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29
CREMATION.
Pass the place where the stocks long stood open to the weather outside the gate; trip
over the open granite stile, a simple device against the straying of cattle from the meadow;
turn south from the appropriate door of the church, capturing or enriching the correct
spirit of entry to this acre from the legend beneath its sundial, "Sicut Umbra"; turn east,
past memorials to some of the most gracious and noble patricians who, from out their hereditary
store of noblesse oblige, ever helped their fellow-beings, until the boundary is reached.
And there, on your left, against the wall of old red sandstone greyed by lichen and green with
little black-stemmed ferns, lovers of a west aspect and the mists of the Western channel,
stands a slate slab. At Easter time, the primroses are in profuse and grateful response to
a want of any undue care of the turf at its foot—mounds make care difficult.
" Reader, pass on nor spend your time
In reading o'er this rugged rhyme ;
What I am this humble stone ensures,
And what I was is no affair of yours."
Looking away south again, a blue heaven meets earth and sea.
Less than 100 years have passed since the persons in whom this philosopher (also gunner
in the senior service) vested as care and property after death, laid him not so far south of
the church, in a place which is no longer commemorated by the slab. They may have
expected, with every right the circumstances of the place could afford—a scattered population
and a scene of utterest repose, that ages could not change the dispositions they had made.
Yet mounds sink in and tumbled tombstones are once more erected (if at all) by those rather
remote persons who reverently make "their" affairs "ours."
There are few persons in the London Metropolis to-day who can count on physical
remembrance at their place of repose over a space of one hundred years, under the process
of sepulture. The density of the population would necessitate too great a reservation of
space for each ultimate mere handful of dust; and this dust is precisely of the same composition,
under whatever agency it is brought to its final state. The conditions of change under
the customary method of sepulture are indescribable to a shocked laity ; they will not
be described here. Rather is attention drawn to a process of change not differing, except
in its utter purity and hastening of the final result, from that of earth-burial.
It would seem that our choice in the Metropolis—or, indeed, elsewhere—is that of
fouling the air and subsoil over large acreages situated in the midst of dwellings, in sepulture,
or immediate and unnoisome reduction to the same dust, in cremation.
If a few moments be given to thought, the position of cremation must stand as the more
thinkable, as it is the more unselfish though far-sighted procedure, with regard to those
we shall have honoured and shall still honour.
A comparison of figures given in the following table indicates the steady progress which
is made in cremation. During last year, 6,315 cremations took place in the 24 crematoria
operating in Great Britain. This is the largest number recorded in any one year, and shows
an increase of more than 21 per cent, over 1931, by far the largest increase yet seen.
Comparing this figure with that of ten years ago, when the total was 2,009, an increase
of 200 per cent, on the 1922 total is shown. Yet this figure represents only a little more
than 1 per cent, of the total deaths, a percentage very much below that of certain Continental
countries. In Czecho-Slovakia, for instance, with a population of about one-third of that
of this country, and with only ten crematoria, 5,441 cremations took place during 1932.
Two new crematoria have been opened in Great Britain during the last year, and it
is hoped, with the growing request, facilities will be provided and will contribute
to an acceleration in the increase of cremation. The Corporation are doing what is possible
to forward this method of disposal of the dead. The interior of the Crematorium at Ilford
has recently been redecorated throughout, the seating accommodation enlarged and improved,
and important alterations effected in the position of the catafalque. A portion of the catacombs
has been altered to provide a columbarium for the storage of urns, and a special enclosure
provided adjacent to the Crematorium, in which ashes can be scattered if so desired.
During 1932, 158 people were cremated at Ilford, which is an increase of 46 per cent,
on the previous year's total, and is the largest in any one year since the opening in 1904.
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