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From ‘The Western Daily Mercury’- 5th August 1885
At a meeting held on the 4th August 1885 by the Strand Board of Guardians, a letter was read from Mr. Pratt, Tavistock Street, Covent Garden, submitting a new method for disposing of the dead bodies of paupers. Mr. Pratt sent a long printed document disclosing his plan, which was headed ‘Cremation Superseded’. The writer suggested that Resolvers Churchyard, Herne Bay, should be reclaimed and utilised as a burial-ground for the pauper dead of the whole metropolis. A railway might be constructed to convey funerals to the place. The body of the pauper could be placed in a cheap coffin and buried in the soft sand of the sea shore but embedded in a sarcophagus of soft concrete, which would of course, harden almost immediately, and others could be buried on the first layer, so that the bodies of the paupers encased in concrete would form a wall to keep out the sea from encroaching on the land - (roars of laughter, whereupon the clerk laid the letter on the table, and no further action was taken).
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