Heymer was with Howerd for more than thirty years as lighting operator, manager and lover, until Howerd died.

On 15 May 2009, Dennis Heymer, Howerd's partner, died in the home that he and Howerd had shared near Axbridge, Somerset.

Heymer claims that the human body, through mitochondria, carries 45, 000 volts per cubic centimetre and that the process of a single cell erupting sets off neighbouring cells in a chain reaction that destroys the body until biological action ceases.

Heymer also thinks that a psychosomatic process in emotionally-distressed people can trigger off his supposed mitochondrial explosion.

The police officer in attendance was John E Heymer, and what follows is taken from his own notes on the incident: " The living room was bathed in an orange glow, coming from windows and a lightbulb.

John E. Heymer is a British former police officer and author who has written extensively on spontaneous human combustion ( SHC ).

Heymer was born in Bow, East London, in 1934 and went to South Wales at the age of 16 to become a coal miner.

In 1955, he met waiter Dennis Heymer, who later became his manager.

Heymer observes that it is very rare for people who find themselves alight to remain motionless, yet all alleged SHC victims seem to have gone to their deaths peacefully, without struggle.

The script was written by Peter Harness, after extensive interviews with Howerd's partner, Dennis Heymer.

Heymer described this ' fringe ': ' as though the clothes had been burned through with a laser beam '.

Heymer describes himself as an autodidact, with a lifelong passion for knowledge, and has written that he is not afraid to pursue this into areas where other people might fear ridicule or contempt.

Heymer observes that Jeannie had mourned and pined constantly since her mother died, and that she could not understand where her mother had gone ( Jeannie, in common with many six-year-old minds, had no concept of death ).

Heymer describes the entire room as ' comfortably warm ' despite the fact that the house was halfway up a mountain, in the middle of a Welsh winter ( the temperature outside was ' well below freezing '), and had no double glazing or central heating.

Questioning Mr Thomas ' neighbour, Heymer found that the night before the ashes were discovered the neighbour had gone out into his garden and seen foul-smelling smoke pouring from Thomas ' chimney.

Heymer, a trained crime-scene officer, argued that everything about the remains showed that the victim had been sitting comfortably in his chair when he burned to death.

Heymer therefore concludes that SHC victims fall into a form of trance before catching fire.

Heymer also notes that all of the victims have one thing in common: aloneness and probably loneliness.

Heymer says that Jeannie Saffin may well have been the loneliest victim of all.

As for the putative mechanism behind SHC, Heymer speculates that defective mitochondria in the body are to blame, breaking down and allowing free hydrogen to build up within the cell.

Heymer then supposes that a small pocket of hydrogen is detonated by the 0. 225 volt of electricity generated across the inner membrane of the mitochondrion.

In support of his hypothesis, Heymer points out that it is typically the lower extremities ( the legs, below the knee ) and skulls of alleged SHC victims that survive combustion.

Heymer suggests that by the time the process has consumed the heart and lungs, all circulation ceases and the fire comes to an abrupt halt just seconds after commencing — hence the reported blue flames, the sharp edges of burns to clothing, and the failure to ignite surroundings.

and during the unhappy time, Miriam often would charge that Wright and Olgivanna were misdemeanants against the public order of Wisconsin.

Among the dolls was one that meant very much to the First Lady, who would pick it up and look at it often.

She would often go up on the roof to see the attendant take down the flag in the evening.

If only this could be done more often -- with such heartening results -- many of the earth's `` big problems '' would shrink to the insignificances they really are.

if, as often happened, he had to repeat because he had spoken too softly, he would repeat his words in the same way, without emphasis or impatience, only a little louder.

As I say, I wouldn't want to begin a day like this, but I often wonder what the dead would have done.

If the artist would study his work more thoroughly and move certain units in his design, often only slightly, finer pictures would result.

Dealers would do well to visit such a campground often, look at the equipment and talk with the campers.

In repetitions of the experiment from couple to couple, the votes of the two persons in a couple probably agree more often than independence would imply, because couples who visit the museum together are more likely to have similar tastes than are a random pair of people drawn from the entire population of visitors.

A somewhat less fragmented hebephrenic patient of mine, who used to often seclude herself in her room, often sounded through the closed door -- as I would find on passing by, between our sessions -- for all the world like two persons, a scolding mother and a defensive child.

Tone systems are certainly more complex than the number of units would suggest, and often analytically more difficult than much larger consonantal systems.

As one would surmise, the procedure, however, could be repeated with the same object or with the same type of object often enough, so that the corresponding visual blots and the merest beginning of the tracing movement would provide clues as to the actual shape, which the patient then immediately could determine by a kind of inference.

Pozzatti and I could not know then that we would experience this sort of treatment more often in Moscow than elsewhere.

More often than not he would bow to the inevitable.

They showed they were glad that Carnegie would have a major orchestra playing there so often next season to take up the slack with the departure to Lincoln Center of the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony.

Since an objective viewer might well conclude that this is not a situation that would often arise, the film's extensive discussion of the problem seems, at best, superfluous.

The arithmetic mean of a variable is often denoted by a bar, for example ( read " x bar ") would be the mean of some sample space.

Readers unacquainted with its reputation as a satirical work often do not immediately realize that Swift was not seriously proposing cannibalism and infanticide, nor would readers unfamiliar with the satires of Horace and Juvenal recognize that Swift's essay follows the rules and structure of Latin satires.

More traditional adobe roofs were often flatter than the familiar steeped roof as the native climate yielded more sun and heat than mass amounts of snow or rain that would find use in precipitous roofs.

It was not uncommon for the Merovingian, Carolingian, or later kings to make laymen abbots of monasteries ; the layman would often use the income of the monastery as his own and leave the monks a bare minimum for the necessary expenses of the foundation.

In a famous passage that is often considered the first specimen of alternative history, Livy speculates on what would have been the outcome of a military showdown between Alexander the Great and the Roman Republic.

They pointed out that astrologers have only a small knowledge of astronomy and that they often do not take into account basic features such as the precession of the equinoxes which would change the position of the sun with time ; they commented on the example of Elizabeth Teissier who claimed that " the sun ends up in the same place in the sky on the same date each year " as the basis for claims that two people with the same birthday but a number of years apart should be under the same planetary influence.