The way we were

Elderly people reflect on their reflections of themselves when young. Entitled ‘Reflections’, it is the work of Tom Hussey. Hat-tip to Caitlin Doughty, who posted a link to this on her Facebook page the other day. 

Please note that here at the GFG we now post most of our stuff on Facebook these days. If you want to spice your day with newsy snippets from our web-harvesting team, make your way over to https://www.facebook.com/GoodFuneralGuide and Like us. 

Good Funeral Awards 2013 — The Longlist

From Brian Jenner over at GoodFuneralAwards

The judging panel of the Good Funeral Awards have sifted through more than 600 nominations for this year’s Good Funeral Awards and have longlisted the following.

The judges have requested that their deliberations remain secret. While they appreciate that many people will be disappointed, they wish to remind everyone that this is an annual event, and each year the method of selection improves. Please do not lose heart, just enter again next year.

If you are a nominee, make sure you’ve got a ticket for the dinner. We sold out last year, and we do not wish to turn nominees away this year.

Heaven on Earth Bespoke Green & Pink Funerals Most Promising New Funeral Director
Poppy Mardall – Poppy’s Funerals
Charlotte Graham – Charlotte Graham Funeral Directors
Sarah Stuart and Lel Wallace – Wallace Stuart
Stacey Bentley – AW Lymn the Family Funeral Service
Christian Fairbrother – Rosedale Funeral Home
Rory Craig – Hinton Park Woodland Burial Ground
Hazel Pittwood – FC Douch
Leah Edwards – Country Funerals

Embalmer of the Year
Liz Davis – freelance
Lisa Fox – Southampton area Co-operative Funeralcare.
Angie McLachlan – freelance

The Eternal Slumber Award for Coffin Supplier of the Year
Yuli Somme – Bellacouche,
Roger Fowle – Willow Coffins
Martin Wenyon – Coffins Direct

Most Significant Contribution to the Understanding of Death
Jean Francis
Pia Interlandi
Kristie West
The Natural Death Handbook
Barbara Chalmers – Final Fling
Death Café

Crematorium Attendant of the Year
Andy at Colwyn Bay
Paul Lawrence at Haycombe
Mandy Ryan and Martin McEvilly at Redditch

Best Internet Bereavement Resource

Jane Harris and Jimmy Edmonds for: Say Their Name, made for the Compassionate Friends.
Kim Bird for http://www.rightchoicefunerals.com/home
James Norris for http://www.deadsoci.al/
The Natural Death Centre for its website: http://www.naturaldeath.org.uk/
Teresa Evans for http://evansaboveonline.co.uk/
Jean Francis for www.pre-needfuneralplanning.co.uk

The Blossom d’Amour Award For Funeral Floristry
Heather Gorringe – Great British Florist
Donald Thornford — Blue Geranium
Helen Pyle — Flowers by Helen

Funeral Celebrant of the Year
David Abel
Dee Ryding
Jan Comley
Canon Reverend Eve Pits
Barbara Millar
Deborah Bouch
Sue Goodrum
Jill Maguire
Tim Clark
Georgina Pugh
Kim Farley
Janice Smith
Noel Lockyer-Stevens
Lynne Watson

Cemetery of the Year Award
Rotherfield Greys
Sun Rising Natural Burial Ground
Cardiff and the Vale
Higher Ground Meadow
Clandon Wood

Gravedigger of the Year
Stuart Goodacre, Horncastle, Lincolnshire
Paul Rackham
Steve Swyer, Epsom Cemetery
Tom Vassie

Funeral Planning Services Best Funeral Arranger
Dee Besley – Rosedale Funeral Home
Angela Bailey – Harrison Funeral Home, Enfield, Middlesex
Sue Kilday – EH Crouch Funeral Directors
Joyce Callaghan – AW Lymn, the Family Funeral Service

The Bereavement Register Funeral Director of the Year
John Harris – T Cribb and Sons in Beckton East London
David Summers – AW Lymn, the Family Funeral Service
Richard Green – Rosedale, Diss
Jeremy Clutterbuck – L.W.Clutterbuck
Cara Mair – Arka, Brighton

Best Alternative to a Hearse
V W Funerals
David Hall, vintage lorry.
Alba Orbital

Lifetime Achievement Award
Paula Rainey Crofts & Simon Dorgan
Ian Hazel
Josefine Speyer

GreenAcres Woodland Burials Green Funeral Director of the Year
Rosie Grant from Natural Endings
Leverton & Sons
Heaven on Earth
Clandon Wood
The Green Funeral Company
Jean Francis

Winners will be announced by Pam St Clement at a dinner in the Ocean View Hotel on Saturday 7 September.

