Walter Harrison was born on the coal barge Baron in July 1921. He lived on the canal for 30 years and worked on the waterways for much of his life.
Family and friends of the pensioner, known as Wally, followed the coffin along the towpath.
Full story here.
SCENE – A village wedding. Church bells. Assorted villagers have assembled at the lych gate waiting for a glimpse of the bride. They are joined by a TOURIST who happily happens to speak perfect English.
VILLAGER: There she is! Just coming round the corner now. Ooh, it’s a Rolls!
TOURIST: Who’s that walking in front of it? That person in the Tudor costume and the three-cornered hat and, what’s that, a mace?
VILLAGER: That’s the wedding organiser.
TOURIST: Why is she walking in front of the car?
VILLAGER: It’s the way it’s done in this country. The wedding organiser walks in front of the car.
TOURIST: But why?
VILLAGER: Oh, ah… tradition. Yes, it’s always been done that way. It’s the way we do it.
TOURIST: But a wedding is not about the wedding organiser –
VILLAGER: Oh, look at that dress! Doesn’t she look lovely! And look, there’s the bride!
_______________________________
The Great British Tradition whereby a funeral director walks in front of, or ‘pages’, a hearse is a well-loved custom stretching back to the heraldic funeral processions of the middle ages. Well, not really. Actually, they didn’t have funeral directors then, it was the Head of the College of Arms who would walk in front of the cortege. No, ah, paging is a lot more recent. There are several schools of thought about where it originated… and little chance of a consensus. Nowadays, it’s a ‘mark of respect’, that’s what it is. Will that do?
It is undeniably a good look.
Yes it is, and I think it is capable of adaptation. If funeral directors were to suggest to families that one or more of them might like to undertake this role instead, I wonder what the uptake would be.
What would be the point?
In a word, empowerment.
Why is it important to empower bereaved people at a funeral?
So that they can go home feeling proud of themselves. If a funeral is to be a valuable event, they need to feel proud they did their bit.
Would this not take away from the status of the funeral director?
Wrong question. Would it add value to the funeral? Yes, I think so. No one ever went wrong who sought to empower the bereaved. The trick is to find them things to do that they’re comfortable with.
But the job of a funeral director is to take all possible burdens from their families.
I respectfully disagree. The job of a funeral director is to organise an event where bereaved people can do good grief work. They can’t do that if they’re spectators. I repeat: they need to go home feeling they played their part in giving the person who died a good send-off. So, I say: ask not what you can do for the bereaved; ask what the bereaved can do for themselves.
Well, I don’t know that I’d want to be a funeral director if you took paging away from me.
Look, I may be wrong, I acknowledge that. But right now I do absolutely believe that you guys have got to stop obsessing about the price of funerals and start looking for ways to add value to them. You can do that in ways that cost nothing. This may be one.
A topical post from our religious correspondent, Richard Rawlinson
Timed to counter the low turnout of voters at the mayoral and local council elections last week, did you catch the BBC advertisement challenging political apathy by chronicling how so many everyday activities–from the fat count in our sausages to the safety of cyclists on the road–are politicised?
Despite the mid-term anti-Government vote that brought some good news for Labour and disappointment for the Tories, and especially the Lib-Dems, Londoners of my acquaintance are relieved to see Boris returned, and the defeat of tax-avoiding, gaff-prone has-been Red Ken.
But how does politics–local and national–impact on the funeral business? Healthcare clearly affects death tolls, and the economy the lot of small businesses such as independent undertakers. Here are five more, big and small, issues with which local councillors might perhaps busy themselves:
How shall we avoid traffic disruption by town centre funeral processions?
Can we empower the police to hose down those awful ‘God Hate Fags’ protesters who upset the bereaved at private funerals?
How can we secure more land for cemeteries?
How can we placate believers in man-made global warming by making cremation more eco-friendly?
How can we tackle the class war issue of inheritance tax and death duties?
Please add some meat to the bone of this shamefully skeletal list.
Posted by Charles
We’ve talked quite a lot on this blog recently about ritual. There have been times when a better and more accessible word might have been theatre.
For what is a funeral if it is not theatre?
The playscript for the drama we call a funeral, together with its delivery, is, for the most part, the responsibility of the ceremony leader. But funeral directors get to play a major part in act one, scene one, the procession, and, though they love dressing up for it, I think many of them have lost sight of the story they’re supposed to be telling and, therefore, the role they are supposed to be playing.
