Grave Robbers

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28869, 14 April 1959, Page 3

Grave Robbers

Sir, —“X’s” revelations make sorry reading in a civilised community. Why are children allowed to play in a graveyard? Graves are private and sacred property and paid for as such. Is it not a caretaker’s business to take the names of offenders who are seen to damage a grave and report them to his employers? Though,

school-teachers have no jurisdiction over their pupils out of school, they can surely harangue them in terms they can understand on the beastliness of insulting the dead and wounding the living. Such children are obviously of a low type, but by getting away with their misdemeanours they will merely be encouraged to s continue them. In a country top-heavy with bureaucratic control it seems odd that so little legal restraint is put on those juveniles who constitute some of our worst types of public nuisance.—Yours, etc., ROMAN PARENT. April 12, 1959.

Sir, —According to your correspondent “X,’’ the young graverobbers attend a school in the vicinity of the graveyard, but when approached one of the teachers protested that he could do nothing about it. Perhaps there is more than meets the eye in this apparently rather defeatist attitude; but one would have thought that the school authorities might at least have read the riot act, taken some steps to identify the culprits, and carried the war into the camp of the parents, who are morally responsible for about 90 per cent, of such juvenile misbehaviour.—Yours, etc., M.T. April 12, 1959.