Letter: Mummy in garden
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: You should have done your spadework before publishing your story "Egyptian mummy found buried in garden" (15 February). My father did die a year after bringing back the mummy's remains from Egypt - but there was no curse and no one in my family ever suggested that there had been. John Wilhelm Rowntree, who was not an "explorer" but a Quaker historian, had been in bad health long before he ever came into contact with the mummy.
The artefact was not displayed in the library, as you report, but in a coach house some way from the main building. Nor was it "hastily buried" by "grieving relatives". It was disposed of more than 20 years after my father's death because it had begun to decompose.
JEAN ROWNTREE
Stone-in-Oxney, Kent
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