A Colourful Story - by Lu Hersey

While standing on a grassy slope at the top of Glastonbury Tor recently, admiring the view, I felt something crunch underfoot. I looked down. It was ashes. Scattered human ashes. I hastily side-stepped onto the grass, hoping nothing of someone's beloved Brenda or Dave would come home stuck in the soles of my sandals. But another part of my mind couldn't help thinking... 

How did I know it was human ashes, and not just the remains of some New Ager's bbq? Because ash from the crematorium has a very distinctive colour. I'd seen it before - my father kept his last wife on top of the wardrobe in a polythene bag for over a year before her family gathered to help him scatter the ashes. (If you're wondering why he didn't at least invest in an urn, you haven't met my father.)

Not wishing to appear callous, but I wondered if maybe I could patent that colour. I'd call it Crematorium Gray. It might fit in nicely with Farrow & Ball's Mouse Back and Dead Salmon. All of which led me to thinking about how paint colours are created. How could I make the pigment for Crematorium Gray? 

In the past there'd be no hesitation. A canny entrepreneur would simply acquire a load of unclaimed human ashes and experiment in various ways to create the desired hue. Artists would love it. It would have authenticity. Don't believe me? Let me lead you down the rabbit hole of Mummy Brown - a truly fascinating journey.

First off, do you know why we call Egyptian bandaged corpses mummies? I didn't. Turns out it's all down to our ancestors' insatiable demand for bitumen, an oily sticky substance used in numerous (highly dubious) medical remedies over many centuries. In parts of the Middle East, bitumen rises naturally to the earth's surface, and was the main source. But over time, demand was so great that the stuff became increasingly hard to obtain. 

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, the blackened appearance of the thousands of ancient preserved corpses was mistakenly thought to be because the bandaging had been soaked in bitumen - and as our forebears had little regard for these old bodies, they started grinding them up for medical use. The old Persian word for bitumen was mum, or mumiya, and over time, the word mummy became associated with the bandaged corpses themselves.

The use of mummies in medicine carried on for centuries.  Robert James's Pharmacopeia Universallis (1747) recommends prescribing remedies using either mummy head, heart, fat, skin or bones for a range of illnesses: 'pungent pains of the spleen'; 'inflation of the body'; coughs, difficult labours, withering and contraction of joints, catarrh, dysentery, 'diseases of the head' and 'particularly the Epilepsy'.  All remedies using the appropriate part of the mummy to cure the ailment. A kind of cannibalism on prescription. And the trade in mummies was so prolific, whole businesses thrived on it. 

A bored mummy vendor

But back to Mummy Brown. Thanks to Napoleon, Egypt became a place more of interest to archeologists and treasure seekers than mummy traders. The use of corpses in medicine died out as people became more squeamish (or educated, depending on your point of view), but a new craze, mummy unwrapping, became quite fashionable. People marvelled at the heaps of bandages at these unwrappings. And rather than letting the corpses go to waste, some bright spark thought the colour might work well as a pigment. For the next four centuries (right up to the 20th century), Mummy Brown became a paint colour highly thought of by some in the artist community. Manufactured by artist paint suppliers, it was soon available in handy tubes. Still partly corpse of course, but that was conveniently glossed (or maybe varnished) over. And corpses were cheap. One pigment maker said a single mummy lasted him over twenty years.

It wasn't until 1964 that the managing director of colour makers Roberson's of London announced that the firm had finally run out of mummies. "We might have a few odd limbs lying around somewhere,' he said, 'but not enough to make more paint.' The firm had sold the last complete mummy (perhaps short sightedly) for £3, and were unable to get more.

Amazing, huh? Who knew a simple paint colour could have so much potential in story telling? Maybe next time I'll tell you about Prussian Blue, at the heart of an infamous murder case, or Scheele's Green, responsible for the deaths of thousands, including possibly Napoleon himself.... 

Meanwhile, back to Crematorium Gray. A quick internet search tells me you can have your loved ones' ashes made into all kinds of things, from ceramics to jewellery to walking stick handles. So why waste all the other bodies? I'm seriously considering putting my pigment idea forward to Farrow & Ball...just in time for Halloween. 

Lu Hersey

Lu Hersey is the author of Deep Water  and Broken Ground

on twitter as @LuWrites