This year’s New Year’s Honours list, announced today, includes a name well known in the world of funerals, and to many residents of Croydon and the surrounding districts. Tony Rowland, who lives in South Croydon, is director of Rowland Brothers Limited, based in Whitehorse Road, West Croydon, and with branches throughout the area, and is [...]
Rowland Brothers Exhumation Services Ltd have been working with the Royal New Zealand Navy & the New Zealand High Commission in London for over a year, arranging & conducting the exhumation & repatriation of Philip Short & assisting with the exhumation & repatriation of Leading Marine Engineer Goodman. The Maori name for this project is [...]
Church Councillors planning developments within the burial grounds will expect to have to deal with exhumation as part of the project. Project Managers on un-consecrated ground may not. Either way, should it happen, someone has to deal with it. Which is where Rowland Brothers Exhumation Services come in. In October 2014 the six members [...]
In July 2004 I left London early, wishing to be in Wrexham in time for the cremation service. Months earlier I had the honour of being tasked, by Warsaw City Council, with bringing the hero Czuma brothers home. Czuma one of the two brothers I was responsible for bringing home a hero, was a prisoner of [...]
On Monday 30th December 1940 Flying Officer Kazimierz Sporny stood before his squadrons Intelligence Officer and claimed a BF109. It was a personal landmark for the young airman, his first confirmed ‘Kill’ flying with the RAF in England and his first concrete piece of retribution for the Germans who had invaded & occupied his homeland [...]
A few weeks before Christmas, at the start of what now appears to be Britain’s Monsoon Season, I accepted a kind and much sought after invitation from Justin Bickersteth of the ‘Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust’- a guided tour of the famous West Cemetery. This film-set perfect vision of the Victorian obsession with death and [...]
Cryonics (from Greek κρύος 'kryos-' meaning 'icy cold') is the low-temperature preservation of animals (including humans) who cannot be sustained by contemporary medicine, with the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. -Wikipedia Not many Funeral Directors, I would say, take Cryonics at all seriously. Maybe because it’s an ‘American Thing’. Pie in the [...]
Personal view by Funeral Director, Michael Gill. So, according to Emma Lewell-Buck MP, funerals are now so expensive people are being forced to bury their deceased in their own back garden, and I, as a Funeral Director of thirty years standing should, presumably, be preparing our company for more home burials than even we have [...]