BOY CHILD’S BODY IN HERMIT’S HUT

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6890, 22 April 1929, Page 6

BOY CHILD’S BODY IN HERMIT’S HUT

HOME OF FORMER MINISTER. GRUESOME COMPANION OF 20 TEARS’ SOLITUDE. United Press Association —By Electri« Telegraph—Copyright. Received Sunday 7 p.m. LONDON, April 20. In a lonely one-roomed hut-, porched a-top of the rugged Kincardine Cliffs, the Reverend Alexander Thomas Bell dic'd a W6ck ago. The police yesterday, in turning over an old collection of rubbish piled on the' floor were 'amazed to find concealed, an 1 ornate coffin, containing an inner sealed shell, in which was the almost perfectly mummified body of a baby boy, who apparently died soon after birth. ' The coffin must have lain there for years. There was nothing on the nameplate to suggest the child’s identity. It contained only a inscription: “There’s a Home for Little Children.” Eey. Bell was formerly in the Scottish Episcopal Church but he turned Roman Catholic at the end of the war. Ho had preached before the late King Edward and King George at All Saints’ West London. 4 He had lived a hermit’s life In a hut for a quarter of a century. The police despair of fathoming tho mystery. The body was dressed in a hand-em-broidered frock. The inference is that tho gruesome relic shared Bell’s 20 years’ lonely existence and is believed in some way to have been bound up in the life of the hermit.