WILL BE BURIED WITHOUT SERVICE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19107, 27 June 1930, Page 9

WILL BE BURIED WITHOUT SERVICE.

FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS FOR LATE MR F. R. COOKE In accordance with the views held by the late Mr F. R. Cooke throughout his life, there will be no official representative of the church at the funeral, which has been arranged to take place on Sunday afternoon. Mr Cooke will be buried without any formal burial service. The body will be conveyed to the Trades Hall and the cortege will leave the hall at two o’clock for the Sydenham Cemetery. Several prominent Socialists including the Mayor (the Rev J. K. Archer) and E. J. Howard M.P., will deliver addresses at the graveside, but Mr Archer will not speak as a representative of the church. It will be recalled that the late Mr Cooke conducted the service at the funeral of Mr Len Wilson, a Socialist, who was killed accidentally recently. On that occasion there was no representative of any church present and the service consisted of valedictory speeches by friends and associates. “ A Religious Man.” “ In my judgment,” said the Mayor to-day, “Mr Cooke was essentially a religious man. It has always been a grief to me that as far as I could discover he was out of touch with all the churches. The reason for this I have never discovered, but I can well believe that the churches as he knew them in his early days, with their ultra-con-servatism, were mainly to blame. “ All the same, if religion is devotion and loyalty to the highest one knows, our lamented comrade was a very high type of religious man.”