building attracted a great deal of opposition from the local community at the time, so Sir Henry Thompson, President of the Cremation Society (and Surgeon to Queen Victoria), stated that the crematorium must be ‘agreeable in appearance… harmonising with the surrounding woods’ and should have ‘reassuring ecclesiological associations’ to pre-empt any suggestion that cremation was a ‘heathen process’. To that end, the Society chose a church architect – Edward Francis Channing Clarke – to design the Gothic chapel, cloister, and columbarium.
Since its formation in 1874, the Society has promoted cremation as a ‘rational, safe, and dignified method for the disposal of the dead’. Early supporters included John Everett Millais, John Tenniel, and Anthony Trollope. Opponents, led by the Vicar of Woking, argued that cremation might be used to prevent the detection of death following violence or poison. They argued that it was also ‘unchristian’ because it would prevent the dead from being resurrected – even though there are numerous biblical references to cremation.
It was Dr William Price (1800-1893), the Welsh physician and political activist, and a founder of the Neo-Druidic movement, who won the all-important test case that led to the legalisation of cremation. In 1883, he attempted to cremate the body of his five-month-old infant son on a pyre that he constructed on top of Caerlan Hill, east of Llantrisant, arguing that ‘it was wrong to bury a corpse, thereby polluting the earth’.
The police intervened, snatched the body, and arrested Price, charging him with infanticide. A post-mortem concluded that the child had died of natural causes, so Price was charged with ‘performing cremation’, which the police believed to be illegal. Mr Justice Stephen disagreed, stating that cremation was perfectly legal provided that no nuisance was caused to others in the process.
The first official cremation occurred at Woking Crematorium in 1885, and this is where Thomas Hardy, Frederick Engels, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and Kate Greenaway, among others, were cremated. The Society went on to draw up the guidelines and safeguards that were later adopted as the basis for the first Cremation Act of 1902. According to the Society, cremation now accounts for approximately 78% of all funerals in the UK.
A tasteless custom
Another item that piqued Sherds’ curiosity was an image in The Times on 26 April 2025 taken from a 14th-century manuscript depicting Krum the Fearsome enjoying a banquet. Krum sounds like a character from a fantasy drama, but he was a real ruler, described by historians as ‘able and energetic’, and bringing law and order to Bulgaria during his reign from c.AD 796 to 814. He is also credited with a decisive victory over the invading army of the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros I. The picture in The Times, taken from the Chronicle of Constantine Manasses, showed Krum being presented with a bowl made from the defeated emperor’s skull, lined with silver and filled with wine.
The accompanying article by Dominic Sandbrook looked at the ‘long and distinguished history’ of drinking from other people’s skulls, which appears to have been commonplace in the past. Palaeolithic skull cups were found in 2011 at Gough’s Cave in Somerset (see CA 254 and 288), while the Japanese warlord Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) served sake to his friends in a gold-lined skull, and Chinese chronicles record numerous examples where the defeated head of an enemy was turned into a drinking cup after being lined with lacquer.
When Lord Byron’s gardener dug up a cranium in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, the poet was seized, in his own words, by a ‘strange fancy’ – he sent the skull to London to be polished and mounted with gold, subsequently inviting his friends to drink from it. He even wrote a poem on the subject: ‘Better to hold the sparkling grape/Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood’, he declared, adding: ‘When, alas! our brains are gone/What nobler substitute than wine?’.
Sandbrook goes on to describe various folklorish beliefs about the medicinal properties of drinking from a skull, especially as a cure for epilepsy – a practice recorded as late as 1909 on the Isle of Lewis. But when in 1898 General Herbert Kitchener disinterred the skull of the Sudanese warlord Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah bin Fahal (ostensibly in revenge for General Gordon’s death in the battle of Khartoum in 1885) there was outrage back home. Contemporary journalists reported that Kitchener intended to use the skull as an ink pot. Queen Victoria remarked that this smacked of the Middle Ages, while a young Winston Churchill called it ‘barbarous’, and The Manchester Guardian said that it hardly formed a suitable beginning for ‘the lessons in civilisation which we are to teach the Soudanese [sic]’.
Woodchip paper
Turning to a different part of the anatomy, Sherds was visiting a museum recently that displayed an old newspaper with an advertisement for ‘splinter-free toilet paper’. This called for further investigation and, as ever, Google provided enlightenment.
It appears that the perforated toilet paper rolls with which we are all familiar appeared on the market in 1890 thanks to the Scott Paper Company of Philadelphia, but that the manufacturing process, using wood pulp, left the occasional unpleasant surprise. Some 40 years later, in 1935, the Northern Tissue company of Green Bay, Wisconsin, began promoting ‘splinter-free’ toilet paper.
But the honour for inventing today’s softer two-ply tissue goes to an English company: St Andrew Mills Ltd, based in Walthamstow. The new Androll brand (an amalgamation of ‘St Andrew’ and ‘toilet roll’) was launched in 1942. Sales took off when it was later renamed ‘Andrex’. The mill expanded to around 400 employees, until it was taken over by the Bowater Company in 1955. The site of the Walthamstow factory is now a block of flats called Paper Mill Place – perhaps a more acceptable name than any of the possible alternatives one could think of.
Planning law
The Government’s Planning and Infrastructure Bill (CA 423) continues to generate much debate, with newly published research by the Planning Portal Market Index showing that nine out of ten planning applications receive consent and that 64,210 permissions were approved in March 2025, a 29% increase over the same period last year. However, more than a million homes granted planning permission since 2015 have not yet been built. This suggests that it is not the planning process that causes delays, but developers who do not build the homes once they have consent. In response, the Government is considering the inclusion of ‘use it or lose it’ provisions in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to require developers to make progress or face having permission withdrawn. Opposition politicians have said that this ‘places too many conditions on housebuilders’.
Meanwhile, there is growing concern about the section of the bill that will allow developers to pay into a national nature recovery fund rather than make site-specific provisions for the protection of species and habitat. There is particular concern, for example, about ‘irreplaceable habitats’, such as rare and vulnerable chalk streams or ancient woodland, which cannot be recreated elsewhere. And while bats and newts are often portrayed as a major impediment to free-for-all development, analysis by the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts shows that newts were relevant in just 140 (0.8%) of the 17,433 planning appeals in England in 2024, and bats in 432 cases (2.48%).
The Government’s own watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection, issued a statement in May saying that ‘as drafted, the provisions are a regression… aiming to improve environmental outcomes overall, whilst laudable, is not the same as maintaining in law high levels of protection for specific habitats and species’. The Government responded by saying that it rejects this claim: ‘We have inherited a failing system that has delayed new homes and infrastructure while doing nothing for nature’s recovery, and we are determined to fix this through our plan for change.’
