A WALK through a cemetery with his stepson gave funeral director Steven Nimmo the idea which earned international headlines.

That notion was QR codes on headstones, so that a passer-by could scan the code with their phone and find out more about the person buried there.

“We were walking through a cemetery looking at the headstones,” Mr Nimmo remembers.

“He said, ‘They don’t tell you very much, do they?’ I said, ‘What do you want to know?’

“I thought, how can we get more information out about people, accepting that people who’ve died aren’t actually people who’ve died, they’re people who’ve lived?“I said to our IT people, what’s the best and easiest avenue to be able to get information out in situ? That’s where the QR code came from.”

The QR Memories idea took off, but Mr Nimmo, 43-year-old managing director of Chester Pearce, sees it as only one way in which he is doing things differently.

He has been in the funeral industry for 20 years, working in corporate and private firms until he established the company five years ago.

“I started the business form my parents’ back bedroom. I took a phone call one day and it was a fellow who had been recommended to me and said ‘Can you help me?’”

He had no premises and had to borrow other people’s facilities, but he said the episode taught him that the traditional trappings were less important.

“It reminded me that what people need at a time of bereavement is people. You can have the best facilities, cars and everything, but what they actually need is people that can help you,” he said.

“In the last five years, we’ve grown from that phone call and from year to year our percentage increase in terms of our work has been quite dramatic.”

The company has grown to a team of 11 people including Steven and his sister Liz. The business is named after his grandmothers – Harriet Chester, who ran a guest house near its Westbourne base, and Beatrice Pearce.

Funerals have changed significantly, he says. People are more concerned about environmental impact, while many want less of a traditional religious element.

“The other area of work I find particularly rewarding is that we now offer assistance to families on lower incomes and on benefits with a scheme that we call Funeral Assist,” he says.

“We were getting families come in and saying Mum’s died or Dad’s died, we haven’t got money, what can we do?

“Most funeral directors require a deposit in advance of the funeral that can be £1,000-£1,500. There’s no point demanding something people can’t pay. We’ve worked hard to become as knowledgeable as possible about government support and we can adapt our service to help people.“There’s no law that states a coffin has to go in a hearse, for example. If you say to a family you can save £150 by using an estate car, if they haven’t got that £150, that surely benefits all parties.”

Few fail to pay, he says.

In pride of place on the wall is a repatriation medal – awarded for Mr Nimmo’s work arranging funerals for service people whose bodies were flown into Brize Norton. He became one of the Ministry of Defence’s preferred partners for the repatriations, which attracted local people to line the roads in tribute.

“It’s a big challenge having the space and time to put a military funeral together,” he says.

Although many independent funeral directors have been bought out, he says he has rebuffed offers.

“What drives me more than anything is legacy. It’s about knowing we’re leaving something for our children,” he adds.