Beautifully written account of the death of an unloved one.
Read it here.
No Corps of any Person or Persons shall be buried in any Shirt, Shift; Sheet or Shroud, or any thing whatsoever made or mingled with Flax, Hemp, Silk, Hair, Gold or Silver, or in any Stuff or Thing, other than what is made of Sheeps Wool only.
Thus spoke the Burial in Woollen Act of 1667, a protectionist measure “intended for the lessening the Importation of Linen from beyond the Seas, and the Encouragement of the Woollen and Paper Manufactures of this Kingdom.”
And it brings me to my second nomination for Best in Show at the National Funeral Exhibition. Like all the best developments in funerals it is a triumphant reinvention of the past. Step forward, Hainsworth’s woollen coffin.
Like it?
I love it. Tactile. Snug. Eye-friendly.The blanket stitch is an inspired touch. For me, it was the sensation of the show.
When funeral directors eye up a new coffin they ask Does it leak? Does it creak? Does it sag? They’re a baleful lot, hard to please. They’ll ask the same questions of this coffin and add an extra one: Will it mark? Answer: not if you’re careful.
Most of our eco-coffins travel here from the other side of the world. And, for all that their carbon footprint is actually tiny (Ecoffins calculate that shipping theirs from China costs but 4.63 car miles per coffin), it is good to have something indigenous and local.
These coffins are made from the wool of Dorset Horn sheep. They are biodegradable, organic and 100% natural. They are made in Leeds, a city built on wool, in one of the last woollen mills in the country.
There’s an undeniable romance about that.
For me, the music died the day Led Zeppelin released their first album. Pop got intellectual, up itself, the mope and dope bunch sagely mulling finer points of riffs and runs. It set friends against each other. Simon bought a bass guitar, I bought a ukulele and got heavily into music hall. It was love, not protest. Humour. Pathos and wistfulness. Making the best. I love that blend.
I am writing with fellow-blogger Patrick McNally especially in mind because I think he will especially enjoy the following monologue by Stanley Holloway. I’m sure you will, too. If you read Patrick’s blog you will see that I mistakenly call him Tom. My embarrassment is fresh and howling somewhat. But I had this lined up for him before I put my foot in it. Life must go on.
Our Aunt Hanna’s passed away,
We ‘ad her funeral today,
And it was a posh affair,
Had to have two p’licemen there!
The ‘earse was luv’ly, all plate glass,
And wot a corfin!… oak and brass!
We’d fah-sands weepin’, flahers galore,
But Jim, our cousin… what d’yer fink ‘e wore?
Why, brahn boots!
I ask yer… brahn boots!
Fancy coming to a funeral
In brahn boots!
I will admit ‘e ‘ad a nice black tie,
Black fingernails and a nice black eye;
But yer can’t see people orf when they die,
In brahn boots!
And Aunt ‘ad been so very good to ‘im,
Done all that any muvver could for ‘im,
And Jim, her son, to show his clars…
Rolls up to make it all a farce,
In brahn boots…
I ask yer… brahn boots!
While all the rest,
Wore decent black and mourning suits.
I’ll own he didn’t seem so gay,
In fact he cried most part the way,
But straight, he reg’lar spoilt our day,
Wiv ‘is brahn boots.
In the graveyard we left Jim,
None of us said much to him,
Yus, we all gave ‘im the bird,
Then by accident we ‘eard …
‘E’d given ‘is black boots to Jim Small,
A bloke wot ‘ad no boots at all,
So p’raps Aunt Hanna doesn’t mind,
She did like people who was good and kind.
But brahn boots!
I ask yer… brahn boots!
Fancy coming to a funeral,
In brahn boots!
And we could ‘ear the neighbours all remark
“What, ‘im chief mourner? Wot a blooming lark!
“Why ‘e looks more like a Bookmaker’s clerk…
In brahn boots!”
That’s why we ‘ad to be so rude to ‘im,
That’s why we never said “Ow do!” to ‘im,
We didn’t know… he didn’t say,
He’d give ‘is other boots away.
But brahn boots!
I ask yer… brahn boots!
While all the rest,
Wore decent black and mourning suits!
But some day up at Heavens gate,
Poor Jim, all nerves, will stand and wait,
’til an angel whispers… “Come in, Mate,
“Where’s yer brahn boots?”
15 Jun 09, 7:05pm
Here’s one about Funeralcare.
Funeralcare has derecognised the GMB union, in the process securing its expulsion from the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival and, I think, the Glastonbury Festival. It has been condemned by the TUC. This is a betrayal of the foundational principles and values of the Rochdale Pioneers and would seem to render the Co-op ethically redundant.
