Memorial inscriptions are vulnerable!

Loss or damage of MIs

Unfortunately this important part of our national heritage is under threat from a variety of sources, and this problem forms the second reason for bothering to record those MIs that have not yet been transcribed and so secured for posterity. What is the extent of this loss? A survey we recently carried out in Bedfordshire reveals the seriousness and urgency of the task (see below).

Loss and damage to memorials in eight parishes in Bedfordshire

Parish	Date of earlier survey	Total MIs in earlier Survey	Date of later survey	MIs missing		Severely damaged MIs		MIs lost total*
				No.	%	No.	%	No.	%
Ampthill	1915	377	1972	86	23	33	9	119	32
Cardington	1914	304	1975	57	19	30	10	87	29
Clophill	1913	211	1976	74	35	27	13	101	48
Evershot	1913	217	1995	34	16	34	16	68	32
Felmersham	1918	186	1993	31	17	n/a		31	17
Kensworth	1946	101	1983	3	3	7	7	10	10
Shillington	1913	231	1990	66	29	19	8	85	37
Wilstead	1915	191	1985	54	28	10	5	64	33
TOTAL		1818		405	22	160	9	565	31

*memorials missing or illegible
We are grateful to Dr Brian Barlow for permission to include this table, the product of his research.

The eight parishes were selected simply because they had all been surveyed twice within the space of between 37 and 82 years, and so a comparison in each case was possible. The sample was of a reasonable size (over 1800 memorials), and revealed that it is the disappearance of the memorials themselves which is the most worrying feature: some 22% of those originally recorded were no longer extant (or at least could not be found) over a period averaging 65 years. Of those MIs remaining to be recorded twice, some ten per cent had become illegible over this period of time. This means that one in three memorials disappears every one hundred years. And so it is clearly important that this large source of historical information, much of it unique, should be recorded before it is too late.