Lloyd George, David, 1863-1945; Prime ministers -- Great Britain -- Biography
The growth of the great Free Churches resulting from the immense
religious revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
made this an acute matter. The hostility of the Established Church to
this revival led to a new use of the power of exclusion from the
burial-grounds. Terrible memories have centred round that struggle. The
late President of the English Divorce Court, Sir Samuel Evans, once told
me that he had to carry by stealth the coffin of his first wife into his
parish cemetery before he could obtain burial for her in Christian
ground. The Established Church in Wales has had to pay heavily for the
luxury of such adherence to a narrow and inhuman practice.
In 1880 the Welsh members returned to Parliament since the Liberal
Revival of 1868 had succeeded in passing that famous Burial Act which
now enables a British Nonconformist to be buried in a parish
burial-ground according to the rites of his own religion as long as due
notice is given to the parish priest. In most of the parishes in Wales
this Act was accepted by decent parsons as a satisfactory settlement of
a prolonged dispute.
But in the little village of Llanfrothen, at the very foot of Snowdon,
there was a rector whose fanatical religious instinct led him to make
one last daring effort to cheat his parishioners out of their rights of
decent Christian burial. In 1888, an old quarryman died at Llanfrothen.
He left it as his last wish that he should be buried by the side of his
daughter. Now, this daughter had been buried in a piece of land which
had been added to the churchyard as far back as 1864 by a certain Mrs.
Owen of Dolgelly. The new piece of land had been enclosed by a wall
built out of their own money by the parishioners. This “acre” had been
recognised up to that time as part of the burial-ground. But the Rev.
Richard Jones cared nothing for walls and little for precedents. This
“churlish priest” raked up the old records and found that Mrs. Owen had
made no legal conveyance of the land. In 1881, the year after the new
Burial Act had passed into law, he persuaded that good lady to make a
new conveyance, with a trust which confined it to those parishioners who
used the rites of the Church of England.
The new grave had actually been dug for the poor old quarryman to rest
by the side of his daughter. A notice under the new Act was served upon
the rector. Then began the struggle. The rector filled in the grave and
pointed out another spot for the burial of the old quarryman—a spot far
from his daughter, “bleak and sinister,” in the words of Mr. Lloyd
George—a place reserved for shipwrecked sailors and suicides.
It was at that moment in the struggle that the relatives of the
quarryman went to consult young David Lloyd George.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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