Funeralcare may be seen by many to be the People’s Undertaker. How do you justify the high price of your funerals given the economies of scale you enjoy? You are in a position to undercut every other undertaker in the land.
In terms of competence, Funeralcare is scandal-ridden. In the funeral industry, Co-op is synonymous with Cock-op.
I have cancelled my smile account in protest at this. No one at smile felt inclined to debate this with me.
16 Jun 09, 11:14am
OK, quite a backlog to get through: here goes… btw, I’m Co-operative’s Head of Social Goals
To Raggedexile… re funeralcare and GMB, we recognise a number of trades unions for the purposes of collective bargaining, however, we need to do this on a national basis as we are a national provider, and GMB were looking to represent a relatively small number of workers
16 Jun 09, 12:26pm
Paul, with ref to Funeralcare, you recognise UCATT, which has a tiny number of members. I really can’t follow your logic.
And you overlook the big point: How can the Co-op, of all organisations, derecognise a trade union and stay true to its founding principles and values?
And how do you answer this: the TUC has condemned Funeralcare for its victimisation and harassment of shop stewards.
And what of the cost of your funerals? You can answer this by telling us how profitable Funeralcare is.
What would the Rochdale Pioneers make of all this?
17 Jun 09, 11:46am
Whoah, no-one is ducking anything.
Think can see from responses to date we have addressed virtually everything raised.
Just didn’t expect so many detailed questions (and am fitting in answering between meetings and such).
17 Jun 09, 2:04pm
Paul, you run the risk of being discourteous at the very least. You have given an undertaking to address questions posed by readers and now you dash in and out breathlessly pleading meetings and such. Is that how important this exercise is to you?
Are you fobbing me (and everybody else) off when you say ‘Think can see from responses to date we have addressed virtually everything raised’? I think it is for us to declare our satisfaction with your responses, not you.
You have not answered my central question: does Funeralcare’s derecognition of the GMB union not amount to a betrayal of the Co-op’s founding principles and disqualify it as an ethical enterprise?
Please would give this greater than cursory attention?
17 Jun 09, 5:11pm
Hello? Hel-lo? Anyone there?
Over at the Guardian’s ethical living blog they’ve put the Co-op under the spotlight.You ask, they answer from now til Friday.
Well, of course, oh yes, I have been asking (under my moniker of raggedexile, adopted when I was living in joyous penury on the guano-spattered Isle of Portland).
Have at them! Good sport! Make em wriggle!
It’s all up with EternalSpace. Even as we slept it went gentle into that good night, taking with it millions of $ of venture capital. After life’s fitful fever it sleeps well.
Investors, it seems, screamed STOP when, just 30 days after its launch, they already saw it going nowhere. They blame feet-dragging undertakers and the glacial pace of change in the death trade.
I am sad about this in a by no means worthy way. I got off on its towering awfulness. Million-dollar awfulness is the best it gets. If you missed it, I’m sorry. I did try to tell you.
And yet online memorial sites have a future. They are places to go and talk and share. The sad news for grieving people is that it is difficult at this stage in their evolution to determine which sites will thrive and which will founder with the loss of all memories on board — as so many already have.
Where’s your quality assurance?
Three factors will ensure the survival of the fittest: ethics, functionality and a stable financial foundation.
Over at MuchLoved, Jonathan Davies is doing his best. He has developed an ethical code of conduct which has respect for privacy at its heart. But one of its signatories, The Last Respect, seems already to have bellied. He has set up a not-for-profit, the Data Trust, to ensure the maintenance of digitally stored information. Not many takers so far, and GaGaGa.com, a site for baby snaps, has failed to launch.
Assessing functionality is partly a subjective thing—do you like the look of the site? But there are objective criteria. How does it drive? How fast does it go? Is it well-equipped? On all these counts, MuchLoved objectively excels.
Financial foundations clearly matter most. And the message to anyone out there hoping to make money from an online memorial site is: forget it—unless you’ve a different and a better vision from that of market leader MuchLoved, which is free. How does MuchLoved do that? Here I declare an interest: partly from people like me who admire it and donate. Partly, too, I guess, from charities which stand to benefit from donations made in memory. And partly ( a big partly) from Jonathan himself, who has poured heaps of his own time and money into the site in memory of his brother Philip. It’s a labour, you see, of love.
