THOUGHTS ON CEMETERIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21774, 13 October 1932, Page 16

THOUGHTS ON CEMETERIES

IDEAL CONDITIONS RESTFULNESS THE DOMINANTNOTE. (From Our Own Correspondent.' LONDON, July 28. A joint conference of the National Association of Cemetery and Crematoria Superintendents and the Federation of Cremation Authorities iu Great Britain was held at Brighton last week. Sir Arnold Wilson, who gave the principal address, said that the whole question of public cemeteries deserved more continuous attention from the public and from local authorities. Up to March 31, 192(1, of 166 public cemetery undertakings in England and Wales, 138 showed losses totalling nearly £550,000 over three years and 28 showed profits of about £57,000 over three years. The net average loss to the ratepayers concerned was £162,000 a year, or nearly £1 per interment. These 166 cemetery undertakings controlled- 8416 acres, in which 10,785,000 interments had been made up to March, 1926, or 1284 an acre. The maximum average allocation space to-day was less than 1500 graves au acre, and the total number of burials to fill a cemetery probably averaged little more than 2000 an acre. A.s nearly 500.000 persons died every year in the United Kingdom, an area of nearly half a square mile had to be dedicated in perpetuity every year as cemeteries or churchyards. CREMATION FIGURES. Only about 5200 persons in this country were cremated last year; compared with 58,000 in Germany. There was an overwhelming case for a full examination of the burial laws and regulations by a parliamentary committee, to be followed by a consolidating and amending Act which would remove doubts, strengthen public control, and put a time limit on “perpetual ” rights, however acquired. The practice of cremation should be encouraged by giving every inducement to local authorities to erect crematoria, and by making official certification easier. Cremation should be substituted for burial at the public expense unless the deceased person had definitely declared a conscientious objection to cremation. There was, perhaps, no single change in public sentiment which would do more to add to general happiness than to change the individual attitude' towards death, and.those who controlled cemeteries had it in their power to do in this respect far more than perhaps they believed. A cemetery should not bo a place of gloom, decay, or sorrow, but, like many parish churchyards, of brightness combined with a feeling of rest. LIKE A PARK. Restfulness should always be the dominant note. Cemeteries should be designed as little like cemeteries ns possible. There should be no wall round them, but only a railing or hedge, or. better still, a sunken wall or ditch. They should be as much like a park as possible, well attended and well planted, oases of beauty, as truly a lung of the city as any pleasure ground, with plenty of good seats and an entrance not too formal. Those who bought a grave should feel that they were buying a bit of land which would for ever be part of the public park and pleasure ground, where future generations might take their ease —a place of historic interest but also of natural beauty. Such a result was out of the question in cemeteries as we knew them now. with monuments to human affection in a form which suggested that the dead were still competing with each other for public notice.

and with texts torn from their context, inappropriate alike to those who lay buried .below and to the feelings of the living above. PERISHABLE MEMORIALS.

Most cemetery regulations insisted that memorials must be permanent, of the more durable —which often meant the most ugly —stone. Surely the principle should be exactly the opposite. Wooden memorials should be encouraged, whether they were small crosses or beautiful leaping boards. They would decay, of course, although oaken memorials had lasted as much as 100 years; but when they had decayed they could be quietly removed, and the turf and flowers would reign again. The graveyard plan would show where anyone was buried. The practice of placing artificial wreaths on graves was going out. and he hoped that that of placing tombstones over graves would also disappear. No change could do more to improve the appearance of cemeteries, to change the attitude of the public towards death, and to ensure that cemeteries would eventually be regarded not as burdensome responsibilities but as quiet parks where the living of all ages might take rest. Dr Duncan Forbes, medical officer of health for Brighton, although preferring cremation, advocated certain reforms in burial. He suggested that wicker coffins and shallow graves should be used, and that there should be an alteration of the law to allow old disused cemeteries to be used for playgrounds.