The story of a funeral procession is that of the last journey ever taken by a dead person here on Earth. The dead person is accompanied, as Thomas Long expresses it, with love and lamentation to the Edge of Eternity. The element of accompaniment is central.
It’s a ritual journey, obviously. The dead person’s last actual journey was probably to the hospital by ambulance. There, on their deathbed, family and friends hopefully got a chance to say goodbye. A funeral re-enacts this ritually, theatrically: a ritualised final journey followed by a ritualised goodbye.
In the olden time a funeral procession could make its way to the place of farewell at a dramatically slow pace (there’s no practical reason for going slowly). Those whom the procession passed amongst would stop and doff their hats and bow and pay their ritual last respects. It was a good show.
That’s all been consigned to the past, borne away by traffic and indifference. Keeping a procession together now through traffic lights and roundabouts is wing-and-a-prayer stuff. The first 100 meters works well enough, the undertaker leading the hearse at a stately walking pace down the street. Like all good actors, s/he is in character. So are the understrappers. Splendid. Then we get to the main road and s/he dives in. The actors come out of character, most of them – all the while keeping up appearances. Heaven knows what talk they talk, what jokes they swap, let’s not speculate. This part of the journey is not about stately procession, it’s about getting to the crem on time. It’s a hiatus, an ellipsis. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
Which is why, in a film, unless it’s a satirical comedy, you’d jump cut to when the church or crematorium hoves into view and the occupants of the hearse get back in character. The funeral director hops out and carries on where s/he left off earlier for all of 200 metres max. And stops just short of the coffin’s destination.
If a playwright wrote it like that you’d shoot him. For this is the point at which the principal actors are joined by The Crowd. When you’ve got that many people on stage there must be ensemble action, a single focus of attention. We don’t get any of that. As the limousine doors are opened and the occupants unfurl under the indulgent but prurient gaze of The Crowd, the Men In Black Macs are, severally, easing the coffin out of the hearse and doing things with flowers.
The procession has entirely lost its momentum, not in itself fatal, but it can never regain a sense of purpose because, by the time it is ready to move on once more, it’s far too close to journey’s end. It falls over the finishing line. The Crowd was never part of a procession. The minister declaimed “I am the resurrection and the life” to empty air and an organist. The Men in Black Macs probably put the coffin on the catafalque before everyone was in and sitting. It can work out a bit better in a church, where everyone is in first, but this denies The Crowd any processional role.
Could it be staged better? In theory, yes. A procession — for those who want one — needs at least 80 metres, a decent run-up. Everyone out of cars, on foot, standing tall. Coffin out, too. People formed up in some sort of order of precedence, leader/s (optional) in front of the coffin, stepping out as one, everyone playing their part, understanding the part they are playing, and quite possibly singing, too.
In practice, no. To do all that you need a gathering-place. Most funeral venues don’t have one of those.
So we’re down to one person walking in front of a car. This does retain an element of theatre. But you can’t help feeling that the grandeur and much of the point of the narrative has been lost, and that’s a shame.
Too much me, funeral directors, not enough us.
The Natural Death Handbook, Fifth Edition
A thoroughly updated and revised edition of the Natural Death Centre‘s celebrated handbook. Now presented alongside a new collection of essays on death, dying and funeral practices by doctors, historians, authors, poets, theologians and artists including Richard Barnett, David Jay Brown, Dr Sheila Cassidy, Charles Cowling, Bill Drummond, Stephen Grasso, Maggi Hambling, Graham Harvey, Gary Lachman, Nick Reynolds, and Dignity in Dying.
It’s out in May 2012!
Here in the UK we are all following, intently or wearily, the furore created by the declaration of intent by Anjem Choudary and Islam4UK to hold a procession through the streets of Wootton Basset “not in memory of the occupying and merciless British military, but rather the real war dead who have been shunned by the Western media and general public as they were and continue to be horrifically murdered in the name of Democracy and Freedom – the innocent Muslim men, women and children.”
Silly stunt, you may say. Politicians of all hues have condemned him. Many would ban him. Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), says he would be “surprised” if senior officers in Wiltshire seek to block the protest because any group has a right to march even if their views are “unpleasant and offensive … Our view is we will have to deal with it, people have a right to march. People might not like it but that is the law.”
Whichever side you’re on, it’s worth looking at this in the light of the ritual which now attends the repatriation of dead service people. That’s what I want to focus on: this new ritual.
