One final group of headstone inscriptions, for the moment, although I’ll show you some at a future date.
No particular theme this time,…
…but an interesting group, nonetheless,…
…including what is probably my personal favourite from the thousands of inscriptions I have seen over the years, the gloriously ambiguous ‘Splendid You Passed’.
Some really moving and heartfelt epitaphs. Some rather curious ones too! I wonder if they thought afterwards ‘we might have rushed into that’ 😉
I think my favourite of those is probably ‘He saw beyond the filth of battle, and thought death a fair price to pay for the company of these fellows’, which at over 100 characters must have set them back quite a bit, not to mention exceeded the approved quota by quite some way.
Ha ha!! “Dear Sir. Can we change it please?”.
“This beautiful inscription with its Shakespearian resonances was composed by Stanhope Forbes RA for his son. Although inscriptions were meant to be restricted to 66 characters this one has 91, and the small pencilled figures on the bottom of the War Graves’ form calculate the total cost as £1 6s 6d.”
So there! And someone, somewhere, can’t count……….
For some odd reason I thought they included the spaces between words in the total number of characters permitted. No idea why I thought that, in hindsight I’m sure they don’t. Am I too young to put it down to a senior moment? Lol
An inscription that I have seen which sticks in my mind is;
“Into the mosaic of peace goes this our precious gem”.
To me, it seems to convey heartfelt words from the grieving family of a twenty year old serviceman.
Yes, I like that one, if ‘like’ is the right word. Mosaic of peace appears to be a mainly Presbyterian expression. But what do I know?