‘Eager yet kindly’ flames
Posted by Richard Rawlinson After her funeral service at St Paul’s Cathedral last week, Margaret Thatcher was driven to Mortlake Crematorium in west London before the committal of her ashes alongside her beloved Denis at the Royal Hospital Chelsea. Mortlake is a pleasant 1930s building surrounded by peaceful, landscaped gardens. HG Wells, who cremated his wife […]
Introducing Hearse+ for bereaved people who like to drive themselves
James Hardcastle of The Carriagemaster has enjoyed ‘strong successes’ with his self-drive hearse, a venture to which the teeming team here at the GFG-Batesvile Shard has given its unanimous and enthusiastic backing. No one ever went wrong, we like to say (over and over, the record shows), who sought to find ways to empower the […]
How do you define ‘dying’?
Sarah Wootton, chief exec of Dignity in Dying, wrote in Friday’s Times about the case of Paul Lamb, who wants to be allowed to die: Dignity in Dying is not fighting for an unfettered right to die, but for the right of dying people to die well. We believe that right must be based on two core […]
Born on a barge and borne to his final resting place on a barge
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.
The opposite of death isn’t life; the opposite of death is birth
We’ve written about Chuck Lakin here before. He’s a retired librarian and active woodworker with a line in plain pine coffins. Above all, he’s a lovely guy. He recently held a make-your-own-coffin workshop in his home town of Waterville, Maine. No one came. Lakin, 67, said he had planned to walk people through the process […]
Suit ya?
There are six Rosedale funeral homes. Headquartered in Diss, they straddle the Norfolk-Suffolk border. This is a gentle, conservative part of the world. If you’ve not been for thirty years or so, you’ll find it exactly as it was. Rosedale is headed up by Anne-Beckett-Allen. She was brought up in the business and spent some years working […]
That bloody box
“This was a funeral that celebrated unity. Like all other funerals. That bloody box: the awful finality: the dreadful unduckable certainty that life has to come to an end. So of course it was the same today. We knew she was dead, and all of us, no matter how little interest we take in politics, […]
From the ashes of Winterwillow…
Sad news for all fans of Winterwillow, the social enterprise of the WinterComfort charity for homeless people which enabled service users to develop basketweaving skills by making wicker coffins. The trustees have discontinued the project. All is not lost. Roger Fowle, lead tutor on the project, has set up on his own. Roger has three […]
De mortuis nil nisi bonum
Pace the spirit of the age, a celebration-of-life funeral does not fit everybody. Nasty, bad, horrible people die, too. We refrain from holding celebration-of-death funerals for them, preferring instead to curtail, allude and acknowledge, to a degree, often disguising our meaning between the lines. Difficult people die, too. They often mean different things to different […]
The word ‘progressive’ is overused and overrated
Posted by Richard Rawlinson A follow-up to Charles Cowling’s thirst-quenching piece about the need for independent undertakers to blow their trumpets louder to steal market share from the corporate chains, here. It’s my hunch that some indies should stop perceiving themselves as niche, fringe and progressive, and instead project themselves as mainstream. Why? There’s an abundance […]
