PRESS INFORMATION FROM TUTILL REMEMBRANCE ITEMS
 
 
 
Remembering Yesterday's Heroes – One Day A Year Enough?

Reaching out into the community has always been a sensitive area for funeral directors, because few people in our life-centred, healthily living and eating society want to be reminded of their ultimate mortality. Even memorial services can be difficult occasions for the recently bereaved, and a bowls tournament sponsorship or arranging outings for care home residents in a six-door limousine, if not delicately handled, can be open to misinterpretation.

A charge that cannot really be levied at a commemorative service or ceremony aimed at remembering yesterday's heroes, or perhaps more accurately the heroes from the day before yesterday. Sue Tutill of Tutill Remembrance Items put it like this, “Peoples' feelings about their great-grandparents in particular are not often touched by the experience of a personal and close loss. Yet this is fast becoming the very generation which gave their tomorrows for our today”.

Sue Tutill noting that, “Many funeral homes already have good relationships with ex-service charities, but casting the net wider to include regimental associations  – both for existing and amalgamated or disbanded regiments – and even historical associations with links to particular towns, could well uncover additional opportunities for putting something back into the local community. As well as providing scope for publicity within regional newspapers and radio when appropriately managed.”

Indeed, the servicemen and women sweltering in the heat of Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, are only the latest in a long line of writer Rudyard Kipling's 'Tommy Atkins', who have served their country in places as far apart as North Africa, Burma, the North Atlantic, Korea and on the Western Front. Even for a conflict as recent as the Falklands, the memories are already fading. There is a natural reluctance of servicemen to talk about their experiences to family and those who were not there at the time. For veterans of WWI, the experiences of Passchendaele and the Somme were so horrific as to push such memories deep into the subconscious.

With the death of Harry Patch in July of 2009, there are now no longer any survivors of the 1914-18 conflict left alive. Yet only two generations on, if you were to ask a cross section of schoolchildren whether they knew what their great-grandfather did in that conflict, chances are only three out of a class of thirty could tell you for certain.

“The lives of these young men – and sometimes women - were cut short defending freedoms that we perhaps take too-readily for granted. Surely we owe them more than a three-minute silence on Armistice day?”, Sue Tutill concludes.

Tutill Remembrance Items have strong links with the forces, both as suppliers of water-soluble cremation caskets for use by the Royal Navy's chaplaincy for burials at sea, and as providers of military memorial books for army funerals, which could easily be used as the focal point for a commemorative service or ceremony for those who have fallen in past conflicts.

Ends

Image caption: “Giving their todays for our tomorrows: the day before yesterday's heroes in danger of being forgotten”

More images and further information at: http://www.aardvarkpr.co.uk/downloads.htm

Editors contact:	Aardvark Associates			tel. 01308 897 911
Company contact:	Tutill Remembrance Items  		tel. 01322 621100

Please note that this document is for information only and is non-contractual;
both Aardvark Associates and Tutill Remembrance Items decline all liability in the case of omissions or errors.