CERTIFICATES OF NOMINATION

If you would like to order a full-colour A4 certificate confirming your nomination, which can be displayed in your premises, we can supply one for £20. You can either pick up the certificate on the night or we will send it to you. Please email info@goodfuneralawards.co.uk with your name and an address to send the invoice.

Please note that here at the GFG we now post most of our stuff on Facebook these days. If you want to spice your day with newsy snippets from our web-harvesting team, make your way over to https://www.facebook.com/GoodFuneralGuide and Like us. 

Bah humbug! Blame Dickens for undertaker-phobia

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Imagine picking up a well-thumbed penny novel by an unknown Victorian author at your secondhand bookshop and, on starting to read it, discovering to your surprise that a family of undertakers is depicted in a favourable light.

We’re used to Charles Dickens, who loathed undertakers as much as he despised Jews like the money-hording reprobate, Fagin, in Oliver Twist, and the mean-spirited Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Of course Scrooge didn’t warm to Christmas, he was the wrong religion!

Like Dickens’s Jewish caricatures, his undertaker, again in Oliver Twist, is a piece of work: a hunched, scrawny, ashen-faced, hand-wringing ghoul, waiting for death like a scavenger crow, ready to prey on vulnerable mourners, to oil cash out of them and then count it with miserly glee. When his shop bell rings, he salivates like Pavlov’s dog. Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly.

Crow, dog, spider, I’m mixing my metaphors, carried away by the melodrama! In truth, I cant even remember much about the undertaker in Oliver Twist, but I know he was a creep.

Has the funeral business fully recovered from its wrecked reputation during the 19th century? Again employing artistic license, let’s return to the depiction of goodly undertakers in my ‘obscure Victorian novel’.

The main characters are a kindly father and his son, who makes the ladies of the borough swoon with his dashing looks and upright gait, complemented by impeccably-tailored mourning attire. Of an evening, conversation flows freely over candle-lit dinners with mother and daughter, a picture of domestic bliss as their hard-earned income provides for contented family life.

On days off, the son walks out with the haberdasher’s pretty daughter, the romantic interest of the story. At work, father and son work diligently in their tidy wood-panelled shop. When the doorbell chimes, they greet mourners courteously, perfectly judging the balance between sympathy and providing wares and services from coffin to coach and horses. Their seemly manner is second nature: besides, to be obsequious would be bad for business, as would cold salesmanship.

They witness suffering through their work. Despite medical advances, death, along with the decline towards death, is all around, a natural part of everyday life: mothers burying their babies; men struck down in the prime of life leaving the family facing the workhouse; visits to homes where the matriarch is laid out in the same bed in which she’d been born, and at which she’d watched her own parents die. The presence of death is even more stark in the slums across town, where life expectancy is far lower than that experienced by our undertakers. 

They’ve seen changes in their trade, too. Grandfather, an honest, ruddy-faced artisan, had been a cabinet-maker who built coffins on demand in the village. They did things simply back then, and without much professional assistance. Father is of the new generation who joined the growing numbers migrating to the city where he set up shop specifically as an undertaker.

Since Prince Albert’s untimely death, the Queen seems to have inspired a cult of mourning influencing all walks of society. The last important event in a person’s life, funerals have long been a rite of passage like baptism and marriage, but increasingly families seem intent on outdoing their neighbours with ever more spectacular funeral processions.

Father, a rational sort, finds the trend somewhat baffling, especially when some people virtually bankrupt themselves with additional black-plumed horses, extra coaches and a parade of professional mutes. On occasion, he’s gently advised less affluent customers to rein in their funeral ambitions. As an act of paternalism towards his housekeeper, he’s also waived costs so she could give a relative a send-off which she couldn’t otherwise afford.

The son, with youthful impatience motivated by aspirations to maximise his savings before asking the haberdasher’s daughter to marry him, expresses frustration at his father’s seeming softness in business.

Father rebukes him: ‘It is dishonest to exploit the pride and vanity of those who don’t see the virtue of living within their means,’ he says. ‘We would no longer merit the trust bestowed upon us if we were governed solely by the biggest and quickest profit. What goes around comes around, my son’.

The son grudgingly accedes to his father’s moral wisdom. They carry on serving the community as usual, the son slowly but surely making progress towards his goal of establishing his own marital home.

Then things start to go wrong. A popular newspaper is serialising a novel featuring a manipulative undertaker who is so grotesque he makes Uriah Heep seem like David Copperfield. Soon, the newspaper’s editor is publishing journalistic stories attacking, in general terms, the practices of real-life undertakers.

