There but for the grace…
From the Sun, 18 July: An undertaker with Britain’s biggest funeral firm has been arrested on suspicion of snatching a dead gran’s savings. Former Co-operative Funeralcare worker Grahame Lawler, 37, is suspected of rifling through the pensioner’s household belongings less than an hour after she died. Could happen to any funeral director? The Sun understands […]
Thoughts of a funeral-goer
Posted by Lyra Mollington It turns out that I am a terrible patient. My sister Myra used to be a nurse so this wasn’t a winning combination. Mr M collected me on Saturday and I’m recuperating at home. Thankfully I’m no longer confined to my bed although walks on the common are out of the question […]
Sharp rise in Pauper’s funerals
Posted by Vale You’d be forgiven for thinking that Oliver Twist is in a workhouse somewhere asking for more. It seems extraordinary in 2012 that there are headlines like this in the Daily Telegraph this week, followed by the stark (and slightly ludicrous) quote from Kate Woodthorpe of the University of Bath that it is: […]
The Deciphering
Posted by Vale The Deciphering How busy we are with the dead in their infancy, who are still damp with the sweat of their passing, whose hair falls back to reveal a scar. We think of wiping their skin, attending them in the old way, but are timid, ignorant. We walk from the high table […]
Library of dust
Posted by Vale Oregon State Insane Asylum closed in the 1970s after operating for nearly a hundred years. Over that time inmates died, were cremated and their remains, stored in copper canisters, were stored uncollected. The photographer David Maisel has made a photographic record of them. He writes: The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a […]
No stripping of the altars here
By Richard Rawlinson The row at Haycombe crematorium in Bath over the replacement of the cross-etched 1960s window with a clear pane – offering a neutral blank canvas for visitors of different faiths and none – is contextualised by this example of tolerance and diversity. The pictures here are of North London’s New Southgate Cemetery and Crematorium, […]
Diss-ceased
No sooner had we berated George Tinning, the beleaguered Nick Buckles figure who totters atop Co-op Funeralcare, for his use of the word ‘deceased’ accompanied by the indefinite article, than a commenter, commenting on this post, asked Jonathan, a human cat among pigeons of the very liveliest sort, “How many Deceaseds have you handled?” Perhaps […]
Open letter to George Tinning, Managing Director, Co-operative Funeralcare #3
Dear Mr Tinning, I found myself, this morning, entertaining one of those whimsical thoughts that pops into our heads when we’re showering. Have you noticed how people tend to say ‘He’s been dead for 30 years, now’ instead of, ‘He died 30 years ago’? It’s as if they regard death as something akin to a […]
Dark ops or what?
We’ve had a lot of correspondence here at the GFG since Dispatches flung that stuff about Co-operative Funeralcare in our eye (5 mins of telly souffléd into half an hour with a dollop of unleavened ombudsman). It’s been complaints, mostly, and of course I can’t go into detail about any of them. But almost all […]
The changing face of Irish funerals
By Richard Rawlinson Dublin undertaker Massey Brothers is responding to the changing attitude to religion in Ireland by offering families non-denominational funerals, online advice and motorbike hearses. While these initiatives may no longer be especially novel in Britain, they’re causing a bit of a stir in Ireland’s conservative, competitive and often quite unsophisticated funeral industry. There […]
