It all began when 86-year-old Graeme Cotton decided to tidy up his grandparents’ graves and then compassion drove him to clean the surrounding headstones where names could no longer be read.
Now he has been busy at several cemeteries, spraying headstones and grave surrounds for lichen and moss, sweeping layers of foliage from the plots and generally cleaning them up out of respect for those who are buried there.
His search for his own ancestors has led him to cemeteries around the district, including his great-great-great grandfather and grandmother, John and Janet Kerr, whose weathered graves date back to the late 19th century. The Kerrs came from Scotland on the Fifeshire and were the first to plough land in the region – at the site that is now the Buxton Carpark in Nelson.
It has all been quite a history lesson of his own family and other families in the cemeteries.
Being Graeme, once he had spruced up his own family’s plots, he wanted to start on other graves because many were no longer readable after sometimes a century or more of neglect.
“I started off doing my grandmother’s and grandfather’s and saw some of the others were in a bit of a mess and no-one was doing too much.
“They look like they may not have any family here to look after them.”
His daughters, Michelle Cotton and Lynda Byrne, and granddaughter Courtney Byrne-Collings, often keep him company and help him in the cemeteries as it is just a few weeks since he lost his wife of 67 years, Elizabeth.
Sprucing up the neglected graves keeps him busy at a time he needs to be busy.
Mitre 10 Helping Hands and Cleaners Wholesale Nelson donated spray for him to use on the graves to clean them up, while the Wakefield Bakery pitched in with lunch when he was doing what he believes is the right thing to do.
His daughters say he has always been compassionate and hard working in the community, right back to the days he was a hockey coach, umpire, built hockey goals and marked the fields, plus kept an eye on the marina as a volunteer launch warden.
Graeme says it is all about compassion and honouring those people who lie in the cemeteries, to show they are not forgotten.
“If there’s more compassion and people helped one another, it would be a blimin’ good world.”