What, then, do we make of GoneTooSoon, MuchLoved’s biggest competitor? It lacks the functionality of MuchLoved. It’s free, but only because it has already been scandal-hit. It now makes money from Interflora and virtual gifts (ugh!).
Ethically, it has question marks buzzing round it like bluebottles. It says it’s a not-for-profit but it’s not a registered charity so far as I can see. When it comes to respecting the privacy of the family of the dead person what do you make of this:
Don’t think it’s not your place to set up a site. You would not be encroaching on other family members territory.
Or this?
Maybe you lost your loved one in a sudden or violent way? … Or perhaps your story is one of true love against the odds? Whatever your story, we’d love to hear from you. Womens magazines are looking for stories of your love and, sadly, loss. If your story is printed, you could receive a payment of around £500 from the magazine.
A glance at the tributes at GoneTooSoon reveals a voyeuristic audience. The same sad people visit every tribute and mark the territory with a mawkish poem or message.
I’d like to contact GoneTooSoon and tell them I’ve posted this blog. I can’t do that by email, only by ringing an 0845 number. No probs with MuchLoved.
And, as ever, I hope someone out there will subvert my analysis.
In the meantime, anyone fancy setting up a memorial site for memorial sites which have gone too soon?
I spent a joyous day on Friday at the National Funeral Exhibition, an expo dedicated wholly to the merchandise and service providers of death. How much fun can that be? A lot, let me tell you. A great occasion for dismal traders (any colour so long as it’s black or green). Surreal—and sublime.
But you don’t want to know about new generation hearses or the man holding masterclasses in reconstructing smashed up heads. Me neither. We are much more interested in lovely people doing life-enhancing things, aren’t we?
People like Paul Sinclair, the motorcycle funeral man. He’s a national treasure. At the end of the day he gave me a ride in his sidecar and then, knowing I’d once had one, let me drive it. Woo-hoo stuff. I’m still thrilling.
For me, two stand outs. The first was Sarah Walton’s memorial ware.
The urge to commemorate our dead with a vertical physical marker (flat won’t do) is as old as humankind. It’s an urge that’s not going to be educated out of us, for all that we can see that conventional cemeteries decay, their older graves testaments to amnesia. The natural burial movement has yet to address this to the emotional and spiritual satisfaction of their clients, most of whom find it hard to curb the urge to mark the spot.
As Thomas Friese has it, “As presently conceived, green burial forbids or strictly limits enduring grave markers to favor ecological factors. This is a short-sighted aspect of its conception, which forgets that a cemetery is not merely a place to dispose of dead bodies but to memorialize and honor human lives. A majority of society will not accept no memorialization; widespread acceptance will thus be impaired.”
I don’t have the answer. But I have a belief that a physical marker does not, for many, need to be over the spot where the body lies—or the ashes. And that’s why I am a believer in the garden memorial. It’s close. It beautifies where you live. You can take it with you when you move.
Sarah’s bird baths and doves are sculptural rather than utilitarian. They are as beautiful as anything I have ever seen. Technically, they are astonishing. They are hollow, you can keep ashes in them, but you don’t have to. No photo does justice to them.
I’m going to talk her up wherever and whenever I can. Get used to it. Check out her website. Not only is she an artist, she is also, you will want to know, one of the very warmest, nicest people in the world.
Immortality and eternity have meaning as concepts but they don’t translate into reality, not here on transient Earth. If you don’t believe that, go and visit a mature cemetery – or ask Ozymandias, poor, baffled chap. Time teaches us this lesson every fleeting minute, but we set our faces against it—heroically or idiotically, it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference. In the words of Marcus Aurelius:
Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.
Yesterday, I went to look around Brookwood cemetery in the elite company of two pioneers: Ken West, who sparked the natural burial movement here and, subsequently, worldwide; and Cynthia Beal, a natural burialist from the US. Ken is gentle and principled. He’s all for stripped-down simplicity. Cynthia is questing, questioning. She’s an environmentalist who makes things happen. Both are highly intelligent, so there were times when I fell off the back of their conversation bigtime. But if you look at a cemetery through the eyes of people with their combined knowledge of ecology, soil science, the law, lobbying and actually running cemeteries, you pick up a lot, even me. It was a privilege, let me tell you.
It’s a dreadful place of untended graves and collapsing monuments. It is the antithesis of all that it aspires to be, utterly incoherent. Especially consonant was the spectacle of an obelisk perhaps twenty-five feet high which, weary of pointing to Eternity, had just flung itself down.
