The Last Farewell (For you are beautiful)

About this song

This gentle folk-rock style farewell ballad was written as a poem by Ron A. Webster, a silversmith and amateur folk-singer from England. It was entered in a radio-station hosted competition hosted by Kenyan-born, British-educated folk singer Roger Whittaker (ref). Whittaker wrote a tune for the text, and recorded it with an orchestral backing in 1971 (ref).

The song was included in Whittaker's 1971 album New World in the Morning, and then reissued in 1975, and ranked at number 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one in several other contemporary charts. It has been recorded by artists including Elvis Presley.

The words are a statement of love and farewell from a veteran of World War I, who on the brink of World War II has to farewell his love on a tropical paradise (likely the Caribbean) and sail home to England. He expects that he will never see her again: either his ship will be attacked and die at sea, or perhaps he will reach England but be unable to return.

Notwithstanding these sentiments, most people focus on the chorus, and the song has become immensely popular as both a statement of love, and more recently as a funeral song for a loved one.

Funeral or wake programme booklet template

This is a template document in Microsoft Word format for making a programme-booklet for a funeral or wake.

It does not have any particular order of service.   Instead, there are sections where you can fill in whatever is happening during the funeral that you are planning.

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Adding rows to Word documents that use tables

Templates from Songs For Funerals are made with Microsoft Word. 

For each one, you can make your own copy, and edit it with any tool that can edit Word files, eg Google Docs. 

Most of the templates use a feature called Tables.  This lets you use a row-and-column, ie "tabular" structure to set out the information.   You know that a table is used because when you click or hover over it, a small "plus" sign appears at the top-left side of the table - like this:

If you click on the small plus sign (called the Table-selector), the table is selected, and thin white lines show you where the rows and columns are:

You may need to add rows from a table to customise the document for your funeral. There may also be times when you want to delete rows, so that there is more space for other rows.

How to add or delete rows from a table in Microsoft Word

To add or remove a whole line, ie a row

• Select the whole line above or below
• Right click 
• Chose Insert or Delete 
• Choose either Row Above, Row Below (to add a line) or  Delete Row (for to remove it)

 

See also

• Templates available from Songs for Funerals