A SIMPLE FUNERAL

Evening Star, Issue 18119, 8 November 1922, Page 5

A SIMPLE FUNERAL

BUIUED IN TRAVELLING BUG. The funeral of Mr Wilfrid Blunt took piano in Sussex recently, in accordance with his wishes, in the presence of his daughter, Lady Wentworth, his -grandchildren, the Hon. Noel Anthony Lytton and the Hon. Anne Lvtton, Mr Gerald Blunt, Miss Margaret Bhmt, Miss Dorothy Carieton, Mias Elizabeth Lawrence, and other friends. Mr Blunt had left the following dnstruotions relating to his burial:-—“I wish to be buried with tho least possible delay and in tho simplest manner, -being laid in the ground wrapped in my old Eastern travelling carpet and without coffin or casket of any kind, at a spot iu Newhuildings Wood known to my executors, without religion!! or other ceremony or the intervention, of strangers, but by tho men employed on my New-buildings estate; and I bequeath a sum of £lO to each of these, to bo chosen by my executors for the purpose; and I request that my nurse, Elizabeth Lawrence, shall accompany mo to, and arrange me in, mv grave. I charge the executors of this my will to carry out this my urgent request and see that the conditions herein named for my burial axe duly performed." Tlwsse instructions were fully carried out. Mr Blunt, who was eighty-two years of age, was (says tho London ‘ Times’j a real, oven -a great, poet; and, though he was many other things, too—professional diplomatist, politician, agitator, champion of little nations, traveller, diarist, horse breeder—it was his poetoy alone that really counted. ■He was a various man, wilful, prejudiced to ■the point of bigotry, -a scomer of easy ways and tho paths of compromise, a figure of medieval pictureequeuess, full of charm and fascination, in an age peculiarly adapted to enrage him at every point. "My country, right or wrong," he improved into "My country, always wrong ”; such a bourg-eot» virtue as patriotism was not for him, and yet he was a patriot on his own lines.