At first the people of the borough turn in subtle ways. Father and son notice visitors to the shop seem resentful and suspicious. When shown a coffin, they frostily enquire if there are cheaper models that will nevertheless impress onlookers. In time, they notice passers-by glaring at them through the window, or even wagging their gloved fingers, or shaking their umbrellas. ‘Shame on you,’ one shouts outside the door. ‘Bog off to where you came from,’ says another.

‘Why are we being demonised?’ says the son. ‘We only provide what they need, and sometimes we even advise them to spend less than they want to’.

‘We’re being tarred with the brush of the greediest members of our trade,’ says the father. ‘While the unscrupulous undertaker in the newspaper is fictional, there is indeed vice in our midst that’s giving us all a bad name. There’s no smoke without fire. But, fear not, justice will prevail, and good will out in the end.’

One night, they wake up with fright to the sound of baying drunks in the street, followed by an empty gin bottle crashing through their shop window. Venturing downstairs later, they see, painted in bold letters across the door, the words: DISMAL TRADER. By the side of these words is a rough image of a diamond-shaped coffin. Daubed in haste in the dead of night, it resembles the Star of David.

‘What the Dickens’, exclaims the son, ‘we’re not even Jewish’.

He then notices an envelope on the doormat, addressed to him in the handwriting of his fiancée. The ink is smudged, as if by tears.  

To be continued…

Vultures circle over Funeralcare

From Sky News: 

The Co-operative Group has rebuffed a string of takeover approaches for its funerals arm amid a controversial restructuring of its troubled banking division.

Sky News has learnt that buyout firms including CVC Capital Partners, the controlling shareholder of Formula One motor racing, and Montagu Private Equity, a former owner of the Dignity funeral planning business, are among a large number of parties to have expressed an interest in acquiring the Co-op unit in recent weeks.

The prospective buyers have all been rebuffed by the Co-op, whose new chief executive, Euan Sutherland, has made it clear that he does not want to part with any of the mutual’s “crown jewel” assets.

The precise value of the Co-op Funeralcare business is unclear, but analysts expect that it would be worth hundreds of millions of pounds if it were to be sold.

More

Vanishing point – what’s the best method?

Guest post by Steve
 
Every funeral at a crematorium will have a point at which the coffin is removed from the sight of the mourners, usually during the committal. 
 
To start off with, is there an optimal speed of removing the coffin from view? Some curtains close in just 10 seconds, which may be too fast for some. Yet a slow 90 second curtain closure may allow time to contemplate for some, or too long to suffer for others. 
 
Curtains – this is the most common form of the coffin “vanishing point”, especially in newer crematoria. The fact that the coffin does not move may make this method more acceptable, but it could also be seen as a rather boring or sterile method saying goodbye. Some European crematoria have moving screens instead of curtains, in some cases with colour changing lighting!
 
Conveyer/doors – this method is common in older UK crematoria (such as Golders Green and Woking), but rare in new builds. The coffin moves along a conveyer or rollers through a wooden or metallic door into a curtain lined receiving room. Since the infamous James Bond crematorium scene, many mourners probably think that coffin is moving straight into the cremator! Opinions may vary as to whether this method is more dignified that curtains. Certainly the “conveyer belt” method of 30 minute funeral slots at crematoria would not be in keeping with conveyers for the “vanishing point”. Some European crematoria use a combination of a moving catafalque on a floor track and curtains or screen. 
 
Lowering catafalque – this was also common in older crematoria, especially if the crematory was below the chapel. The catafalque lowers at the committal, in keeping with a burial. This may be seen as traditional or tacky. In some cases the coffin can be moved half-way down for flowers to be placed on the coffin, before it is lowered further to a receiving room (or even conveyer belt) below. In a few cases, it is just for show, and the coffin is raised back up again after the mourners have left the chapel. 
 
Do nothing – this is common in European crematoria. The coffin is not removed from sight, but mourners must remove themselves from the coffin at the end of the chapel service. Turning your back on a loved one may be harder than having them removed from you. 
 
Straight into the cremator – in Japan where the cremation rate is 99%, and many other cultures, it is traditional to view the coffin going into the cremator. This may be a bit traumatic for UK audiences, but it may be a more “final” way of saying goodbye. In Singapore, mourners view from a balcony as what can only be described as a robotic forklift moves slowly along a floor track, and places the coffin into the cremator. A You Tube video of this is shown below.  

 
Given that all mourners will likely have a different idea of what is an acceptable method of removing the coffin from view, is there a perfect method of the “vanishing point” to suit everyone?
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