Dilapidated gravestones to be restored (From Your Local Guardian)

Though its good the council is spending money on maintaining cemeteries. Its does smack of endless funds for pet projects - rather than spending money on priorities.

It would be interesting to hear how the Council can afford this work, which could easily wait, whilst closing libraries, old peoples day centers, grants for school uniforms for the poor, and numerous other worthy social projects.

Indeed - where has the councils moral compass gone? I'm sure we could have a competition for the best one line reply?

I would be very grateful if someone did put upright the memorial stone - currently leaning rather alarmingly, though not dangerously to anyone - of my great-uncle in East Sheen cemetery. I only discovered it was there in this last year despite living in

I would be very grateful if someone did put upright the memorial stone - currently leaning rather alarmingly, though not dangerously to anyone - of my great-uncle (who died in 1927) in East Sheen cemetery. I only discovered it was there in this last year despite living in Queens Road nearby from 1951 to 1977. Why? Because there was a terrible tragedy encapsulated in this stone. He lost a leg during the Great War in India - I don't know how exactly - but despite this got a job as an accountant and was a partner in a firm of City chartered accountants. He had married a barmaid and may have been thought to have let the family down. Sadly she died in 1925 from cancer and he perhaps went to pieces and lost his job, perhaps having muddled a client's funds with his own (I don't know of any prosecution) or maybe it was just the recession. In 1927 he was living in Riverside Gardens. Barnes (a nice address, though how he afforded it I don't know and perhaps this was the tipping point). He took a machete and killed his two youngest children, then chased his older child, a son of 17 at Westminster School on the verge of entering Sandhurst, down the road hobbling on his false leg and killed him too, and then himself. The gravestone says they all died "suddenly" and thus conceals a tale which passers-by may not realise. I don't know if my father, who in 1927 was at boarding school in Bristol, knew this was where this sad family was buried when he bought the house in Queen's Road. Sadly I have no funds to maintain this grave so if volunteers simply help put the main stone upright and give it a scrub, I would be very grateful. Recessions put terrible pressures on families and this stone is a symbol of the hardships that can strike.

Twickenham Bob - I should have thought that respect for the dead was of pretty good moral value