Finding the friends of Olive Archer

The Reverend Lonsdale says Olive's story has touched a nerve in British society. (Photographs: Richard Wintle. Calyx Multimedia)

British interfaith minister Akasha Lonsdale has spoken to Outlook about her campaign to find the friends of an old age pensioner who recently died in her parish.

Olive Archer, who died on December 20th aged 83, lived for the last few years of her life in a nursing home in the English county of Wiltshire and is reported to have had no visitors for the past five years.

The Reverend Lonsdale is conducting her funeral on January 14 and has set out to find people who knew her.

Listen to the Rev Lonsdale on Outlook

"To create the service and to make it meaningful in anyway what I like to do is to find out what I can about the person, and to get a photograph," she told Outlook's Fred Dove.

"I phoned the care home and they said 'well we don't really have very much we can tell you about her.'"

The care home however did supply a photograph of Olive when she was a glamorous young woman which further sparked Lonsdale's interest and led her to appeal in the local newspaper for people who knew her.

This in turn led the national press to dub Olive a modern-day 'Eleanor Rigby' - a reference to the Beatles song which describes the funeral of an old lonely woman when 'nobody came.'

The result, says Lonsdale, has been extraordinary.

"I've had hundreds of phone calls from people who wanted to send donations or to send flowers or who wanted to come to the funeral just because they couldn't bear the thought of her passing from this life on her own.

"I've had people come forward who did know her, who've come forward to share memories of the different times that they did know her in their life.

"And finally at the end of the week, some family members came forward as well."

Lonsdale says that she thinks it's touched people because "they don't like to hear of being dying on their own because they don't want to be on their own when they die."

But she also feels that the story represents a wake-up call regarding the increasing loneliness of many old people in Britain.

"The elderly people I've met, generally... are just lonely. They just want someone to talk to. They want someone to sit and listen to them talk about their life - because everyone has a story to tell...

"Going into a care home, people are just sitting waiting to die and I think that's an absolute tragedy and I think as a society there's more that needs to be done."

Olive Archer's funeral now looks likely to be well-attended - by her family, old friends, people who've been touched by her story, and, of course, the media.

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