Books by Patricia Utechin
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‘An absolutely wonderful book … These
epitaphs do what they were carved to do – give us pause.’
Ronald Blythe
‘A delightful and wide-ranging collection.’
These epitaphs have been collected from churches and churchyards in the
towns and villages of Oxfordshire. In verses or prose pieces that are
beautiful, touching or eccentric, they tell us what people over the
centuries have been moved to say about their dead. The young lady of
Dorchester who died ‘a martyr to Excessive Sensibility’, the baby of
Compton Beauchamp whose
‘life was like his length all but a span’, the Cottisford man, a
servant of the East India Company, who ‘acquired the entire esteem of
the Natives and great Honour to the English factories’, the itinerant
female rat-catcher who found her ‘last lodging’ in Chipping Norton
churchyard, John the Smith of Brightwell Baldwin, who died in 1371 –
all these and many more are for a moment brought to life as we read
their epitaphs.Sunday Times ‘A splendid little anthology … It is a most notable and worthwhile achievement, one which everyone with a love for English and, above all, local life will welcome with acclaim.’ Senex, Oxford Times The book first appeared in 1980: for this new paperback edition (1990) Patricia Utechin has added twenty-six epitaphs. Patricia Utechin, daughter of an army officer, lived in India as a child, but has spent most of her adult life in Oxfordshire. Towards the end of the Second World War she was a VAD in military hospitals at Middleton Stoney and Tusmore Park. Thereafter she was a student at Ruskin College, and since then has worked largely in Oxford itself. She has one son, who works as a radio producer, and she lives in Old Headington. |
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Also by Patricia Utechin
 The Trumpets Sounded
Commemoration of the War Dead in the Parish Churches of Oxfordshire £3.60 ISBN 0 946976 05 8 ‘The memorials in Oxfordshire are all still there (the bombers having passed over them to Coventry, Birmingham, the North) and Patricia Utechin has gathered them in. Somebody of an equally careful and unsentimental piety should do the same in all the parishes of all the counties … Rural churches, especially those with trees outliving us ten times over, are peculiarly potent collecting places for, if not belief, at least seriousness. So it is sweet and right that where the local dead are gathered the names of those abroad should be gathered too.’ David Constantine, Oxford Magazine  Sons of This Place Commemoration of the War Dead in Oxford’s Colleges and Institutions £6.00 ISBN 0 946976 07 4 ‘… gathering in the memorials, Patricia Utechin has herself carried out a service of memory. “Sons of This Place” is an appropriate title. Most were only sons, they didn’t live to be fathers. And the words come from an inscription on the lych-gate of St Mary’s, Pyrton, remembering the men of the village who died in two World Wars: “Sons of this place / let this of you be said / That you who live are worthy of the dead”. That would do very well as an inscription in any privileged place, where the new generations pass through with better chances of life.’ David Constantine, Oxford Magazine |