on the headstone of Spike Milligan in East Sussex, but there are limits as to what you can and can not put on headstones, the tombstone censor, has to be called in, and make a judgement, the objections could be really nitpicky, like disallowing an
image of sports equipment on gravestones, but they mainly tried to avoid
blasphemy and libel in epitaphs, here are a few that appeared in 1905,
A young engineer in a Norristown mill was killed by the
explosion of a boiler, and the family of this young man, believing that the
mill owners had known all along that the boiler was defective, actually had
carved on the tombstone the sentence, “Murdered by his masters.” The tombstone
censor, of course, refused to sanction such an epitaph.
On the death of a certain noted prize fighter
the surviving brother of the man wanted to put in a glass case beside the grave
a championship belt, four medals, a pair of gloves and other trophies of the
ring. But the censor’s negative was firm.
A widow who believed that the physician was
responsible for her husband’s death wished to put on the tomb, “He employed a
cheap doctor,” but the tombstone censor showed her that such an inscription
would lay her open to heavy damages for libel.
when something objectionable slipped through, or
there was no censoring process, lawsuits could happen. One resulted from an
inscription that said, "This ain't paid for." you can read more about
tombstone censors and the cases they dealt with in an excerpt from the book The
Victorian Book of the Dead, graveyard humor at it's best.
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