On this day in vegan history · November 2, 1950
Shaw Dies at Ninety-Four, Sixty-Nine Years a Vegetarian
George Bernard Shaw spent nearly seventy years refusing to eat what he called the scorched corpses of animals, and it was a fall from a ladder pruning his own trees, not his diet, that finally caught up with him.
The facts
- Died
- 2 November 1950, Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England
- Age
- 94
- Cause
- Kidney failure following a hip fracture from a fall while pruning a tree in his garden
- Vegetarian since
- 1881, aged 25
George Bernard Shaw died on 2 November 1950 at Shaw's Corner, his home in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, aged 94. He had become a vegetarian in 1881, first to save money and then, as he put it, as a matter of principle, and stayed one for the rest of his life. In September that year he fractured his hip falling from a ladder while pruning a tree in his garden; he survived the operation but died weeks later of kidney failure brought on by the injury. By then he was the most famous vegetarian in the English-speaking world, a playwright and critic who had spent decades defending the diet in print and in person.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
-
I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
George Bernard Shaw, interview "Who I Am, and What I Think", The Candid Friend (May 1901)
Source: Wikiquote -
Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?
George Bernard Shaw, interview "What Vegetarianism Really Means: a Talk with Mr Bernard Shaw", Vegetarian (15 January 1898)
Source: Wikiquote
Why it still matters
Shaw gave vegetarianism a kind of respectability it hadn't had: a Nobel laureate and the most quoted wit of his age, still gardening and still arguing the case at 94, undone by a ladder rather than a diet everyone had warned him would kill him young.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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