A peal for Martin Logan van Oppen: Medbourne packs St Giles for a life well lived

St Giles’ Church in Medbourne was packed, and not in that slightly exaggerated way people sometimes mean when they say “packed”. There were some 200 there, which for a village funeral is saying something. The bells were peeled before the service, tolled for the burial, and then, in the evening, the ringers went at them again in Martin’s honour. Which was exactly right, because this was a man who belonged to the place and, in a rather old-fashioned and admirable sense, helped keep it going.

Martin died at home, aged 91, having lived a life that was not so much full as gloriously overstocked. These days, if somebody has managed a couple of jobs and once been to Marbella, we’re invited to regard it as a life of dizzying richness. Martin, by contrast, seems to have got through several lives.

He was the great-grandson of Paddy Logan, MP for Market Harborough, and came from one of those families which appear, every so often, to have left a thumbprint on half the county. During the war the family took refuge at the former orphanage at East Langton, built by his great-grandfather for children orphaned by the building of the railways. Even that, for most of us, would have sufficed as an interesting family footnote. For Martin it was merely part of the preamble.

He was the son of Ernest van Oppen and Maud, known as Pat, née Burgess, and part of the wider van Oppen family, long associated with shipping and insurance. He went first to Harborough Grammar and then Bedford School, was unbeaten at boxing in the Army, attended Moulton Agricultural College, and then, because ordinary life was evidently never going to be quite enough, headed off to Assam to plant tea.

From there he established a vegetable farm in Southern Rhodesia, later a riding school in South Africa, and eventually met his future wife, Priscilla Berry of Great Bowden, on a blind date. Which is pleasing, because blind dates so often end in a strained lunch and a fabricated excuse about needing to feed someone else’s cat. This one ended rather better.

Martin and Cilla were married for 59 years, and there was something faintly, unmistakably fitting in his dying on Valentine’s Day.

Martin and Cilla made their home in Medbourne, had two sons, James and Charles, and spent many years in the Caribbean, where Martin worked for the British government. Through all of this, he kept the family farm in the Welland Valley going, which suggests a level of commitment and stamina that most of us can barely summon for remembering to put the bins out on the right morning. His son James now runs the vO Polo Club from near Middleton, while Charles has continued the family’s international insurance interests and also has plantations overseas. So the family’s reach remains, as ever, both local and far-flung.

And then there was Medbourne itself. Martin was not merely a resident but one of those people without whom village life becomes thinner, flatter and less itself. He served as churchwarden for many years and plainly cared deeply for St Giles and the community around it. You could tell that not simply from the formal tributes, but from the turnout, the atmosphere, the bells, the faces in the church, and the gathering afterwards at Manor Farm, where Emerson & Wests laid on what everyone agreed was a marvellous spread.

There was another touch which would have pleased a man with Martin’s sense of family continuity. Stamps Funeral Directors, who handled the arrangements with their usual care, were able to provide orders of service from previous generations of the family, which made it feel part of the larger cycle of family life, loss and remembrance.

That, in the end, is how these things are measured. Not by the solemn adjectives we reach for afterwards, but by whether people come, whether they stay, whether they talk, laugh, remember, and go home thinking they have been present at something that mattered.

Martin van Oppen’s funeral did not feel like an exercise in mourning alone. It felt like a village saying thank you to one of its own.

The family have asked that thanks be passed to the Reverend Stephen Bishop for taking the service, to organist Ivan Linford, to Steve Millington and the bell ringers, to Stamps Funeral Directors for their care and longstanding help to the family over the generations, and to the many friends whose support has meant so much.

A good send-off, then. A crowded church, a peal of bells, good food, old stories, gratitude, affection and a proper sense of a life fully lived. You could not ask for much more than that. Nor, one suspects, would Martin have done.

Martin Logan van Oppen (6 October 1934 – 14 February 2026)