GRATEFUL COSTERS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3307, 28 August 1911, Page 7

GRATEFUL COSTERS.

TWO THOUSAND IN STRANGE VEHICLES AT BENEFACTOR’S FUNERAL.

Orue of the strangest funeral processions ever witnessed in London was seen, at Kilburn and Finchley the other day, the occasion Doing the funeral of Mrs Martha Perry, known by some as the “Friend of the Costermongers,” and! by others as their “Queen.” Two thousand costermongers attended from a,ll -parts of London, making a mile-long procession of over two hundred vehicles—mourning coaches, donkey barrows, taxi-cabs, motor-omni-busses, mule carts, hansom cabs, and waggonettes. The coffin was in a hearse drawn by six horses. A postilion in black velvet knickerbockers guided the leading pair. Behind was a van piled high with wreath*.

Three hundred of them were placed on the grave. There the costermongers, who had smoked their day -ripes as they whipped their donkeys to the cemetery, broke down, .with their women friends when they saw the last of the woman who had heloed to start man- of them in business.

“Mrs Perry,” said her executor, Mr J. Lazarus, recently, “was one of the most generous: women I have ever met. There is, I should thinx, hardly a costenmionger in Kilburn, besides many out side, whom she lias not heloed. All the costermongers of London adored her. Many of them, she set up in trade gratuitously. “One of the latest instances of, her generosity occurred a few months ago, when she gave a woman £2O to save her home being sold up. She has left about £600.”