The death of Julian Litten. . . and more

A few days ago I came across this article from  Great Britain’s newspaper, The Telegraph.  The headline was intriguing to a person like me who worked in Death Care, so I continued to read the article.

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Turns out that the article was an obituary news article of sorts dealing with the life and death of Julian Litten.  And, if you are in North America like I am, I’m guessing that you have no idea who Julian Litten was.

Here’s what the headline said, “Julian Litten, historian who traced changing death and burial practices and loved a good funeral”.  As I delved into the article and went further it turns out that Litten wrote a book in 1991 that could probably be equated with the Jessica Mitford book, “The American Way of Death”, in the USA.    Litten’s book was titled, “The English Way of Death:  The Common Funeral Since 1450”.  

I have not read it, but from what I have tried to learn about Litten’s book is that, for the most part, he was an advocate of funerals and his book was not as critical of death and burial customs as was Mitford’s.  According to the article from The Telegraph,  Litten’s book was a “deft and amusing guide to the consumerism of death, in which Litten charted the history of the changing etiquette surrounding burial over the centuries”. 

Again, from reading the article, it appears that Litten was no fan of the British modern cremation ritual of which he is quoted as saying, “an unaccompanied funeral car glides noiselessly under the porte cochère, the coffin is transferred to a stainless steel ‘hors-d’oeuvre’ trolley and wheeled into the chapel, which looks more like a waiting room in a … hospital than a dignified setting for the disposal of the dead”. 

In any regard, my curiosity took me to reading the article and learning about somebody that I didn’t know had existed.  I think that any funeral home or cemetery practitioner would enjoy the newspaper article on his life and death which you can find here.

More from Europe —  I thought today might be an appropriate time to offer readers links to a couple of articles written about November 1 from foreign press sources and pertaining to All Saint’s Day and the ever-moving customs of cremation and burial in certain countries.  Here are those articles:

Finally, it is November 22 —  Today marks the 61st anniversary of the assasination and death of United States President John F. Kennedy.  One of the all-time most read articles of Funeral Director Daily deals with that situation, the funeral director that was called to prepare the President for the flight back to Washington, DC from his death in Dallas, Texas, and the history of the casket that was used for that transportation.

Here’s that article entitled “The Story of the Kennedy Casket”.

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