GLOOM AT WEDDING.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20922, 11 July 1931, Page 2 (Supplement)

GLOOM AT WEDDING.

SMILES AT A DEATH.

STRANGE OLD-WORLD COLONY. REMOTE CORNER OF ENGLAND. The strangest, religious community in Britain has its home at Loxwood, a remote corner of Sussex. The members wear Early Victorian clothes, regard marriages with gloom and funerals with gladness, and recognise no other interest in life outside their daily work and observance of the'most austere "religious principles. 'The adherents of the sect—they number in all about a thousand—met at Loxwood, on Sunday, a few weeks ago for one of their conventions. They spent most of the next three days in their little chapel on the hillside behind the village. The only intervals were those for meals and sleep. And this they do every Sunday and Bank Holiday, closing the shops thoy own and even shutting off the taps of their roadside petrol pumps. Officially the name of this community is " The Church of the Dependents," but everyone in their own district calls them " Coklers," says a Sunday Express correspondent. How this name originated is not clear. People who have studied the history of 'tho sect say that it is a corruption of "cocoa drinkers," the name given to the members .when they began as a temperance movement seventy-five years ago. . The members live in a world of their own. They deny themselves all luxuries, sport, and amusement. Theatres, cinemas, and even wireless are unknown to them.

Their only reading is the _ Scriptures. Shingled hair, powder puffs and lip sticks, short skirts and other changes in fashion mean nothing to their women-folk. As soon as they pass the school-girl age they adept the sort of costume their greatgrandmothers wore, long skirts of black or dark blue, and a tightly fitting bodice buttoning in the neck. hair is plaited and rolled in a " bun " beneath a small straw bonnet. The men, too, dress soberly in dark colours of homespun cloth. , Among the staunchest adherents the spinister" is esteemed more than the married woman. Marriages are not frequent. Loxwood remembers only one Coklers' wedding in the last four years. Births are not hailed as occasions for special rejoicing. But death, representing the birth into the higher life, is approached with gladness. When one of the brethren dies there is no mourning and no flowers, nor is a headstone set up above the grave in the cemetery behind tho chapel. Some of the old people in Loxwood remember when the doctrine of the " Dependents " began to spread in that part of Sussex. It started when John Sirgood gave up cobbling in Clapham and migrated to Sussex. There he preached

in tl>o chapel at Loxwood and in the neighbouring hamlets. Soon he had gathered round him a large band of followers. Now Loxwood, an old-world village, five miles from the nearest railway station, is the headquarters of the ' movement. Here the " Dependents " run their own farm and a large store, supplying everything from groceries to petrol.