‘Some sick variety of tableware’: Brit Oxford snobs exposed as partying with cup made from slave’s skull

The British aristocracy is a strange, disturbing, and terrifying community. Routinely beaten and abused at boarding schools, they’re forced to suppress their emotions and encouraged to embrace cruelty, growing up to become cartoonishly evil adults. Just as an example, see the notorious Oxford Bullingdon Club’s “initiation ceremony” of burning money in front of horrified homeless people.

But a new revelation exposes something that plumbs the depths of what these sick freaks get up to behind closed doors. Oxford University routinely gulped down expensive wine from a “skull-cup”, a sawn-off and polished braincase decorated with a silver rim and stand.

You might think this is some weird historical curiosity that died out decades ago, but think again. According to Prof Dan Hicks’ book Every Monument Will Fall, the skull-cup was in regular use at formal dinners up until 2015. The cup was initially used to serve wine until it eventually began to leak, but rather than retire it, they repurposed it as a chocolate bowl.

It appears that there were guests who were invited to these dinners, saw these rich boys supping from a human skull, and were left horrified and nauseated. As the book puts it, “mounting disquiet” saw the cup eventually put into storage.

Scientific analysis shows that the skull-cup is about 225 years old and was likely made from the corpse of an enslaved woman of African origin in the Caribbean. Its exact origin is unknown, though in 1946 the cup was listed at auction in London, and featured silverwork indicating it was assembled in 1838 to mark Queen Victoria’s coronation.

The cup was purchased and donated by former Worcester College student George Pitt-Rivers, a Hitler-loving fascist and white supremacist who was so virulently pro-Nazi that the British government imprisoned him during World War II. Which, to be fair, does sound like someone who’d get his kicks drinking from an enslaved woman’s skull.

The revelation has been met with horror by Britain’s Black community. Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, said: “It is sickening to think of Oxford dons, sitting in this bastion of privilege, itself enriched by the proceeds of centuries of colonial violence and extraction, swilling drink out of a human skull that may have belonged to an enslaved person and has been so little valued that it has been turned into an object.”

As evidence that the college knew they were doing something horrible, there are no pictures of the skull-cap online, and you can’t visit it. The college has decreed that it be stored in “a respectful manner, where access to it is permanently denied”.

Just a thought guys, maybe return her to her people so they can decide how best to honor and this anonymous and desecrated human being? The cherry on top is the college’s final word on the matter, in which they insist they’ve “dealt with the issue ethically and thoughtfully.” Uh, if you’ve been drinking wine from a slave’s skull, I don’t think you get to decide what’s ethical anymore.