Cash for crash
Suffolk police have come under fire for their practice of awarding cash payments to officers who have to deal with exceptionally difficult or distressing incidents — a particularly horrible road crash, for example or, in the words of the Police and Crime Commissioner, “picking up charred remains of bodies from house fires and picking up […]
Historical perceptions of a disreputable trade
The following is extracted by a PhD thesis by Sarah E Bond. It describes the social status of funeral workers in earlier times, particularly in ancient Rome where, we discover, FSOs were often employed, also, as executioners. According to an inscription from Puteoli dated to the first century BCE: “The operae (workers) who shall be provided […]
Patron saint of FDs, pray for us
Posted by Richard Rawlinson It’s a crying shame St Joseph of Arimathea shares his feast day with St Patrick on 17 March. The patron saint of funeral directors gets ignored in a wash of green and Guinness. But the world’s most famous undertaker is particularly special to Britain, and well worth your prayers seeking his intercession. […]
Requiem for the topper and the silver-knobbed cane?
Writing in the spring 2013 issue of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management Journal, the editor, Bob Coates, writes: What was once the abnormal is now the normal with respect to funeral ceremonies on our premises … Less enamoured, however, may be the funeral director. Some may find the frankness of discussion, particularly over […]
Funerals must address dreams, too
In an excellent article in the Christian Century, the Rev Samuel Wells, an American, describes taking a British funeral. There are lessons here for clergy, funeral celebrants and undertakers. And so it was that I was called to preside at the funeral of Michael. Michael had had a difficult life. He had Duchenne muscular dystrophy. […]
Britain’s most unreasonable undertaker?
From an email sent to the GFG: Hi Charles A friend told me about your website. She says you you like to hear about interesting funerals. Well wait till you hear about mine. My mum died in hospital — long illness, merciful release and all that. My brother Stephen and I were determined she wasn’t […]
A wee whiff of Auld Reekie
The stopping train takes more or less forever to get to Edinburgh through the fertile fracking fields of the desolate north-east. I’d been invited to look round Scotmid Co-operative Funeral Directors. Scotmid is a small, independent members’ co-operative dating back to 1859. It owns 10 funeral homes. Like all co-operatives, it both co-operates and competes with […]
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 […]
Validating the unverifiable
Last year’s TV documentaries revealed shocking scenes in funeral home mortuaries which horrified undertakers as much as they did the public. But just as the documentaries did not rouse the public to descend in angry mobs on their nearest funeral home, so they failed, also, to rouse good undertakers to fight back by demonstrating convincingly […]
Undertakers feast on misery, situation normal
There’s a story in the Scottish Daily Mail, 7 June, that exemplifies very well the misinformation and scaremongering that are characteristic of media treatment of funerals in the UK. Here it is: LOCAL authorities and funeral directors are making money out of family misery, with ‘the cost of dying’ reaching thousands of pounds in Scotland, […]
