WHILE abhorring any form of grave desecration – particularly involving war dead – I feel the objections of South Ockendon Residents’ Association members to the removal of 400 bodies from the Cherry Orchard Chapel site in North Road, as described in last week’s Gazette, are irrational.

As I discovered when studying to become a City of London Guide Lecturer in the 1990s, many bodies have been removed from churches and their graveyards over the years, for reasons of health, hygiene and progress.

The present Bank underground station ticket office was once the crypt of St Mary Woolnoth Church. The church lives on, but between 1897 and 1900 its dead were reburied in the City of London Cemetery at Manor Park.

In the 1960s, 2,500 bodies from the graveyard of St Botolph’s, in Aldgate, which had to be rebuilt following extensive Blitz bomb damage and a subsequent peacetime mystery fire, were moved to the same cemetery.

Surely it is possible to find a new resting place for the South Ockendon 400, ideally locally, possibly in the St Nicholas Church graveyard just up the road.

I doubt Chris Savill’s claim that the ground is “hallowed” in the Anglican sense of the word as the chapel was part of the non-conformist churches’ movement.

Is there any evidence of a desire to visit the graves following the sale of the chapel by the United Reformed Church in 1965?

Councillor Lynn Carr’s idea of turning the 1812 building into a community centre is a good one, but Thurrock Council has approved 15 homes which will, at least, mean the site is no longer an eyesore.

It is currently guarded by dogs which bark every time residents walk by to Tescos (personally I would not want to live next door to a petrol station and mini-supermarket but I’m not a planning committee councillor).

As we approach next year’s centenary of the start of the First World War, I would rather the Residents’ Association campaigned about the state of the village memorial.

Vandals spray-painted it some years ago and council contractors cleaned it afterwards. I don’t know what was used but the names of several local First World War service people who died in France or Belgium are now too faint to read.

At least that site is visited regularly, particularly on Remembrance Sunday.

DAVID SAVAGE The Green, South Ockendon.