When the media reports events around death and funerals it customarily seeks to jerk tears or generate fury with stories fuelled by ignorance. Research is boring and in any case truth is far too dull.
Take this piece here from WalesOnline. It begins HUNDREDS of people are being laid to rest in empty funeral parlours – because they have no-one to grieve for them. Daft or what?
The story is a hardy perennial: pauper funerals. The facts are sad: some people die alone and unknown. The truth is boring: they are not tipped into mass graves as once they were. No, they are given a public health funeral which is pretty much the equal of the funeral that anyone else gets. But hey, let’s bandy the pauper word around a bit anyway.
The journo responsible for the story has made some calls for quotes, one to Kate Woodthorpe at CDAS, and another to Simon Lewis of Merthyr, onetime president of the BIFD. And he seems to have googled ‘pauper funeral’. I wonder how much dull truth he discovered and decided to omit. Never let the truth get in the way of a corking lapel-grabber: HUNDREDS of people are being laid to rest in empty funeral parlours – because they have no-one to grieve for them.
The figures quoted are interesting. Between 2008 and 2010, 288 public health funerals were carried out in Wales at a total cost of £218,100 – an average of £757.29 per funeral. One funeral in Merthyr Tydfil in 2009 cost the local authority just £109.99 … Other budget services … included a £149.69 service in Caerphilly in 2008, a £250 send-off in 2008 in Merthyr and a £275 service for a funeral in Monmouthshire last year.
With the price of cremation in Merthyr now £460, I’m scratching my head here. A lot of paying customers would like to be able to get their costs down to figures like these. Can anyone shed some light?
Read the article in WalesOnline here.
More on pauper funerals here.
About a year ago I googled ‘Council Funerals’, otherwise known as ‘Public Health funerals’. The Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management told me that the average spent on these events is £2,800 – not bad, huh? – for which are provided a hearse, a casket, a celebrant and, believe it or not, in some places even a professional mourner (have you ever met one of those?). I did ask one local (Devon; Dignity) funeral director what he thought of this description, and he told me the council funerals he organizes don’t get anything like that much funding. But who’s to say? And what publication would put up with a headline such as: “Council funerals are pretty much like all others”? How about: “Councils waste billions on burying nobodies in solid gold coffins as hard up taxpayers foot the bill”?
But then you can’t bury no body, can you?
Well, £2,800 is a very respectable figure. I have never met a professional mourner and would like to look into joining the profession. Your bathetic headline has no news value whatever but expresses the entire story in one sentence. Thanks for this, Jonathan.
Sounds to me rather as though this is a case of councils doing a pretty reasonable job and getting little credit, and little attention unless some bored journalist wants to create yet another shock-horror-dismay-about-SFA, instant-outrage. Because as you say Charles, it’s a lot simpler than thinking for yourself and pursuing some facts.
Councils no doubt get many things wrong sometimes,but they also surely do a lot of good things with our money. No doubt as cuts bite and councils get more desperate, Mail-type outrage headlines will increase.
To which one response might be: “if you’re so convinced your councillors are no bloody good, stand for election yourself, and dedicate many hundreds of hours every year to unglamorous, detailed work.”
Sorry to rant. But we often seem to forget that they are OUR councils and responsible to us (as recent English elections might remind us)not some abstract Stalinist tyranny dedicated to wasting our money.
Sounds to me as though the councils are doing, in these cases, what they should – looking after the (post-mortem) interests of those who can’t look after themselves. Let’s hope these “paupers” were not as intellectually and morally pauperised in their lives as the sort of journalists and editors we all know and love.
If the Council is responsible for providing the funeral, and they also own the crematorium, presumably they don’t have to charge themselves the cremation fee? Could that explain the low figures? A FD keen to promote good image and carry out Public Health funerals for nothing (or maybe just the cost of a coffin), coroners case so no Doctors’ fees, and 69p for a Celebrant (that’s the going rate isn’t it?)
If there is a cost to the council (there is) they should surely chalk it up as such. I think you will find that celebrants do their work for the love of it, Kingfisher – but are often touchingly grateful for a small contribution towards a cup of coffee afterwards.
Nice story in the Mail, home of piss-poor journalism, headlined ‘Funeral bosses refuse to cremate 19-stone mother for being too fat’. As if they said to the woman’s family that she was too fat. ‘No, she’s too fat, take her away. TOO FAT we said. Sorry pal, there it is, that’s what we think of obesity.’ Dang it, they’ll be refusing to cremate smokers next.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1385110/Funeral-bosses-refuse-cremate-19-stone-mother-fat.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
Well here’s another ‘bathetic headline’ with no news value:
“Object too big to fit in hole too small has to be put in bigger hole.”
No. If I was the editor of the Daily Mail I’d prefer “Someone or other are bastards” any day.
There is all of life in that headline, Jonathan.