It’s a recent thing, this bringing home our dead, only made possible by skilful morticians, refrigeration and aeroplanes. It’s a novelty. It’s also a curiosity. These processions through Wootton Bassett look like funeral processions, but they’re not. They are journeys to the coroner. When dead civilians go to the coroner buy cialis reviews they go, not in a hearse, but in a low key van of some sort (call it a private ambulance if you like) in everyday traffic. It’s a non-event and none the poorer for that. The funeral to come is the thing, after all.
It’s as if these dead service people are being given a sort of pre-funeral. Why? Don’t people have the opportunity to honour them (or protest about them) after the coroner has handed them back to their families at their funeral proper? Of course they do. So why?
It’s an invention of the Ministry of Defence. PR? It’s your call. These processions are well regarded. And bringing home the dead in this way certainly gives the country a way of counting the cost of the war in Afghanistan.
But while these processions offer ordinary people the chance to pay their respects to the dead, they have also become expressions of patriotism and militarism. Wootton Bassett is no place for pacifists or dissenters. It’s Daily Mail country. It’s got political. So it’s no surprise to see the political Mr Choudary requiring the right, in his own way, to drive home the cost of the war to Afghan civilians.
If Wootton Bassett has become a political battleground, the invention of this about-to-be-hijacked ritual is something the MoD may now regret.
No death threats, please. Use a comments box to put me right.
‘Loveable’ and ‘funeral director’ aren’t words that sidle up to each other and make friends. I can think of a little handful of hugely loveable funeral directors, but that’s only because I hang out with a heck of a lot.
Up in Newcastle, Carl Marlow is one such. And what makes him loveable is not so much his warmth and zest, though he’s brimming with these. No, what makes your affections for Carl go the extra mile is his sheer naughtiness. It’s a very humane and serious species of naughtiness and it impels him to do things others would never think of.
Is he a genius? Yes, he is. Half saint, half scamp. The very best sort of saint.
He’s made it to today’s Sun with the story of a funeral only he could have suggested. All the mourners set off for the crem in a 49-seater coach with their dead person in the boot. Cheerful. And (don’t overlook this) cheap. Everyone together, not dispersed in ones and twos in cars and buses.
The purpose of a funeral is to express and reaffirm beliefs that make sense of a death in terms of, both, the tenets of the dead person and those of the living. We don’t see a lot of common purpose in an age in which faith has fragmented. All funerals alienate to a greater or lesser extent.
As a result, there is a move to make them less offensive, more inclusive. Secularists draw disparate mourners together by finding common ground: by focussing on the dead person and celebrating their life. Sorrow is tempered by joy. Where spirituality is addressed, it is with fondness rather than fervour. Heaven is envisioned not as an exclusive venue of staggering magnificence but, rather, a nice place for a picnic. Where such a ceremony is bland and euphemistic, we are indulgent. It is the price of compromise. Where there are football shirts on the coffin, banal poetry, Henry Scott Holland and mawkish or sniggermaking songs, we redouble our indulgence. We’ve all done the diversity training. We bite our tongues behind arranged smiles.
The secular funeral is an evolving rite. If it bungles sometimes, we should not be surprised.
The benchmark against which secularists measure its progress is, of course, the poor, bloody Christian funeral, a rite which has much to answer for, especially when conducted with the disengaged perfunctoriness for which it has achieved especial notoriety. For all that, we can only pity all those priests who have ever presided at funerals at which the congregation has glowered back at them with hollow, hostile eyes, alienated by the very liturgy that they had called upon the priest to deliver.
Christians, too, are now moving towards a more conciliatory, secular way of doing things. And this is the subject of a very interesting essay by Thomas G Long. “These newer practices,” he says, “are attractive mainly because they seem to offer relief from the cosmeticized, sentimental, impersonal and often costly funerals that developed in the 1950s, which were themselves parodies of authentic Christian rituals.” And yet, he says: “Contemporary Christian funeral practices certainly need to be changed, but change should be more a matter of recovery and reformation than innovation and improvisation.”
Christian funeral rites, he says, need to be ‘pristinised’. We note, here, that almost every innovation in funerals draws its inspiration from the past. But what is interesting about Professor Long’s analysis is that it is, I think, equally instructive to secularists.
He identifies three elements in a funeral: preparation, processional, burial. “The funeral itself was deemed to be the last phase of a lifelong journey toward God, and the faithful carried the deceased along the way to the place of final departure with singing and a mixture of grief and joyful hope.”
