WEST HARTLEPOOL & CREMATION.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 154, 1 December 1874, Page 3

WEST HARTLEPOOL & CREMATION.

West Hartlepool will not receive Sir Henry Thompson well if that eminent surgeon's services should be soon required in that borough. Mr. Turubull, a convert to Sir Henry Thompson's views on cremation, brought forward a motion at the meeting of the Town Improvement Commissioners of West Hartlepool, for the adoption, in the sanitary interests of the place, of the practice of burning the dead. But before the Commissioners assembled, 200 women, mostly of the working class, got up an extempore indignation meeting to protest against the expected motion, and saluted Mr Turnbull when he arrived with cries of " Bum him!" "Stick him in a tar-barrel!" ,l Give us Christian burial!" "Let him taste it [i.e., cremation] first!"—nor did this rather lively '•deputation" withdraw till the chairman of the commissioners had assured the insurrectionary women that the commissioners had no sort of power to adopt Mr Turnbull's proposal. Even then the 200 waited outside till they were swelled into a crowd of 2,000, and saluted Mr Turnbull on his departure, after his unseconded motion had dropped to the ground, with tremendous hootings. Science certainly takes much less pains to understand the people, than to serve them. It might have ktiown, by remembering the popular horror of post-mortem examinations, that proposals* to hasten Nature in the process of destroyingeveu the already mouldering image of our nearest and dearest, "7ould be received with a start of horror. To burn the body of a living enemy would always seem more decent and natural to a mob than to burn that of a dead friend.