Their London and their times - A yearning for faiths
Funerals and Christianity
…transforming the tragedy of his death into an exercise of municipal administration with all its reassuring mundanity. The crematorium offers these opportunities for transformation at forty-minute intervals until half past four. The first slot at nine-thirty is half price.
By the ‘90s, funerals in London with funeral corteges and a religious service were largely replaced by short cremation services followed by a subsequent ‘celebration of life’. There was a severe shortage of physical burial plots in the city, requiring many families to either bury loved ones in distant boroughs or utilize shared graves. The result was that 70% of British families choosing cremation over traditional burial. This led to shorter, somewhat ‘conveyor-belt’ ceremonies at busy London crematoria. Services were highly standardized, often taking only 20 to 30 minutes to accommodate back-to-back ceremonies.
The problem for those who retained affection for some of the Christian rituals but did not share the faith was what music to play at the cremation or the celebration. Hymns were the usual choice – largely because of their familiarity and the comfort that they brought. Abide with Me retained its popularity but there were many others.
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded, for, with blessing in His hand, Christ our God to earth descendeth, our full homage to demand.
Gerard Moultrie (Translated), (1864)
Mortlake Crematorium, serving west London