cemeteries

Diagonal Daze in St Mary’s Churchyard, Twyford

8 November 2012
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: burial, cemeteries, memorialisation, Memorialising

Posted by Eleanor Whitby

I was wandering around a churchyard on that one sunny  summer’s day, as you do, and came upon a few really lovely headstones.

The first was surrounded by a burst of colour in a green area of flat memorials in the council owned section – I loved the smooth, pebble like surface and the little indentation which created a bird bath.

I moved round to the church owned section and was taken aback because all the graves were at an angle to the path – obviously positioned to face East, but it created a diagonal vista across the cemetery which I’d never seen before. There must have been a fashion for rough hewn stones as there were several – but I liked this one’s inscription:

” Oh! Call it not death – ‘Tis a holy sleep”

Then I came across the only wooden memorial – cleft from a huge piece of oak. The owner’s name long lost in the ravages of wind and weather – but just look at how  it has dried and stretched and shrunk and cracked, yet still stands tall and proud.

Hiding amongst holly trees,  a prickly barrier against would be intruders to the peace of this long lost grave.This next one then made me stop still for quite a long while – hand hewn by a loving father? husband? brother? So poignant in its home-madeness – I had to touch it and run my fingers over the clumsy lettering that had been chiselled with such love.

As I made my way out, my eye was drawn to this small headstone set back from the path, almost lost by all the cremation plot markers. The angled words completing my diagonal day. What a wonderful inscription, I resolved to make an effort to be more of a light!

Dying for a pee

6 November 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: cemeteries

When the inhabitants of Milla Milla, Australia,were told by the council that they couldn’t have toilets in their cemetery because they’d cost too much, they took matters into their own hands. 

Citizen Pat Reynolds built the toilet you see pictured above in his garage in his spare time. He’s done a proper job, mind, inbuilt septic tank and all. 

Buried in a ‘Wasp Rockery’

30 August 2012
Charles
No comments
Categories: Art and death, cemeteries, death and funerals

Posted by Vale

Gore Vidal died at the end of July aged 86. Although he would have wanted to be remembered as a writer and thinker, he was perhaps better known as a raconteur and wit with a vicious line in put downs. He had a long feud with writer Norman Mailer and once goaded the belligerent Mailer so much that he knocked Vidal down. As he fell to the floor Vidal managed to say ‘Ah, Norman, lost for words again’.

But then, with an insouciant air the GFG itself likes to sport, he believed that ‘Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.’

Dick Cavett, who used to host a TV chat show, has said that ‘You can be sure of one thing. Gore Vidal hates being dead. Unless of course we die and go somewhere you write, drink, have sex, appear on TV and, above all else, talk.’

It’s less well known that he had chosen and laid out his final resting place many years ago. His headstone of polished granite, marked with his date of birth, was in place and waiting only for his own death and interment for its inscription to be completed. The headstone includes Gore’s lifelong companion, Howard Austen, who died in 2003.

It’s in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington DC which dates back to the early 1700s. Christopher Hitchens called it a ‘WASP rockery’. You’d expect the patrician Vidal to want to keep distinguished company. Perhaps more unexpected is the suggestion that he chose his plot for another reason altogether. Nearby is the grave of Jimmie Trimble, a school friend and lover of Vidal’s who died on Iwo Jima. Jimmie was, the New York Times has suggested, ‘the only person with whom [Vidal] ever felt wholeness.’

Sources: Dick Cavett, Huffington Post

London’s Pyramid of Death

26 July 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: burial, cemeteries, memorialisation

Posted by Belinda Forbes

In the second of BBC Radio 4’s series Unbuilt Britain, Jonathan Glancey describes one of the most audacious buildings ever planned for London – it would have been the largest pyramid ever built.

Church yards were so crowded at the beginning of the 19th century that corpses were literally bursting out of the soil.  Some people believed that a necropolis for the dead might be the answer.  In 1829 the architect Thomas Willson came up with a proposal for the storage of millions of dead bodies in a pyramid situated in Primrose Hill, North London, one of the highest places in London.  Constructed from brick with granite facings, it would have been 94 storeys high and the base would have covered 18 acres.  In his prospectus, Willson claimed that the mausoleum would have made about £10,000,000 – an enormous amount in those days.   He hoped that people would enjoy looking up at this splendid monument as they ate their picnics.

The City of London Archive holds Willson’s drawings and ground plans.  Catharine Arnold, author of ‘Necropolis: London and its Dead’ said that the pyramid was to have been ‘compact, hygienic and ornamental’.

At the time of Willson’s plans, there was a fashion for anything Egyptian so his proposal was not as outlandish as it seems.  Thomas de Quincy, in an opium induced trance, dreamed of meeting Isis and Osiris and ‘being buried…in the heart of eternal pyramids.’ However, public opinion stopped this monumental pyramid of the dead from being built.  It was regarded as too over-bearing.  The idea of a garden cemetery was the preferred option of the General Cemetery Company. If the pyramid had been built, it would have cast a great shadow over the park of Primrose Hill.

Jonathan Glancey’s fascinating programme is available on BBC iPlayer here.

Politics and funerals

6 May 2012
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, bureaucracy, cemeteries, End-of-life issues, funeral directors, Processions

A topical post from our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson

Timed to counter the low turnout of voters at the mayoral and local council elections last week, did you catch the BBC advertisement challenging political apathy by chronicling how so many everyday activities–from the fat count in our sausages to the safety of cyclists on the road–are politicised?

Despite the mid-term anti-Government vote that brought some good news for Labour and disappointment for the Tories, and especially the Lib-Dems, Londoners of my acquaintance are relieved to see Boris returned, and the defeat of tax-avoiding, gaff-prone has-been Red Ken.

