BURIED IN A PAUPER’S GRAVE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 152, 17 September 1927, Page 10

BURIED IN A PAUPER’S GRAVE

FATE OF A GENERAL’S BROTHER How a man belonging to a wellknown family died as an “unknown ’ in Charing Cross Hospital—W'hich wras founded by his great-uncle, Dr. Benjamin Golding—and was buried in a pauper’s "grave, has been disclosed in an application by the family to the Home Office for permission to exhume the body and transfer it to the family vault. The man, Mr. Henry Hugh Ventris, aged 62, collapsed at Charing Cross Station on July 7, .and died in the hospital the same day. At the inquest it was stated that he had no relatives and in consequence he was buried by the Westminster Guardians at Woking.

After the funeral the family made inquiries of the police and reported him as “missing,” and it was discovered that he was the man who had been given a pauper funeral.

Mr. Ventris, who was an accomplished musician, was a son of the late Rev. E. F. Ventris, and a brother of Major-General Ventris, who lives at St. Leonards-on-Sea. The dead man’s sister, Mrs. Vereker Scutt, of Granville Park. Lewisham,

S.E., told a “Daily Mail” representative that Mr. Ventris had recently been employed as a night watchman at th« Bank of England Club. She added.— “He was a man of very iniepencen. habits. He was educated for th* Church but took up a musical career Recently he had been unable to obtain pupils and had to do other work. H > was too proud and too plucky to let m know’ his position. If the order b granted the body will be transferred tn the family vault at Church Aston Shropshire.”