PRAYING FOR DEATH

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21829, 16 December 1932, Page 11

PRAYING FOR DEATH

MAN OF A HUNDRED Samuel Claire, of Northampton, should have died 20 years ago. Every night he prays: “Will the Lord be pleased to take me before morning.” He is 100 years old, and says he is ashamed of it. “What is there to live for after 80?” he said on September 4, when a visitor called with birthday congratulations. “ Eighty is the age when all men should die to give the young a chance and spare other people from nursing you.”

Not that he needs any nursing. Ho still climbs a stile to the spinney near his cottage at Kingscliffe to saw wood for his fire. He still shaves himself with an open razor. “There is no happiness in being 100,” he said. “ One is only an object of wonderment.” Mr Claire, who has never been to a kinema, says he believes that education has spoiled the country. He prefers the old days, when his father brought up 11 children on 13s a week. He points proudly to the example of the late Henry Labouchere, who resigned his parliamentary seat at Northampton with the words: “I think that after 70 every man lags superfluous on the stage of life, and impedes the promotion and happiness of younger people.”