His eloquent and theatrical defence and subsequent acquittal captured the imagination of the nation and paved the way for the legalisation of cremation through the Cremation Act of 1902.Ī grateful, though nervous Woking crematorium finally fired up its burners, installed but never lit due to the ambiguity of the law, and the age of burning our dead began. A heartbroken Dr Price took the boyʼs body to a hilltop, on a Sunday and in full view of the nearby chapel, and attempted to cremate him in paraffin.Ī furious crowd dragged the body from the flames, calling it a “vicious act of blasphemy” and rioted, nearly killing the doctor in the process. It was the death of the aforementioned son when he was barely one year old that was to seal the doctorʼs place in history.

Often seen stalking the hillsides naked in his youth, by the time his son - defiantly named Iesu Grist (Jesus Christ) - was born to him in his eighties, he had taken to wearing a scarlet waistcoat and fox-skin headpiece and parading through town carrying a blazing torch and druidical crescent moon. He had already formed a reputation as a flamboyant eccentric, endorsing free love and vegetarinisim and refusing to treat those who smoked. In 1883 when Welshman Dr William Price (above) healer, druid and naturist, fathered a child with his housekeeper, nearly sixty years his junior, nobody was surprised.

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