But how does politics–local and national–impact on the funeral business? Healthcare clearly affects death tolls, and the economy the lot of small businesses such as independent undertakers. Here are five more, big and small, issues with which local councillors might perhaps busy themselves:

How shall we avoid traffic disruption by town centre funeral processions?

Can we empower the police to hose down those awful ‘God Hate Fags’ protesters who upset the bereaved at private funerals?

How can we secure more land for cemeteries?

How can we placate believers in man-made global warming by making cremation more eco-friendly?

How can we tackle the class war issue of inheritance tax and death duties?

Please add some meat to the bone of this shamefully skeletal list.   

Lairs – time for re-evaluation?

16 April 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: cemeteries, green funeral, natural burial

Posted by Vale

Have you ever thought about the rateable value of cemeteries and burial grounds?

The Scottish Assessors Association have. They offer information about how sites and locations should be valued and have some fascinating guidance for cemeteries, churchyards, graveyards and necropolises.

A guidance note advises that:  

The recommended rate is £110 per coffin lair. Where casket lairs are provided they should be taken at £45 per lair.  (see more here)

Lairs. Wonderful!

But there’s more to this tale than old fashioned language. In February the Bournemouth Echo reported here  that:

WIMBORNE Cemetery has scored a landmark victory in a two-year battle against a 150 per cent rise in its rates.

Thousands of chapels across the country could escape similarly steep costs after the cemetery won an appeal based on an historic act that the Church of England cannot own anything.

Rather than accept the Valuations Office hiking the picturesque cemetery chapel’s annual rateable value from £3,250 to £8,000, clerk and registrar Anthony Sherman took the matter to Parliament, enlisted barristers and even threatened a judicial review. Now the rise has been overturned, they’re looking to claim the money back.

It seems there could be wider implications too, particularly for Natural Burial grounds. A local company,  Tapper Funerals which also operates a natural burial ground congratulated Wimborne on its win and commented that :

Valuations of cemeteries have always been extremely low due to the low financial turnover and the high maintenance costs relative to the large expanse of land (similar in some ways to farming). Strangely, as private businesses embarked on cemetery provision, the Valuations Office has started to view them completely differently with increases, in some places, of many 100s of percent. It is difficult not to be cynical over the timing of such changes!

You can read more here.

Is there a wider issue out there? Are other natural – or just non-religious – burial grounds fighting local battles about rateable values? It would be interesting to find out.

Grave dressing at Easter

4 April 2012
Charles
9 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, burial, cemeteries, Funeral flowers

Posted by Vale

On my way to the crematorium today I passed a family tidying a grave, clearing it after the winter and bringing fresh flowers for Easter.

It reminded me of this description from the diary of Francis Kilvert. At the time of writing he was a curate at Clyro on the Welsh border near to Hay on Wye.

Saturday Easter Eve 16 April 1870

…When I started for Cefn y Blaen only two or three people were in the churchyard with flowers. But now the customary beautiful Easter Eve Idyll had fairly begun and people kept arriving from all parts with flowers to dress the graves. Children were coming from the town and from the neighbouring villages with baskets of flowers and knives to cut holes in the turf. The roads were lively with people coming and going and the churchyard a busy scene with women and a few men moving about among the tombstones and kneeling down beside the green mounds flowering the graves. An evil woman from Hay was dressing a grave…

More and more people kept coming into the churchyard as they finished their day’s work. The sun went down in glory beside the dingle, but still the work of love went on through the twilight and into the dusk until the moon rose full and splendid. The figures continued to move about among the graves and to bend over the green mounds in the calm clear moonlight and warm air of the balmy evening…

When the choir had gone and the lights were out and the church quiet again, as I walked down the Churchyard alone the decked graves had a strange effect in the moonlight and looked as if the people had laid down to sleep for the night out of doors, ready dressed to rise early on Easter morning.

On this blog we’ve sometimes discussed the need for special days – like the Mexican Day of the Dead – where we spend time with the ancestors. Rightly, the general view is that you couldn’t import such an alien custom but this beautiful celebration is native to us and the scenes described were only a little over a hundred years ago. And some families still take time at Easter to dress ’their’ graves.

Are there places out there where this is still a more general tradition and ritual?

The sisterhood of the skulls

27 October 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, cemeteries, Ossuary

Posted by Vale

If Kutna Hora and Capela dos Ossos show anything it is that we cannot let bones lie.

Buried and disinterred, stacked and stored these vast collections become places where the living can meet and marvel at the dead.

In Naples, at the charnel house in the middle of its Fontanelle Cemetary, this urge has flowered into a full blown relationship. In the 1870s a cult arose around the anonymous dead. People adopted skulls, cleaned and polished them, gave them names, brought them offerings and asked them for favours.

The cult lasted until the late 1960s when the church closed it down.

You can read about Fontanelle here and here.

Frantisek Rint – baroque and berserk?

26 October 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: cemeteries, Ossuary

Posted by Vale

Back in 1278 an Abbot of Sedlec came back to Kutna Hora with some earth from Golgotha in his travel bags.

He scattered it in the cemetery and created the most famous and popular necropolis in Bohemia and Central Europe.

Grave space was at a premium and, sometime after 1400, a chapel and charnel house was built. The ossuary is now estimated to hold the remains of some 40,000 people.

But it isn’t the numbers that astonish. In the 19th century a wood carver called Frantisek Rint began to make things – baroque, fantastical and unlikely – from the bones. The chandelier is only one of his many creations:

If you want to visit Kutna Hora there is information here.

If you want to see photographs try here.