Fiona’s graveyard shift pays off a family debt

Fiona Dunlop has been cleaning and maintaining burial sites and cleaning headstones for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) over the last two years.

Now her voluntary work have been recognised with a Spotlight Award from the commission for ensuring the memorials are looked after.

Fiona was inspired to volunteer after taking students at Peebles High School on trips to World War One battlefields in France and Belgium during her 35-year teaching career there.

Another reason was to “pay a family debt”.

The CWGC tend to two of her own relatives’ graves – her great-uncle Donald, who is buried in Langemark in Belgium, having been killed in the early days of Passchendaelein 1917, and a first cousin of her grandmother who was killed in the Iolaire disaster in 1919 and is buried at Ness on the Isle of Lewes.

Fiona now looks after graves in more than a dozen cemeteries from Peebles to Hawick and finds cleaning and tidying them “much more enjoyable than ordinary housework and gardening”.

She said: “I feel I’m sort of paying back the CWGC because they look after the graves of two relations of mine.

“One of the best things about the volunteering that I do is finding out the stories of the people who are buried in these cemeteries because, you know, they’re all people like us.

“They’ll have their own stories and their own backgrounds, so that’s one of the really rewarding elements, finding out about them.

“I really don’t know why scrubbing a gravestone in a cemetery is more exciting than cleaning my flat but it really is and it somehow seems more constructive, although birds can be a bit of a nightmare and you have to clean the headstones of birds poo.

“The people in these graves were very much part of our communities, whether they were local people who are buried or from abroad. I have a number of Polish people who are buried for example who were stationed here in World War Two, especially in Hawick.

“I think it is important to remember that these were people, they were individuals and not just a headstone or a statistic. They were a person who contributed to our communities.

“The award came completely out of the blue but it’s wonderful to be recognised by an organisation for which you have so much respect and affection.”

Fiona is now training to become a CWGC tour guide and hopes to share the stories of those buried in Peebles Cemetery in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday.