A FLOWER GIRL’S FUNERAL

Dominion, Volume 16, Issue 154, 17 March 1923, Page 15

A FLOWER GIRL’S FUNERAL

LONDON HOMAGE TO FANNIE. The traffio was held up for some minutes in Fleet Street on a recent afternoon for the passing of a funeral which must have seemed in the eyes of many who watched it to reach the heiflht of grandeur. It was the funeral of Fannie, the kindiv and muchloved flower-seller of Ludgate Hill, and while the burial was to be at Ilford the procession moved in state from th® service at St. Clement Danes up tine hiJJ to the place where she used to have her pitch, states the “Manchester Guardian. n “It is a proper homage to a respectable street seller,” Baid a newsvendor wljen the cortege had passed, and he stressed the word ‘•respectable,” adding, “there are Btreet sellers and street sellers.” Certainly it was a remarkable homage. One wondered what Fannie herBmf would have said could she have foreseen her last journey. The band, composed of boys from Drury Lane, playing the Dead March as they paced Very slowly; the officials from St. Clement Danes, the Rector, the irregular procession of flower-sellers, costermongers, and people from the markets : a group of flower-sellers wearing purple shaws to distinguish them as members of the club of 200 flower-girls to which Fannie had for twenty years belonged; the babies carried in their parents’ arms; the friends from the pavements who joined in as the funeral passed; and then the magnificent hearse drawn by four coal-black horses, the eight huge black plumes nodding above the hearse, the wreaths of flowers that covered its sides. Other mourning carriages bearing wreaths and drawn by black horses with funeral trappings followed, and as they vanished into the fog the street-sel-Jers still at work said: “It is a beautiful funeral.”

; Soens Out tide Church. The crowd that gathered outside the church long before the sendee began had known her. Inside the church gates stood two rows of flower-sellers, her club and trade associates, who were, too deeply impressed by the solemnity of the occasion to talk even among themselves. It was the flowersellers pressing behind them who talked'about tho. dead woman and their kindly memories of her. Two Salvation Army officers were there because Fannie had been converted by the Army thirty years ago. They talked about her hard life, the Exposure to all weathers, the lack of the comforts that home-workers know. One young woman who “never sells flowefs now” had, as a child of eight, been Fannie’s assistant. . Another recalled the days when Fannie had been one of the women Who used to stand all day selling flowers .on the steps of St. hfary-le-Strand, a pitch long ago abandoned. One woman with a baby in her arms, who had left her stand in Southampton Row to attend the service, talked of ilia hard times they hare now,rworse than during the war,” though Bhe said that'thft'Austraiian and New {Zealand soldiers wh» used in war years to haunt Southampton Row did not buy her flowers. A costermonger had conje all the way from North Kensington, another had brought the wreath Bufiscnbed few by street traders in Farrington Street. . . All the women in purple shawls carried bunches of white “paper” narcissi, and two of them bore between

thorn the empty flower basket, decorated with white lilies, in which Fannie used io carry her wares to Ludgate Hill. - ■ When the funeral reached the church the huge black plumes of the hearse and tne tall hats of the drivers looming very large in the yellow fog, the flowered-covered coffin was borne through the porch, followed by a little company. Fannie’s husband and adopted son were there, and her nearest friends. Then the crowd from outside crushed in, struggling for admission. In the crowd on© saw an old flower-seller in a purple shawl look up at a o'hild borne sbouldor-hight and give him her bunch of narcissi.