Service in Chapel

Wigs & Mitres Service with the dedication of the Columbarium and interment of ashes of Lord Steyn.

Guest Speaker: The Rt Revd Humphrey Southern.

The new Columbarium provides a permanent resting place for ashes. This possibility has been under discussion for the last few years, because of the pastoral need to make provision for a permanent resting place for ashes. For example, as people live longer and lose their country connections, the Inn presents as a natural resting place for those who have worked here all their lives and possibly lived here as well.

As the Treasurer commented, it is a great privilege that the first ashes to be interred are those of Lord Steyn, or as he preferred to be known ‘Johan’. The Preacher writes : I only met Johan in the last weeks of his life, but in getting to know the family and a little of his work and writings, I discovered someone for whom service, to the Crown and to this country, which adopted him; and the rights of the individual mattered so much: whether in the Guantanamo Bay Lecture or in his own relationships personal and professional. As one colleague wrote to the family on his death, ‘He was such an extraordinary man and in truth he became the conscience of the law in this country.’ Integral to all that was the membership of Lincoln’s Inn which had accepted him when he turned his back on a distinguished career in South Africa; and later the significant years it gave him and Susan when they had a flat in the Inn, just behind Chapel. The Scholarship in his name indicates how much he valued any contribution he could make to enabling others in the law.