Ken and Cynthia debated memorialisation. People want, need, to mark the spot. They must have somewhere to go and something to do. Problem is, most people stop doing that after around ten years, that’s when the rack and ruin set in. Cynthia is all for enabling people to mark the spot in ways which are not ecologically hostile. Ken is for anonymity and subsumation (a new word. I like it.)
It’s a complex matter, this business of memorialisation. Very complex. People tend graves to show they care. “Vanity!” said Ken. “Can they not show they care by allowing nature to receive them back, by permitting them to create habitats?”
My feelings exactly. But we don’t feel for all.
For all that, Brookwood is an object lesson in the vanity of human wishes. Its 500 acres are an ecological and memorial near-waste of space. Dire to think that it’s got around 250 years to go before it’ll be full.
On the journey back I overtook a catering caravan travelling to Glorious Goodwood. I passed signs to Royal Ascot. I reflected that I had spent the day at Buggered Brookwood.
The BBC has got a poetry season running. They’ve been dusting off dead rhymers from ages past and pushing them out in front of the cameras. But they’ve left the memory of Geoffrey Chaucer undisturbed and unsung, for all that he was the first poet to be buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. When I was a nipper he used to be aka the Father of English Poetry. In those far-off days grown-ups used to say that British policemen were the best in the world. Sic transit, etc.
To me, Chaucer will always be The Daddy. I love his down-to-earth humanity and the wonderful effects he was able to conjure from the small vocabulary of the then still-new English language. He was a most acute and uncritical observer of other people.
He was preoccupied with what makes a person gentil. In this debased age we don’t have a synonym for gentil. It encompasses virtuousness, honesty, courtesy, decency, modesty, courage and hard work—all the virtues summed up in what we used to call gentlemanliness. Chaucer, a true democrat, reckoned gentilesse to be attainable by both sexes and by the members of any social class. He says:
Looke who that is moost vertuous alway,
Privee and apert, and moost entendeth ay
To do the gentil dedes that he kan ;
Taak him for the grettest gentil man.
In modern English: the most gentil person is the person who strives to be virtuous always, privee and apert: when nobody’s looking as well as publicly.
Chaucer develops this idea:
Taak fyr, and ber it in the derkeste hous Bitwix this and the mount of Kaukasous, And lat men shette the doores and go thenne ; Yet wole the fyr as faire lie and brenne As twenty thousand men mighte it biholde.
In mod-speak: Take a firebrand and carry it to the darkest house between here and the Caucuses. Shut the doors on it and go away. The firebrand will continue to blaze as if 20,000 people were looking at it.
It’s a great image. What’s it got to do with funerals? I’ll tell you.
Most funeral directors can put on a good show They can big up the empathy, switch on the sincerity, convince you they care. But what are they like when you’re not looking? Quite the reverse, many of them. Put them in that derkeste hous (their messy mortuary) and they exhibit undreamed of coarseness and carelessness (vileynie and vice, in Chaucer’s words).
Some, not all. There is a breed brought up in a code of funerary gentilesse and etiquette. I was reminded of this the other day when chatting to Sam Wilding of the Rose Funeral Service in Weymouth. In a way Sam and his kind are reminiscent of those butlers who used to run aristocratic country houses. Behind the scenes they treat their dead bodies with courtesy. They talk to them as they wash and dress them. They knock before going in to the chapel of rest. They carry coffins gently. They hold ashes’ urns in both hands, never under an arm. They are ever gentil, privee and apert.
Shame on you, BBC, for neglecting one of our greatest poets. Shame on me were I to neglect to celebrate this unsung, unseen and perhaps unexpected side of our best funeral directors.
There’s an excellent series of photos on the Undertaken With Love Flickr site telling the story of a home funeral.
It’s thought provoking in any number of ways. See how engaged the children are. And you can see from everyone’s faces how emotionally healthy the whole business is.
Now, I know I bang on a lot about home funerals. But I do recognise that, though this is how people cared for their dead in centuries past, the (real) traditional funeral is unlikely to make a comeback, not in any widespread way.
At the same time, I wonder about the emotional impact of outsourcing the care of our dead and the creation of their farewell ceremonies to various un-joined-up specialists—undertakers, celebrants, etc.
Put it another way. What would be the impact on the bereavement counselling industry if people were to participate more than they do now in caring for their dead, going the distance with them? Would counsellors find their caseloads slashed?
I rang Cruse to ask them. Had they ever thought about it? Had they ever considered campaigning for more participative funerals in order to enable people to grieve better at the best time for grieving? No, they hadn’t.
I think there’s something in it.
