Dunnarunna

The team at the GFG-Batesville Tower has decamped to the seaside, where it is presently sitting on a deckchair in a vest, eating whelks and supping strong lager, and keeping a fatherly eye on the pallid little interns as they hoot and caper in the surf.

We are very grateful to the wider (still, and wider) GFG community for keeping the blog hot and lively while we are away.

Did you see the Olympics opening ceremony? That amazing memorial wall? Hats off to Danny Boyle!

Enjoy the summer. To our funeral director followers we say, go clear out that store room.

In jest?

Lockwood woman’s colourful funeral request – including a jester to walk in front of hearse

Funeral director Debbie Ingham dressed as a jester at the funeral of Margaret Harper

IT WAS a fitting end to a colourful life.

Lockwood grandmother Margaret Harper had only one dying wish – that no-one wore black to her funeral.

Friends and family rallied around this week to dress as brightly as possible to celebrate the 81-year-old’s life.

And funeral director and family friend Deborah Ingham stuck to her promise by leading the cortege dressed as jester.

The funeral procession turned heads in Lockwood as it slowly made its way towards Huddersfield crematorium.

Mourners then gathered at Lockwood Baptist Church – where Margaret was a member and ran the Sunday school for many years – for a celebration of her life.

Her daughter Geri Harper, 55, said: “There was a big cheer and laughter when everyone saw the procession. Someone even said ‘only at Margaret Harper’s funeral could they turn up and everyone bursts into laughter.’

“That is what she would have wanted.

“Debbie is a friend of the family and used to live next door to us when she was a kid.

“When she became a funeral director, my mum would tell her there was no way she would wear black to her funeral.

“She was even going to knit Debbie a poncho but never got around to it.

“That was her only request at her funeral, that everyone would wear bright clothes.”

Source

Read more about Deborah Ingham here

Posted by Evelyn

Quote of the day

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

Albert Camus, The Outsider

Hat tip Richard Rawlinson

Good to go

DEAD GOOD GUIDES

Autumn School 22-25 October in Frome

Gilly Adams & Sue Gill

The intensive 4 day course will examine the Hows and Whys of ceremony and celebration in a practical and experiential way. We will investigate how both positive and negative life events can be distilled into myth and poetry and create meaningful rituals to contain them. In particular, we explore how ceremony and celebration has and does play out in our own lives in order to feel empowered to facilitate these processes in the lives of others in an imaginative and creative way.

This is not a nuts and bolts course; instead the week will be shaped to fulfill the needs and aspirations of participants so there will be plenty of opportunities to learn and practise many aspects of the craft of creating ceremony – both public and private – in a safe environment. Gilly Adams and Sue Gill have been working together for many years; they will offer insights into the cognitively rich world of the secular celebrant, sharing their experience, offering theory, information, and – they hope – inspiration.

Food is always a key element in ceremony and celebration, and since we will be eating lunch and supper together, feasting will be a special theme. The working day will be 10am – 9pm, finishing at 2pm on the last day. The venue is East Woodlands Village Hall, near Frome BA11 5LQ, on the edge of the Longleat Estate and has a very particular rural character.

There are 12 places on each course at a range of fees. 4 places left at £375. Fees include tuition, all materials, and lunch and supper throughout. To secure a place, the full fee needs to be paid to SUE GILL by cheque or BACS.

To express interest and/or for further information please contact Gilly or Sue:

Sue Gill foxandgill@btinternet.com 01229 869769

Gilly Adams gillyadams@tiscali.co.uk 02920 552389

……… hoping to gain greater depth, clarity and complexity of knowledge …. by learning from pre-eminent pioneers and leaders in this field. The experience fulfilled and surpassed my hopes: you were welcoming and wise, the venue was magnificent; the food was delectable. Content blended the practical, personal, professional and theoretical and the form shifted from discussion and presentation to hands-on creativity ….. I carry away with me a bounty of thoughts, questions and ideas that will enrich my own arts practice.

