20 May 2016 – The Good Funeral Guide

August Equity out, Montagu Private Equity in. Your local funeral directors.

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Thanks to Robert De Baahr from the London Society of Death for bringing this to our attention – from Insider Media Ltd.

‘European private equity firm Montagu has acquired a majority stake in a Berkshire-headquartered funeral services provider which has more than 130 branches throughout the country.

Founded in 2007 by chief executive Phillip Greenfield, Funeral Services Partnership (FSP) is the third largest provider in the UK. The Reading-headquartered company employees about 500 staff and oversees 10,500 funerals per year.

FSP’s model is based on acquiring independent funeral directors and putting in “investment, training and improved processes”.

Montagu will partner with Phillip Greenfield and his management team to grow the business by making further acquisitions and through organic expansion.

Greenfield said: “We want to continue to grow our presence in the UK market and we are confident that Montagu will be great partners given their previous experience of the sector. We look forward to working with Alex and the team going forward.”

Alex Dabbous, director at Montagu, added: “We are proud to be investing in FSP, a strong brand name in a sector we know well. FSP provides important and essential services, and we will work hard with Phillip and his team to help build the business further in the years to come.”

The financial details of the deal were undisclosed.’

The modern funeral is a grief-bypass procedure?

Stewart Dakers is a 76 year-old voluntary community worker with a weekly column in the Guardian. He wrote a piece in last week’s Spectator about funerals. Here’s a taster:

Funerals ain’t what they used to be. Today’s emphasis is more on celebrating a life past than honouring the future of a soul. While I am not averse to a celebratory element, the funeral is morphing into a spiritually weightless bless-fest. This was brought home to me last week at the funeral of Enid, a lady I knew only through our mutual attendance at bingo in the community centre.

I was uncomfortable from the moment we gathered outside the church, where my sombre suit set me apart from the Technicolor crowd of family and friends. The atmosphere was more akin to a wedding, even a hen do, than a funeral, the air drenched in perfume and aftershave. Inside, there was pew-to-pew chatter, wall-to-wall music (Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’, inevitably), not a single moment of silence, and not a single sacred song, let alone a prayer (an inaccurately mumbled Lord’s Prayer excepted). There were two readings, one by a grand-niece of perhaps eight, snivelling, bless, a poem about being only next door; then a nephew offering a eulogy, the main point of which was that his aunt had been a keen gardener ‘and she will plant her flowers in heaven’.

I know I shouldn’t sneer. Religion, the Anglican version anyhow, is a broad church with a wide liturgical spectrum. But I could not help feeling that such celebration missed the point. It somehow connected with a virtual life rather than a real death. It was spiritual displacement activity.

You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.