Pauper-bashing?
FREE FUNERALS HERE! I bet you’ve never seen a banner outside your local registrar’s office with those words on it. Because the free (aka public health) funeral is, if not a well-kept secret, not something councils bang on about. Its minimalist aesthetic might make it irresistibly attractive to the middle classes. Seriously, the public health funeral enables us to […]
The PM who was cremated before his funeral
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Neville Chamberlain (above) died from cancer on 9 November 1940, just six months after he resigned as Prime Minister. Winston Churchill, his successor, paid tribute to him on 12 November despite the two men having disagreed over the ‘appeasement’ of Hitler: ‘Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, […]
Gridlocked in Ross-on-Wye four days before Christmas
Guest post by David Hall Christmas is an important time of the year for Vintage Lorry Funerals as all of the 450 Funeral Directors, who display pictures of the 1950 Leyland Beaver, receive a Christmas Card in the second week of December. The process starts in July when David Hall’s wife chooses the most appropriate […]
Revealed: the one and only fix for funeral poverty
The problem: The circumstances of the death do not admit of any effective competition or precedent examination of the charges of different undertakers, or any comparison and consideration of their supplies. There is not time to change them for others that are less expensive, and more in conformity to the taste and circumstances of the […]
All fine by who?
Here’s something that’s been bobbling in my mind for ages. Finally, spurred by a newspaper story announcing that Grimbsy crematorium is going to fine funeral directors £159 if a service overruns, I sprang into action. I wrote to the crematorium manager: I see that NE Lincs Council has announced a surcharge of £159 in the […]
Remembering the dead
Older readers will recall that, by the 1970s, observance of the two minutes’ silence on 11/11 had declined in the civilian sphere to such an extent that a great many people paid no heed to it whatever and carried on doing whatever they were doing. There’s been a big revival of observance in recent years. In an article in […]
First funeral at historic Plymouth venue
Posted by Wendy Coulton This week 200 people attended the first non religious funeral at Devonport Guildhall in Plymouth — see previous blog post here. The funeral ceremony was 35 minutes duration followed by a private committal service at the crematorium. It absolutely reaffirmed my belief that the bereaved in the city should have more choice […]
Bring on the empty corpses
Book review: Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty Caitlin Doughty, graduate in medieval history and author of a sunny thesis entitled The Suppression of Demonic Births in Late Medieval Witchcraft Theory, rejects a promising career in academia in favour of one as a corpse handler and incinerator of the dead. Anticipating bewilderment she asks, […]
Onsite SEO for Funeral Directors
Posted by Mark Sharron For the third part in this series on SEO for funeral directors I’m going to explore onsite SEO. The goal of this post is to give you an understanding of how the major search engines view your website’s funerary focused content. If you think back in time before Google existed, the internet […]
Local and community
Guest post by John Porter My first job was in a local grocer’s shop. They boiled ham in their kitchen – hmmmm, I can smell it now – and would cut three special slices, carefully wrapped in greaseproof paper for Mrs Rogers who came in every Tuesday. She chatted for a while, nobody huffed and puffed […]
