The three-year-old daughter of a carter out of work died of tuberculosis. The father, whose policies had lapsed, borrowed the sum of £2 5s. necessary to bury the child. The mother was four months paying the debt off by reducing the food of herself and of the five other children. The funeral cortège consisted of one vehicle, in which the little coffin went under the driver’s seat. The parents and a neighbour sat in the back part of the vehicle. They saw the child buried in a common grave with twelve other coffins of all sizes. “We ’ad to keep a sharp eye out for Edie,” they said; “she were so little she were almost ’id.” The following is an account kept of the funeral of a child of six months who died of infantile cholera in the deadly month of August, 1911. The parents had insured her for 2d. a week, being unusually careful people. The sum received was £2. £ s. d. Funeral 1 12 0 Death certificate 0 1 3 Gravediggers 0 2 0 Hearse attendants 0 2 0 Woman to lay her out 0 2 0 Insurance agent 0 1 0 Flowers 0 0 6 Black tie for father 0 1 0 -------- 2 1 9 The child was buried in a common grave with three others. There is no display and no extravagance in this list. The tips to the gravediggers, hearse attendants, and insurance agent, were all urgently applied for, though not in every case by the person who received the money. The cost of the child’s illness had amounted to 10s., chiefly spent on special food. The survivors lived on reduced rations for two weeks in order to get square again. The father’s wage was 24s., every penny of which he always handed over to his wife. The usual amount paid for burial insurance is 1d. a week for each child, 2d. for the mother, and 3d. for the father, making 11d. a week for a family with six children, though some over-cautious women make the sum more. Another form of thrift is some sort of paying-out club. Usually payments of this kind come out of the father’s pocket-money, but a few instances where the women made them came within the experience of the investigators. One club was named a “didly club.” Its method seemed to consist in each member paying a certain woman ¼d. the first week, ½d. the next week, ¾d. the next week, and so on, always adding ¼d. to the previous payment. The money was to be divided at Christmas. It was a mere way of saving, as no interest of any kind was to be paid. Needless to relate, about October the woman to whom the money had been paid disappeared. Stocking clubs, crockery clubs, and Christmas dinner clubs, make short appearances in the budgets. They usually entail a weekly payment of 3d. or 4d., and when the object—the children’s winter stockings, the new plates, or the Christmas dinner—has been attained, the payments cease.