Death, Dying & Disposal conference Death and rituals Winifred Robinson: Professor Douglas Davies – he’s an anthropologist and a theologian at the University of Durham. Douglas has studied death, dying and the afterlife and he wrote The Encyclopaedia of Cremation. He’s also studied natural burial.

Douglas tells us about some of the work that you have done which you feel has made a real difference.

Professor Douglas Davies: Well I guess at about this time today if we happen to be in mid Wales there will be people being cremated and there’ll be families with them and I was just pondering this. The most practical outcome of my research has been the crematorium at Aberystwyth. What was that about? Well, people came to me for other reasons to say we think perhaps there ought to be a crematorium in mid Wales because good Welsh people have to go into England to be cremated if you die and who wants to go into England to be cremated and let's be honest - - So to cut a long story short we did a simple sociological survey and analysis of that part of Wales and sure enough there was a need. The crematorium was built. I was there when it was opened. Very practical, very concrete outcome of very ordinary sociological survey methods. Behind that lay an interest in with my anthropological hat on on ritual in Britain surround death really and in – in the late 1980’s and 1990’s I started doing quite a lot of work on crematoria because by and large – and it’s amazing really – sociologists and anthropologists had almost exclusively ignored the fact that from the mid 1960’s the Britons cremated their dead instead of burying them. So in a sense I started looking at that again social surveys by and large wider population and clergy especially we did a big project we included sixteen hundred people across the UK on re-using old graves in full cemeteries and that resulted in a book called Re-using Old Graves for which we got the Booksellers’ Magazine Prize for the weirdest title of the year, which rather shocked the publisher because they're a very conservative publisher. They are the people who produce the law reports for Britain. Imagine it! And in a sense that resulted for example in presenting the results to a select committee of the House of Commons when the British politicians started to think – and they're still thinking. They won't act on this kind of issue because it’s not very sexy and they don’t want newspapers of a certain sort saying your – your MP wants to dig up your granny and that sort of stuff. So it’s a very serious issue really about resources; resources in

cemeteries for the dead without building new ones a long way away for elderly people to travel to and that sort of thing. So my interests have been very much in getting people’s social attitudes, trying to bring a little theory to them and doing stuff with them and much more recently with Hannah Rumble - my dear former student and colleague up there we did another project on woodland burial – on ecological burial which is a different style of British innovation. So in a sense what I've been very much interested in is this issue of Britons changed their funeral practise, what that means. And feeding that back to the users as well, to the associations and groups that are about burial and cremation in Britain and talking to their conferences and wearing my theological hat dealing with lots of groups of clergy. I wrote a little book called ‘Cremation Today and Tomorrow. It was very small but it was the outcome of a study of one part of England in detail and the clergy and what they were up to. And as it were that fed back into the Churches and I've been involved with the Churches Committee. The Church of England at this very moment actually is thinking about developing its funeral needs and what it’s up to. And I've been involved in doing some clearing, thinking for them as they set out on that. So it’s been that kind of interaction I would say.