Ruth Howard, Canada – participant Spring School, June 2012 Cumbria

Let’s hear it for extravagant funerals

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Since the Dispatches exposé, we’re all sounding like Jessica Mitford, the ‘red sheep’ of an aristocratic British clan who naively embraced wretched communism while settling in comfortably capitalist California, and wrote The American Way of Death (1963), which accuses the US funeral trade of exploiting vulnerable grievers.

First, let me say I’m certainly not about to defend undertakers who hoodwink financially-challenged bereaved folk into paying embalming fees for ‘hygienic reasons’, or who falsely imply DIY funerals are ‘illegal’. Undertakers should not be viewed like doctors bound by professional ethics, but as salesmen of the death business, to be approached with the caution extended to double glazing peddlers. Those who withhold price lists should indeed be exposed to public humiliation, especially if this helps educate those who, due to ignorance, sentiment and taboo, are conned into spending beyond their means.

It’s also noone else’s business if an affluent person, like Mitford, chooses a cheap, no-frills funeral because their aesthetic of simplicity turns them away from ‘pomposity, complication and expense’.

By the same token, there’s nothing unethical about choosing to splash out on an opulent send-off either. Buying the best coffins, flowers, tombstones and mourning attire, and hiring limousines, printers, choirs, musicians, caterers and wine waiters help the economy and society by making employers profitable. It’s churlish to admonish spenders for not giving those thousands spent on a funeral to their favoured charity, or leaving it in their will for the benefit of living family and friends.

Those who say funereal showiness is vulgar are often demonstrating their middle class snobbery toward the nouveau-riche, or their socialist philosophy of envy. There are plenty of people who, in life, have given time and money to good causes, and recycled their waste and conserved energy out of concern for the environment of future generations, and then want a no-expenses-spared funeral. It sounds like a Bond film but ‘We Only Die Once’.

Brahn Boots – Stanley Holloway

Our Aunt Hanna’s passed away,
We ‘ad her funeral today,
And it was a posh affair,
Had to have two p’licemen there!

The ‘earse was luv’ly, all plate glass,
And wot a corfin!… oak and brass!
We’d fah-sands weepin’, flahers galore,
But Jim, our cousin… what d’yer fink ‘e wore?

Why, brahn boots!
I ask yer… brahn boots!
Fancy coming to a funeral
In brahn boots!

I will admit ‘e ‘ad a nice black tie,
Black fingernails and a nice black eye;
But yer can’t see people orf when they die,
In brahn boots!

And Aunt ‘ad been so very good to ‘im,
Done all that any muvver could for ‘im,
And Jim, her son, to show his clars…
Rolls up to make it all a farce,

In brahn boots…
I ask yer… brahn boots!
While all the rest,
Wore decent black and mourning suits.

I’ll own he didn’t seem so gay,
In fact he cried most part the way,
But straight, he reg’lar spoilt our day,
Wiv ‘is brahn boots.

In the graveyard we left Jim,
None of us said much to him,
Yus, we all gave ‘im the bird,
Then by accident we ‘eard …

‘E’d given ‘is black boots to Jim Small,
A bloke wot ‘ad no boots at all,
So p’raps Aunt Hanna doesn’t mind,
She did like people who was good and kind.

But brahn boots!
I ask yer… brahn boots!
Fancy coming to a funeral,
In brahn boots!

And we could ‘ear the neighbours all remark
“What, ‘im chief mourner? Wot a blooming lark!
“Why ‘e looks more like a Bookmaker’s clerk…
In brahn boots!”

That’s why we ‘ad to be so rude to ‘im,
That’s why we never said “Ow do!” to ‘im,
We didn’t know… he didn’t say,
He’d give ‘is other boots away.

But brahn boots!
I ask yer… brahn boots!
While all the rest,
Wore decent black and mourning suits!

But some day up at Heavens gate,
Poor Jim, all nerves, will stand and wait,
’til an angel whispers… “Come in, Mate,
“Where’s yer brahn boots?”

