Fostering a pluralist and tolerant society

I have invariably found ‘Gerard Henderson’ to be a very useful name. The combination of the essentially Catholic ‘Gerard’ with the predominantly Scottish/Protestant ‘Henderson’ reflected the fact that my maternal grandparents came from Irish Catholic stock while my paternal grandfather came from Protestant Scottish stock. The marriage between Lennox Henderson and Margaret Nugent was a union between a Protestant and a Catholic—which was once called a mixed marriage.

Lennox was cremated in 1934 at the Melbourne Crematorium in Fawkner; Margaret was buried in 1956 in the Catholic section of Boroondara General Cemetery in Kew. Before the Second Vatican Council in early 1950s, the Catholic Church prohibited cremation because it was associated with Freemasonry. So Lennox and Margaret were united in life, but not in death.