"GALLERY" GRAVES

Evening Star, Issue 19320, 5 August 1926, Page 7

"GALLERY" GRAVES

FOLKESTONE IH A FERMENT There is an immense ferment at Folkestone, a somewhat exclusive southern coast resort, writes the London correspondent of the Johannesburg 1 Sunday Times.’ The Town Council Cemetery Committee there, with the laudable ambition of making a bit out of the dead, for the benefit of tho rates, decided that, if people wanted to bo buried, they could have the choice of being interred first, second, or third class. Up rose, thereupon, every right thinking man, and, slapping his chest, vigorously, shouted that there is no possible distinction between dust, and that the whole thing was a horrible outrage. The amount of indignation thus engendered was a real credit to Folkestone, and, as the officials of a health resort which simply hates to appear in an adverse light, the cemetery-mongers at once held out an olive branch. “We gladly abandon the suggested idea of labelling graves on tho railway system, n they said, “ and they shall bo known as ‘A,’ ‘ B,’ and ‘C ’ “A ” being the gallery, “B” tho pit, and “ C ”■ the stalls. A subterfuge such as this only made the right-thinkers madder, and they slapped their chests even more furiously. As one distinguished townsman very properly remarked: “To use commercial and sectarian terms in connection with a burial ground is to write oneself down fifty years behind the times.” When heckled, the Cemetery Committee admitted that they, themselves, had already booked first-class graves, hut this was because their idea was to bertefit the rates and not through any idea of snobbery. The general feeling in Folkestone is that visitors not, in the event of their imminent decease, he put to the invidious choice of the class of grave they would prefer to inhabit, and that the burial authorities, as sportsmen, should make it a fiat rate.