Conclusion

Abstract

Over a long perspective, responsibility for the disposal of the dead in Britain has passed from the local and personal to the distant and institutional. It has passed from families, neighbours and parish clergy to medical professionals, funeral directors and local government authorities. The growing preference of cremation to burial in the twentieth century is part of this process. This process is not ineluctable, as ‘natural death’ and funeral reform movements in the late-twentieth century indicate. Nor is cremation a final stage in disposal, as the founders of the Cremation Society appreciated. Promoting an alternative to burial, they framed their Declaration ‘until some better system is devised, we desire to adopt that usually known as cremation’.