Nine years late, Dad's lost ashes come home
David Smith reports on a daughter's joy after a longed-for but unexpected discovery
Sunday April 1, 2007
The Observer
A stranger tomb is hard to imagine. For more than eight years the lost property office of London Underground - a basement filled with tens of thousands of glasses, gloves, iPods, mobile phones, pushchairs, scarves, schoolbags, toys, umbrellas and wallets - has hosted a highly incongruous object. An urn containing human ashes.
Like a diligent graveyard caretaker, Ted Batchelor, the lost property supervisor, has done his best to make it a decent resting place. Each December he would wish the remains a merry Christmas, while in his spare time he tried to crack a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes. Who was the deceased? How had their ashes got lost? And who were the rightful owners? There was only one clue. A label that said: 'W Maile, 5/10/98.'
Batchelor appealed for information in Arena: Underground, a TV documentary shown last month as part of BBC4's 'Tube Night'. It caught the eye of a member of the public, John Fisher, who set about using the phone and internet to trace the enigmatic W Maile. Two days later, he had his man - and his relatives. Molly Schofield, a pensioner living in Leyland near Preston, Lancashire, received a call from Fisher informing her that her father's long lost ashes had been found.
'I went into a flat spin,' Molly, 75, recalled. 'He said the item about the urn had caught his interest and he'd followed it up and identified my dad's ashes. It was a surprise and a shock and it made me feel a lot better to finally know what happened. My children are delighted.'
William Maile, who took part in the Normandy landings and was a driver at the Potsdam conference, died in September 1998 at the age of 91 and was cremated in Preston. Molly had fond memories of visiting London with him, so she decided to take his ashes to Westminster Bridge and scatter them on the Thames, where he would go fishing. She took a train south with her daughter and her two grandchildren, placing a bag containing the urn under a pushchair in the luggage compartment.
But when the train reached Euston station, the bag and the urn had gone. Molly said: 'I was astounded. We felt, well, we're not going to see him again but at least he got to London. On the train two men were talking loudly and giving the impression that they'd just been released from prison. Our thoughts turned to them when we saw the bag had gone. I'd love to have seen their faces when they realised what they'd got. That's caused me some laughter over the years.'
The bag was abandoned on a tube train, from which it was handed to the lost property office in Baker Street, which receives up to 1,000 items a day.
Years passed and no one came forward to claim it. Batchelor spent weekends searching birth and death certificates and on the internet in an attempt to solve the riddle. He found the word Luton on the urn and contacted crematoriums in Luton and Stevenage without success. He decided that if no one came forward by the urn's 10th anniversary, in 2008, he would scatter the ashes in a churchyard.
Fisher was struck by Batchelor's search in the Arena special and decided to investigate via the genealogy website ancestry.co.uk. The name and date were enough to pinpoint the Preston area, so Fisher called local crematoriums and struck gold. He used the electoral register to find Molly, still living nearby.
Fisher, a researcher and analyst from Cambridge, said: 'It was such an unusual situation and a sensitive one: it must be terrible to lose the ashes of your just departed. I was impressed by Mr Batchelor's sincerity so I offered my services. It wasn't rocket science: anyone with access to the internet and telephone could have done it.'
Batchelor said he was delighted with the outcome. 'I thought it was quite depressing that somebody could spend 10 years in the basement of a lost property office, so the plan was to take the ashes to a local church and scatter them, taking lots of photos in case the family turned up one day. Then this BBC programme came along. Something like this puts a smile on your face.'
Maile, known to friends as 'Ray' or by his army nickname, 'Jumbo', was a carpenter after the war. Last week his ashes were sent by courier to Molly, a former telephony accountant. 'I felt quite emotional and a few tears appeared,' she said. 'When the parcel arrived I was making a cup of tea, so I had a cup of tea with my dad. The urn is now sitting on a shelf by his photograph.'
She added: 'We're still deciding what to do with the ashes. My thought is to go back to London and continue with our original scheme at the Thames, possibly as a holiday treat for my granddaughter's birthday in August. I don't think I'll put it in the luggage compartment this time. But my father would have enjoyed the publicity, if nothing else.'
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/ ... 28,00.html