pyre

A teenaged widow was burned on her husband's funeral pyre under the Hindu practice of sati 37 years ago.

As is customary, a huge pyre was lit at the centre of the square.

In 1968, Conservative MP Enoch Powell had given his explosive “rivers of blood” speech, in which he said that by permitting mass immigration, the country was “heaping up its own funeral pyre”.

They cremated their dead on wood funeral pyres for three days, to purify the bodies of the deceased and transition their souls back into the Earth.

But when the time came for the festival’s grand finale, the burning and explosion of the snowman atop a pyre, high winds kicked up and the ceremony was scuttled for safety reasons.