The title says it all. Actually more than all, for just two sentences mention cremation and the only crematorium mentioned, Edinburgh's, was a private one opened in 1929. The first public crematorium in Scotland was Kainhill in Aberdeen. Even this had been built and operated privately until taken over by the Council at the end of 1944 in the aftermath of the Aberdeen coffins scandal.Footnote ¹

The secularisation of death in the nineteenth century was becoming a trite thesis until Julie Rugg's Churchyard and Cemetery administered a corrective.Footnote ² It must, however, have different incidents in a country where, as in England and Wales, the Established Church had an Order for the Burial of the Dead and ministers bound to perform it, compared to one, such as Scotland, in which funeral ritual was virtually proscribed and ministers were under no obligation to be present at funerals. Michael Smith's book is a study of secularisation in the latter.

Secularisation in Scotland was a process by which the Established Church lost its monopoly on places of burial and on the accoutrements of funerals, such as mortcloths, biers, mortsafes, ushers, batonmen, mutes and bearers and their appropriate clothing. Three factors in particular hastened the process: (i) the Disruption, one consequence of which was that Free Church persons were denied access, probably unlawfully, to kirks and kirkyards, or granted it with ill grace; (ii) the development of private cemetery companies; and (iii) the Burial Grounds (Scotland) Act 1855, which provided for the compulsory closure of kirkyards (and other burial grounds) but allowed parochial boards to make provision for burial in the grounds of the private companies. Together this made available to the Free Church as well as to other nonconformists burial space where mourners were freer to develop their own rituals and to give vent to sentiments which the Calvinism of John Knox had sought to suppress. Thus prayers at the graveside and even hymns came to be heard at burials. The Established Church followed suit. So as far as burial ritual in Scotland is concerned, it might be argued that the opposite of secularisation took place.

Smith depicts the changing scene in Edinburgh through chapters on the Kirk's place in burial, its role in the burial of the poor and its attitude to the Anatomy Act; the onset and activities of the private cemetery companies; the development of trading undertakers; and two chapters on funerals and mourning. The first of these final chapters consists of case studies of Scottish ecclesiastical reactions to the funerals of Princess Charlotte in 1817 and Price Albert in 1861 and of the funerals themselves of a cross-section of eight local dignitaries, including an episcopalian and two Roman Catholic bishops. The other chapter is a study of the sentiments expressed in private letters of condolence and consolation to the bereaved.

Smith's book is an important addition to the recently growing academic interest in death, funerals and mourning in Scotland. It is sad, therefore, to have to warn readers, first, that the ten plates to which reference is made in the text (and which are obviously intended to be collected in a section at the end of the book) are missing from my review copy (although I have seen another copy in which they are present) and, second, that the index is poor. It has too few entries and more than half (by my calculation) of the page references are inaccurate. Things start to go wrong about page 5 and by the end of the book are at least ten pages out of kilter. This is only partly offset by the unusually large print and spacing between lines for a book of this type, which makes skimming through them in search of a reference easier than usual. So my advice would be: if you are interested in the social and ecclesiastical history of Scotland, read this book – it's important – but have pencil in hand to mark the margins and amend the index (by addition of items and correction of page numbers) for anything you are likely want to come back to later.