SIX HUNDRED VICTIMS.

New Zealand Mail, 29 January 1902, Page 17

SIX HUNDRED VICTIMS.

Six hundred children burned to death in a year owing to their being left unattended was the startling fact which was brought before a coroner’s jury in London on December 6. Tlie case which provoked Dr. Wynn Westcott, the Hackney coroner, to draw public attention to the terrible yearly death-roll of children from this cause 'presented the usual picture of little ones left by themselves in a room where a fire was burning unguarded. The victim was the three-year-old daughter of a Kingsland waste water inspector. The mother told the coroner that she left this little one and a brother two years old in her room while slio went downstairs. Five minutes later she heard screams and rushing upstairs met her little girl enveloped in flames. There was a fireguard, she explained, in tlie front room, where there was no fire, but there was i.o guard to the fire in the room where the children were. Dr. Wynn Westcott said that in 1889 records shewed that 600 children were burned to death through being left unattended. The Coroners’ Society had appealed to the Home Secretary for assistance, and the Government was considering the advisability of legislation to'enable a fine or a term of imprisonment to be imposed on any person who left a child alone, if that child •was thereby burned to death. The rry returned a verdict of Accidental Death, and expressed their concurrence with the coroner. The mother was censured for her “thoughtless want of care.”