The will, the parish, and the long answer.
Lady Clementina I Tottenham was, by the time she made her last will in the spring of 1959, a woman of seventy-three living quietly in a flint cottage on the outskirts of Burton. She had no children. She had buried both her parents in the churchyard at St Luke’s, and she came up the path most Sunday afternoons in good weather to sit on the bench beside the south yew.
Her will was a short document. Most of it concerned the small flint cottage, which she left to a cousin in Hampshire, and a quantity of household effects, which she left to her housekeeper. But one paragraph set aside a sum sufficient, in 1961 money, to keep the churchyard of St Luke’s — its stones, its hedges, its gate, and its grass — for as long as the parish endured. The will was proved on 27 October 1961, and the trust we are still administering today was registered with the Charity Commission shortly afterwards, under the number 220026.
The income now is small. In the financial year ending 31 December 2024 it was just twenty-seven pounds — the interest from a quiet capital sum, held in a deposit account at the local mutual. That is the truth of the figure: small. Most of the practical work in the churchyard is done by volunteer hands, by donations from the parish, and by occasional small grants from the diocese. The bequest is the steady drip beneath the bigger flow — never the whole of it, but always there.
We mention all of this on the front of our website because we think it matters. A small charity should not pretend to be a large one. Lady Clementina’s trust does one thing, and it has been doing it for sixty-four years.
What we actually do
In any given year we pay for one or two specific items, agreed by the trustees at our spring meeting. In 2024 that was a load of cedar shingles for the lych-gate roof, a contribution towards the lettercutting of a new memorial slate for the Howe family, and the hire of a small mechanical scythe for our August cut. In 2025 it was the second half of the lych-gate, a contribution to the parish’s annual yew survey, and a quantity of lime mortar for the re-bedding of three Victorian headstones on the south side. We publish all of this in our annual reports.
We are also the people who keep the records of the churchyard — the plot map, the photographs, the lichen survey, the brief biographical notes attached to certain stones. This is not glamorous work and it is not the kind of work that wins grants. We do it because, in the long, slow life of a parish churchyard, the records are the thing that survives.
Why ‘the bequest’ and not ‘the trust’
Local people in Burton say ‘the bequest’ when they mean us — never ‘the trust’ and never ‘the foundation’. The word comes straight from Lady Clementina’s will. We have kept it because it is the word the parish uses, and because it is honest: the work began with one woman, leaving one sum of money, for one piece of ground.
