Putting the fun in funeral

Last year I missed the Lambeth Cemetery Open Day. I had a previous engagement. But I was excited to learn that there would be another one this year when we went on one of our frequent walks in the nearby boneyard. I was dying to go. And so we went. And this was the first public event outing for Baby Cletus.

Now, you might think that a cemetery open day would be a moribund affair - and you would largely be right. There was, as far as I could see, a poor turnout. There were not throngs of onlookers crowding the roads as the parade of hearses toured the cemetery.



A gaggle of coffin cars



The famous Harley Davidson motorcycle hearse


And we didn't manage to get one of the offered rides in the hearses. This one looked quite fun:



But we did manage to go on the Tomb Trek during which the cemetery manager went around showing us special graves and sharing the history of the cemetery. We learned:

• around 250,000 people are buried in Lambeth Cemetery. Stacked like hotcakes or buried in between the spaces of old graves. Many of the original graves are long, long gone.
• The cemetery is chock full of London music hall and variety greats. None of whom I'd heard of - but there were bullet catchers and Wild West type acts and circus folk, too. And that's kinda cool.
  
• Charlie Chaplin's father is buried in a mass grave there and Ida Lupino's father and other kinfolk are also buried there (in a private plot).
  
• A quarter of an acre of fresh burial space can generate a revenue of £1.5 million