JOHN SHAW’S SKULL
It’s said that boxerturned-hero John Shaw did more to win Waterloo than Wellington himself. But how did a cast of the man’s skull and a curious painting of him come to be displayed a London museum?
In the summer of 2022, considerable column inches were given by the national media to a report prepared by the military charity, Waterloo Uncovered, that it had positive proof that the skeletons of soldiers killed and buried after the Battle of Waterloo, on June 18, 1815, had been exhumed from mass graves not long after the battle. This was so that their teeth could be made into dentures and their bones ground down for fertiliser. The announcement was swiftly followed by the news that, despite the best efforts of the orthodontists and the men from Fisons to empty the field of human remains, a complete skeleton had been discovered near the British field hospital at the Mont St Jean farmhouse. Although still to be identified, in all probability it was that of a British soldier.
Added to this news was the statement that this was only the second complete skeleton to have been exhumed from the battlefield, the first belonging to a Hanoverian soldier. This is not strictly co…
