Excellent news...

Image: the Coffin Works, Jewellery Quarter

Last year, I blogged about the Newman Brothers Coffin Works in Birmingham and the cuts in national public funding which led to regional development agency Advantage West Midlands, which owned the site, to pull out restoring the building as a museum. However, the building has now been purchased by the Birmingham Conservation Trust as a result of a £150,000 grant from Birmingham City Council. For more on this story and the future of the Coffin Works, see here...

Book of the Dead...

Image: Catatonic Man, Magenta Magazine 

This photograph is one of 52 images captured by Canadian photographer James Burman in his provocative new book, The Dead. The book is a collection of memento moris and post-mortem photography that documents his travels from the catacombs of Sicily to the gas chambers of Poland. You can read more about the book and the man in question here, which alas, is only available in the US and Canada at this time.

Skeleton of dismembered child found by archaeologists...

Image: Dr Jill Eyers, Bucks Free Press

Archaeologists re-investigating a mass burial of 97 infants have discovered the skeleton of a dismembered child. The group has been carrying out tests on excavation finds from 1912 at the Yewden villa, examining the remains of the infants which were rediscovered in boxes kept at Buckinghamshire County Museum. The examination has revealed that the infants died at 40 weeks gestation, leading Chiltern archaeologists to suspect that the site in Hambleden could have been a Roman brothelm, where unwanted children were systematically killed.

For more on this story, see here or alternatively, check out the new BBC series 'Digging for Britain' which features the excavations at Yewden villa in the first episode.

Tattoo collection...

Yoinked from Morbid Anatomy, I highly recommend checking out the ‘photo story’ documenting a collection of tattoos found in the Department of Forensic Medicine at Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland.

Image: Morbid Anatomy

Accompanying the images is a fascinating article, an excerpt from which is provided below!

Preserving the Criminal Code

Photo Stories

Katarzyna Mirczak

In Poland, tattoos are common among criminals. Traditionally, they could be found on people who exhibited a tendency towards perverse behaviour: such as burglars, thieves, rapists and pimps. It was noticed that a significant percentage of tattooed people showed signs of personality disorders and aggressive behaviour. In the 1960s in Poland, getting a prison tattoo required special skills and criminal ambition – it was a kind of ennoblement, each tattoo in the criminal world was meaningful…

The tattoo collection at the Department of Forensic Medicine at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland consists of 60 objects preserved in formaldehyde, a method devised by one of the experts employed by the Department at the turn of 20th century.

The tattoos were collected from the prisoners of the nearby state penitentiary on Montelupich Street as well as from the deceased on whom autopsies were performed.

The majority of the prison tattoos represent connections between the convicts. Besides gestures and mimics it is a kind of secret code – revealing why ‘informative’ tattoos appeared on uncovered body parts: face, neck or arms.

The collection was created with a view to deciphering the code – among prisoners known as a ‘pattern language’.

By looking closely at the prisoners’ tattoos, their traits, temper, past, place of residence or the criminal group in which they were involved could be determined.

The entire photo story, with the full article and image collection can be found here.

Preserving the past...

Preserving the past? A bottle of embalming fluid from the Coffin Works collection. Photograph by Tim Ellis – see more of his work here.

In trawling the interwebs t’other day, I happened to chance upon the sad story of the withdrawl of funding from a proposed project to transform a Victorian coffin works by the name of Newman Brothers in the centre of Birmingham into a delightfully macabre museum. Not only would I have crawled across broken glass on my hands and knees to snaffle a job there, this really would have made a unique and unusual attraction. More importantly however, it leaves the factory building on the EH ‘Heritage at Risk’ register and a curious collection without a home. The entire debacle makes for an interesting read and if you feel as miffed as I do then make your voice heard here…