No flowers or obituaries

WHEN a council arranges a public health funeral, the person who has died will be provided with a coffin and the services of a funeral director to bear them to the crematorium or cemetery with dignity.

Public health funerals are no-frills services and do not include flowers, viewings, obituaries or transport for family members.

You cannot choose the funeral director or the date or time of a public health funeral. Burials may take place in an unmarked grave shared with other people.

Every local authority provides details about how they carry out public health funerals in their area and practices can vary.

In 2008 a memorial to locals whose families could not afford headstones was unveiled and dedicated in West Bromwich.

The Pauper Memorial, believed to be the first of its kind in the UK, ensures that 2,500 people buried at Heath Lane Cemetery are not forgotten.

Carved out of granite in India from a design by artist Andrew Scholes, the beautiful, contemporary sculpture was unveiled by Rev Andrew Smith, vicar of All Saints Parish Church.

Members of the West Bromwich Union Pauper Memorial Group were behind the plant to honour the anonymous dead has finally come to fruition.

At the time chairman Moreen Wilkes said: “We have been working on this project since about 2003. That was when John Pearce, now one of our members, came to the West Bromwich Local History Society, of which I am also chairman. He wanted to try and find where his grandmother, who had died in the workhouse, was buried.

“He found that paupers were buried in mass graves and that it was illegal to put markers on these graves. She was buried in a mass grave at the back of the cemetery along with about 2,500 others. Some were buried in unconsecrated graves.

“This new memorial is a place for people to come and pay their respects, not only to those from our area.”

Monumental masons Strongs, based in Heath Lane, West Bromwich, donated labour and granite to the project.