A FEW WEEKS AGO the wife of a pensioner in
our village died after being for some years what is known as not quite right in, the head. A friend of mine, for whom the old man does odd jobs in the garden, undertook to help him to get his wife's savings transferred to his own account. This turned out to necessitate an application to the Court of Protection, and the application had to be' accompanied by a certified copy of an entry of death in the local register. My friend obtained this and sent it off: it is signed by the registrar and on the back the medical superintendent of the hospital in which the old lady died certifies that she 'is one and the same person' as the lady referred to in the records of the Court of Protection. The Court have now written back to say that 'the form of Certificate of Death submitted was issued for a special purpose under the Friendly Societies Acts and is not acceptable as evidence in this Court': he must get another kind of certificate and have it, like the first one, endorsed by the medical superintendent. I had not realised that even death was officially impossible until the right form had been filled up.
Previous page
