Councillors are to discuss how best to manage large-scale funerals after one for a traveller from Cheshire attracted hundreds of mourners.
Holy Trinity Church in Blacon and Chester Crematorium were packed for the service marking 54-year-old Elton man “Pudgie” Evans’s life on 30 January.
Cheshire West and Chester Council and Cheshire Constabulary worked together to manage the funeral.
Local residents were advised beforehand and roads shut for the funeral cortege….
That really is a different world (spoken from the US)…do we have an equivalent community to the traveler community in Europe?
Gal, yup, there certainly is: see:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-09-25-irish-travelers_x.htm
In my experience as pastor I have dealt with quite a few Travellers over the years. Quite a different culture – strongly family centred, much more out front with emotions, very communal – a traveller funeral is full of keening and breast-beating and collapsing over the coffin. Makes the rest of us look rather repressed. But there is something refreshing about stuff being out front. And oh yes: they do not like their young adults co-habiting, so there tends to be early marriage. BTW I was surprised in this report that the funerals seemed to involve the C of E and a crematorium (in American language: crematory, I think). (But then Americans also use the appalling neologism cremains.) However, as I was saying, surprised, because most Travellers in UK are Catholic, although at one point Pentecostals had made quite a few converts. In some ways Pentecostal worship and Traveller exuberance would be a good fit.