Cruse Bereavement Care
organization
Cruse Bereavement Support and its counterpart Cruse Bereavement Care Scotland are the United Kingdom's largest bereavement charity, which provide bereavement support to people suffering from grief.
Purpose
Cruse Bereavement Support is the UK's largest charity for bereaved people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a sister organisation in Scotland. Cruse offers face-to-face, group, telephone, email and website support to people after someone close to them has died and works to enhance society's care of bereaved people.
Cruse has a freephone national helpline (0808 808 1677) and local services throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Cruse also has a specialist website for young people, hopeagain.org.uk. Cruse services are provided by trained volunteers and are confidential. Cruse also provides training and consultancy for organisations and for those who may come into contact with bereaved people in the course of their work.
History
Founded in 1959 by Margaret Torrie In 1973 the charity moved to its own premises in Richmond upon Thames with the support of a grant from the government. The organisation grew out of Torrie's work for the Citizen's advice bureau and its founding aim was to support widows with advice and assistance. The first branch of Cruse Scotland opened in the late 1960s, and by the mid 1990s there were 28 branches.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cruse Bereavement Care” is organization. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cruse, Bereavement and Care, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “organization” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5190174. VIAF identifies the subject as 140971347. The Library of Congress control number is nb2005000025. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1677, 1959 and 1973.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Cruse Bereavement Care” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.