Meden Vale Grandad's 'perfect' send-off - on the back of a skip lorry

George Jackson died on September 27, aged 79.

Darren, his son, said his father had struggled with ill health in his later years and was found unresponsive in his deckchair in the sunshine beside his dog, while the cricket was playing inside on TV.

“It was a bit of a shock, but it was the perfect way for him to go really,” Darren, 54, said.

“He played a lot of cricket in the 70s, he loved it. He was once noted to be the one of the best wicketkeepers in Cambridge.”

George, a dad-of-three, was formerly the owner of a successful skip hire business in Cambridge before moving to Meden Vale to be closer to his family.

When George was alive, Darren said he and other family members often joked that they would “chuck him in a skip” when his time came.

So as a fitting tribute to his dad, Darren and his wife decided to call Sutton-based TR Smith & Sons, to arrange for his father’s coffin to be transported to the crematorium in an unusual fashion.

Darren said: “We always said, ‘Dad, when you’re gone we’ll just chuck you in the back of a skip and be done with it’, but obviously, health and safety wouldn’t have allowed us to put him in a skip, so the best thing we could do was to make his last road trip on the back of a skip lorry.

“We decided we wanted the funeral to be a celebration of his life, rather than a mourning, and this was the cherry on top.

“The celebrant said she’d never before conducted a service at the crematorium where people had laughed so much, which was absolutely what we wanted.”

The funeral service, at Mansfield Crematorium, attended by many of George’s loving friends and family.

“It was perfect,” Darren said. “These things are never nice occasions, but when people saw the skip lorry turn up, tears of sadness quickly turned into tears of laughter. It was everything we wanted it to be.”

Darren said the family will always remember George for being a hard-working and generous man, with a passion for gardening, football, snooker and adopting rescue dogs. He leaves 16 grandchildren and many great-grandchildren.

His funeral service read: “The love George had for his grandchildren was unconditional and he always made time to spend quality time with them.

“He was always generous with his time and support for his family.

“’Pops’ will always be remembered and greatly-missed as a much-loved, grumpy, devoted family man.”

Richard Smith, director of Smith & Sons, said when he first received the call from Darren, he thought it must be a ‘wind-up’, but was more than happy to help, free of charge.

He said: “It’s definitely one of the strangest things we’ve been asked to do.

“When Darren rang me, I thought he was having a laugh, then he went on to tell me about his father setting up a skip company in the 1970s and that they’d always joked that’s how he wanted to go out.

“It went brilliantly and brought smiles to many different faces.”