BURNED IN HUT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 269, 12 November 1937, Page 12

BURNED IN HUT.

ELDERLY MAN INCINERATED. TRAGEDY NEAR KUMEU. News was received by the Auckland police yesterday afternoon that the destruction by fire of a two-roomed whare at Brigham's Creek, near Kumeii, in the early hours of the morning had resulted in Mr. Robert Poston Ritchie, aged 04 years, being burned to death. It was stated at an inquest held .by the coroner, Mr. F. K. Hunt, that Mr. Ritchie lived alone in the whare. Alexander Ralston, an elderly farm labourer, who lives in another whare about AO yards away from the one which waa burned, stated that he last saw Mr. Ritchie alive about fl p.m. on Wednesday, when Mr. Ritchie was working in his garden. Witness retired about midnight and just before then everything about Ritchie's whare seemed to be as usual. When he went out of his whare on the Thursday morning he saw that Ritchie'# whare was a nui of smouldering rutns. Witness said he at once made an investigation and found the incinerated remains of his neighbour on a wire mattress in the midst of the burnt ruins of the-whare 1 . He advised his employer, Mr. A. R. Sinton, who telephoned to Constable Pollard, of Henderson. Witness stated his belief that the tragedy was the result of embers falling from an open fireplace upon a heap of kipdling Mr. Ritchie was in the habit of keeping beside it. It had also been Mr. Ritchie's habit, he said, to put on his fire logs that were too long for the grate, with the result that the burning ends at times fell on to the floor of the whare. Witness had often warned Mr. Ritchie that this was a dangerous practice.

The coroner found that Mr. Ritchie was accidentally burned to death.