Not cricket

Upset by the sale of Thiago Silva and Zlatan Ibrahimovic to PSG, a group of AC Milan supporters expressed the widely held disappointment of their fellow football fans by leaving a small funeral arrangement outside the club’s via Turati offices. A funeral card, candles and flowers were set up near the building’s front door in the scene made to symbolize the faith some fans have left in the club after selling two of their best players.

London’s Pyramid of Death

Posted by Belinda Forbes

In the second of BBC Radio 4’s series Unbuilt Britain, Jonathan Glancey describes one of the most audacious buildings ever planned for London – it would have been the largest pyramid ever built.

Church yards were so crowded at the beginning of the 19th century that corpses were literally bursting out of the soil.  Some people believed that a necropolis for the dead might be the answer.  In 1829 the architect Thomas Willson came up with a proposal for the storage of millions of dead bodies in a pyramid situated in Primrose Hill, North London, one of the highest places in London.  Constructed from brick with granite facings, it would have been 94 storeys high and the base would have covered 18 acres.  In his prospectus, Willson claimed that the mausoleum would have made about £10,000,000 – an enormous amount in those days.   He hoped that people would enjoy looking up at this splendid monument as they ate their picnics.

The City of London Archive holds Willson’s drawings and ground plans.  Catharine Arnold, author of ‘Necropolis: London and its Dead’ said that the pyramid was to have been ‘compact, hygienic and ornamental’.

At the time of Willson’s plans, there was a fashion for anything Egyptian so his proposal was not as outlandish as it seems.  Thomas de Quincy, in an opium induced trance, dreamed of meeting Isis and Osiris and ‘being buried…in the heart of eternal pyramids.’ However, public opinion stopped this monumental pyramid of the dead from being built.  It was regarded as too over-bearing.  The idea of a garden cemetery was the preferred option of the General Cemetery Company. If the pyramid had been built, it would have cast a great shadow over the park of Primrose Hill.

Jonathan Glancey’s fascinating programme is available on BBC iPlayer here.

The view below the radar

An article in the Times dated 15 July, based on an interview with Mike McCollum, ceo of Dignity plc, offers one or two (no more) features of interest.

His definition of an undertaker?

“We’re event organisers,” says McCollum. “We arrange a family event for you on very short notice, which you wish you didn’t have to arrange.”

He adds:

“And, on the day of the funeral, we’re the master of ceremonies. The funeral director makes sure everything goes exactly to plan, to the second, and hopefully makes sure everybody, in an unfamiliar situation, knows where to sit and where to go.”

He doesn’t say if he regards this model as eternal, nor whether he is aware of trends towards empowered mourners who take a different view of the brief of a funeral event planner.

Concerning the travails of his reassuringly inept rivals, ‘Co-operative’ Funeralcare, he is defensive of the hub model and reckons “it’s time people accepted some home truths”.

“The definition of a mortuary is a place where dead people are kept. When people die and they can be in different conditions. You need specialist refrigeration, specialist conditions. You’d expect them to be clinical, to use stainless steel equipment, to be easy to clean. They’re not necessarily going to be nice places to be.”

Hmn.

By way of assuring Times readers who are also Dignity shareholders, the article points out that Dignity’s market capitalisation has risen from £180m to £446m and the share price from 230p to 810p. The writer does not detect the present injurious effect of underfunded funeral plans. Nor does he point out Dignity’s Achilles heel, its high prices, vulnerable, in an increasingly price-conscious market, to consumer scrutiny. Nor does he question Dignity’s policy of brand omerta, a remarkable stance for an outfit in the event-planning business.

Would you buy shares in Dignity?

Source (paywalled)

First impressions

By Richard Rawlinson

You want celebrants to say good things well, but how do you want them to dress? If you’re opting for a civil funeral, do you want them business-like in a dark suit or to join in any sartorial theme requested by the departed? If you’re opting for a religious funeral, do you prefer traditional vestments or those favoured by the more progressive clergy?

The Good Funeral Guide
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