GLOOM AT WEDDING

Stratford Evening Post, Volume I, Issue 215, 20 August 1931, Page 6

GLOOM AT WEDDING

SMILES AT DEATH STRANGE OLD-WORLD COLONY The strangest religious community in Britain has its home at Loxwood, a remote corner of Sussex. The members wear Early Victorian clothes, regard marriage with gloom and funerals with gladness, and recognise no other interest in lite outside their daily work and observance of the most austere religious principles. The adherents of the sect— they number in all about I,ooo—met at Loxwood, on Sunday, a few weeks ago for one of their conventions. They spent most of the 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 they own and even - shutting off the taps .of their roadside petrol pumps. Officially the name of this commun- : ity is "The Church of the Dependents," ! but everyone in their own district calls | them "Coklers," says a Sunday Ex- ' press correspondent. How this name | originated is not clear. People who jhave studied the history ©f the sect >£ay that it is a corruption of "cocoa 'drinkers," the name given to the "members when they began as a temperance movement 75 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 jhair, powder puffs, and lip sticks, short skirts, and other changes in fashion mean nothing to their womenfolk. As soon as they pass the school girl age they adopt the sort of costume their groat-grandmothers -wore, long skirts of black or dark blue, and a tightlyfitting bodice buttoning high in the neck. Their hair is plaited and rolled in a ''bun" beneath a small straw bonnet. The men, too, dress soberly in 'dark colours of home-spun cloth. ! Among the staunchest adherents I the spinster is esteemed more than I the married women. Marriages are not frequent. Loxford remembers pnly one Coklers' wedding in the last four yeare. Births are not hailed as occasions for special rejoicing. But death, representing the birth into the higher life, is approached with ghidness. , 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 the 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 the 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" iron their own farm and a large store, supplying everything from groceries to petrol.