Elsewhere on this website there are reports on the extravagant decorations which are placed on the graves of travellers, or gypsies, mainly at Christmas time – most recently ‘Decorations on Sparrowhawk grave’, posted 4 January 2022.

The massive  floral tribute shown here was prepared for Danal – ‘Dannie’ – Buckley, who died in 1983 aged 71.  In his early life Dannie and his wife Doris travelled around the countryside with a horse and wagon working on farms.  In the 1960s they settled at Little Totham, Essex, and Dannie was buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s Kelvedon, on 6 July 1983.  The following Christmas the tribute, now displayed in the Museum of East Anglian Life, in Stowmarket, Suffolk, ‘was taken to the graveside with 50 members of the Buckley family in procession behind’.

Prepared by David Weekes, a Braintree antiques dealer and former florist, the tribute, which is in the form of a gypsy caravan, contains approximately 2,000 artificial flowers, and involved some 200 hours work.