Bentham's bonce

[oursin]

Further to extensive discussions on my last post about JB's auto-icon.

I'm pretty sure that the actual head has been photoshopped in to the image I posted, because last I heard it was kept in a vault at UCL (in fact, I think somewhere in the archive store) because, not only did it rapidly demonstrate the limitations of Victorian mummification techniques and become extremely grotesque, sometime during the 1980s it became infested with carpet-beetle and had to undergo extensive and specialised conservation treatment.

(And everyone will be getting Bentham keyrings from me for Christmas, hmmmm?)

ETA MI BENTHAM LOLTHEORISTZ, LET ME SHOW U THEM (from my mad lol-thing phase last summer).

Comments

[liadnan]

We (I was at UCL in the early 90s) were always told that the actual head had been damaged when Kings stole it and used it as a football. That does seem to be a recorded legend, though my recollection was that it was supposed to have happened in the 20s: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/info/jb.htm .

(Mainly KIngs went for Phineas, the Union mascot. People once sought to persuade me to get involved in a plot to steal Reggie the King's Lion (again) but I declined, pointing out that by then it was filled with concrete.)

[gmh.livejournal.com]

I heard exactly the same thing as you, but then, I was also at UCL in the early '90s, so this is not terribly surprising.

If I also remember, UCL Union in the late '60s tried to stop the regular thefts of Phineas by adopting a new Union mascot - the Post Office Tower - and inviting rival institutions to steal that instead.