The metaphor of life as a journey collapsed in theological uncertainties. The result? “Dead Christians have nowhere to go but to evaporate into the spiritual ether and into our frail memory banks. With heaven domesticated, the soul morphed into an immortal gas, the corpse become a shell and the cemetery moved out of sight, it was almost inevitable that the dead with their embarrassing bodies would be banned from their own funerals and the living would be condemned to sit motionless, contemplating the meaning of it all and pretending to celebrate life as the nephew of the deceased sings ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.’”
So like a secular funeral, yes?
He concludes: “Surely our culture will eventually weary of such liturgical and spiritual thinness and be ready for more depth, for more truth—for our sake and for the sake of those we love. When we are, the great drama of the journey to God will be there, beckoning us to join the procession of the saints. We will travel toward eternity with those we have loved, singing as we go and calling out to the distant shore in words of confident hope.”
It’s heady stuff, imbued with a sense of certainty unattainable by secularists with at best a fuzzy spirituality.
Yet the metaphor of life as a journey is just as strong and relevant to secularists, just as much of an inspiration, as is Professor Long’s metaphor of “the cosmic drama … of marching to the edge of eternity.”
Secular funerals are beginning to find words and music with which to celebrate a life and even expound a fuzzy spirituality. What they have yet to find is the actions, the rituals. But do they not, also, enact the cosmic drama of marching to the edge of eternity—even if that is an eternity of nonexistence?
Yes, they do. The element of processional is indispensable.
Read Professor Long’s essay in full here.
Hear him speak here: http://wjkbooks.typepad.com/files/wjk-radio-8_-thomas-g.-long-on-the-christian-funeral.mp3
Elmer Johanning, of Douglas County, Kansas, sold tractors for 35 years. He died at the age of 91 ten days ago. He was borne to the cemetery on a tractor-drawn trailer, and followed there by nine other tractors.
Now that’s what I call a procession.
Watch it here.
I don’t suppose anyone is left unmoved by news coverage of the repatriation of dead soldiers from Afghanistan and their subsequent solemn processions through Wootton Bassett. Everyone has an opinion, as is their entitlement. These soldiers are members of that group of people who have both a public role and a separate personal life, so, like dead firefighters and policemen, many will have a dual funeral.
People’s feelings run the full gamut, of course, from pride to despondency. These deaths are glorious or they are terrible waste of young men’s lives.
To be sure, they take some justifying in the public arena. It was halfway through the last century that Britain conceded that that it is futile folly to foist its values on people who don’t want them. “Lesser breeds without the law”, as Kipling described them, have every right to misgovern themselves—or just govern themselves differently.
Britain gave away its empire but forgot the lesson it had learned. Subsequent adventures in nation building as ill-equipped junior partners of the US have led to defeat in Basra and a losing fight in Afghanistan. Liberal democracy doesn’t grow well in all sorts of soils. Dammit, the Italians have been toying with it since 500 BC and they’ve still got no further than Berlusconi.
So, these deaths. They affect us all. Those processions through Wootton Bassett, they focus our feelings, whatever they are.
My own feelings scapegoat the undertaker leading the procession. What’s he doing there? What’s his purpose? Why hearses? Don’t these dead soldiers still inhabit their public role? Why has the Army handed them over to civilians? Can’t the Army see it through with them and convey them in suitable military vehicles?
I picked up the phone.
First, who are the undertakers? Kathryn has a hunch they’re Barry Albin’s men. I rang to confirm. No, I was told, these are Kenyon’s men. Kenyon’s, if you didn’t know, is a branch of Dignity. This is their repatriation arm—in which, Albin’s conceded, they have a sizeable financial stake.
Next, I rang the Ministry of Defence press office. Why hearses? Because they’re appropriate, dignified; we couldn’t put them in the back of a 10-ton truck. I’m not suggesting that; haven’t you got anything else that would do? No, we haven’t. Okay then, what about the undertaker? What’s he doing there? I thought you guys were world leaders in ceremonial? Why not a military figure? After this the conversation came apart somewhat. I asked, These soldiers are going to the coroner, right? So why hearses? We use hearses for funerals, not removals. The reply: I think you’ll find that those who witness these processions consider them to be very moving and dignified. Yes, okay, but couldn’t you do it better? I put it to you, here’s another way of looking at it, it’s a possible point of view, couldn’t you do better than have these brave young men and women led by a mincing popinjay twirling a stick?
No. The overwhelming majority of people would wholly disagree with me.
It’s possible that my animus is simply displaced anger; that these blameless men in cod-Victorian clobber are not proper objects of my wrath. Yes, I concede that.
But I can’t shed a strong sense that it could all be done much better.
