“In the UK, the size and number of cremators at a crematorium are selected to enable the ‘duty’ to be accomplished within a normal working day and so the cremator is used for about 8 hours per day and then shut down until the next day. This is not an energy-efficient way of working, and cultural practices have been allowed to dominate at the expense of efficiency.”
Mortonhall Investigation Report 30 April 2014
The report into the Mortonhall ashes scandal was released yesterday.
To refresh your memory: from 1967 until 2011 parents of babies who had died antenatally or perinatally in Edinburgh were informed, on the authority of Mortonhall crematorium, that there would be no ashes after cremation.
All the while (since 1934, actually) two privately-owned Edinburgh crematoria, Seafield and Wariston, had been managing to achieve ashes from foetuses as young as 17 weeks.
There’s a useful summary of the findings of Dame Elish Angiolini’s report here.
You can find the full report here.
Here are some extracts of the report that interested us:
* Most meetings between managers at the crematorium and with their line managers appeared to focus on budgets and finance rather than policy or practice. The issue of the cremation of foetuses and babies and whether or not remains were recovered and returned to parents does not seem to have been discussed even though Mortonhall was operating so differently to the other crematoria in Edinburgh over so many years.
* There was little by way of formal training at Mortonhall other than in general cremation practice. When it came to the cremation of foetuses and babies, staff learned from their more experienced peers or supervisor. Likewise, notions of policy and practice were derived by word of mouth with very little other than operators’ manuals committed to writing.
* Despite the complexities and difficulties of this particular aspect of cremation operations, there has been little by way of any local or national written guidance for Cremator Operators at Mortonhall. The absence of any practical formal training to attempt to support staff in recovering remains from infants or foetuses is a significant concern given the misgivings expressed by some of the staff involved. The absence of such training is all the more surprising since the difficulties have been recognized within the professional organisations and discussed by senior members of the profession over many years.
* The official ICCM direction: “The hospital must inform parent(s) that ashes may not be recovered from cremation.”
* The official FBCA direction: “In cases where bereaved parents desire the cremation of an infant or of foetal remains, they should be warned that there are occasions when no tangible remains are left after the cremation process has been completed. This is due to the cartilaginous nature of the bone structure.”
* Dr James Dunlop, witness: “Crematoria are occasionally asked to cremate non-viable foetuses. Many doctors, especially those associated with crematoria, believe that there will be no cremated residue. However, if the cremation technique is modified, cremated remains are produced. These remains can form a focal point for the parent’s grief. Crematoria are urged to ensure their technique yields a residue … [When cremated gently] the outline of a foetal skeleton (it has been described as resembling the skeleton of a bird) can be discerned quite clearly on the base of the tray amid the ashes of the coffin.”
* It is not whether ashes can be recovered from foetuses but the degree of care and modification of the adult processes applied to the cremation of the baby which profoundly affects the outcome.
* Anne Grannum told the Investigation she had always believed there were no ashes from babies. She was not alone in that belief. This understanding was, until very recently, also held by the Chief Medical Officer, pathologists, midwives, medical referees, senior members of the professional associations and Funeral Directors. Her belief was based on the assertion that ashes were the calcined bones of the cremated individual and nothing else. Any residual remains from the process were simply refractory dust and coffin ash.
Mrs. Grannum’s failure over many years to make any enquiry about what was happening at Seafield, where she understood it was said ashes were being recovered, is also very difficult to understand. As business competitors it may have been seen as inappropriate to make a direct approach to Seafield but the matter could have been referred to her senior managers or to one of the professional organisations to pursue. She was not alone in this apparent inertia. NHS staff and Funeral Directors, amongst others, were all aware of the assertions by the staff at Seafield Crematorium of recovering ashes yet no one investigated these claims until the writer Lesley Winton visited Seafield in 2012.
* The contrast in the working practices and the approach to the cremation of babies at Mortonhall with the approach at Seafield and Warriston is stark. The obvious care taken at Seafield and Warriston to provide the very best possible outcome for the parents of the foetus or baby is exceptional. As a consequence of misunderstanding and poor advice in the NHS leaflets, many parents were led to believe that there would be a charge made for a funeral at these private crematoria where ashes were being recovered for parents. Neither of these crematoria have ever charged for such cremations.
Posted by Baggaman
Yesterday Quokkagirl had a go at crappy crematoria. Fair do’s. But it’s not all bad.
Take the time limit. Is that a restraint or a constraint? A restraint is bad, something to be got round. A constraint is good. The best art, literature and music are inspired by self-imposed constraints. The haiku, for example. 12-note composition. Blank verse. Street art.
The 20-minute funeral.
It drives up attendance. It reassures us we won’t be there all day, praise the lord. We’ve got 21st century thresholds of impatience, we haven’t time or inclination to get whirled into a vortex of ritual and la-di-da and, god forbid, the sacrifice of an ox.
He was 78. That’s a decent innings. Death happens.
Time constraint enforces concision. Time for just one eulogy, and a snappy one at that. No time for close family members and friends to speak one after another with extreme difficulty, inarticulacy or egotism. No time for open-mic. Phew.
Keep the private separate from the public. Don’t do in public what’s best done at home. Don’t do in the funeral what’s best left for afterwards over a few drinks.
Constraints concentrate the mind and condense the content. Make a decent fist of it but don’t overplay your hand, we won’t feel cheated. Cut to the chase, distil to the essence.
We come to do our bit, pay our respects. Understand who a funeral is for. Enough’s enough.
A rant by Quokkagirl
Imagine if you will – a member of the mourning congregation spends the funeral ceremony of a dear 100 year old friend, listening intently to me …..….awaiting his cue. When the cue comes, he leaves his role as a mourner to fiddle with his mp3 player (which he’d had to go out and purchase the day before) having already arrived ahead of the mourning party, to be in position to set up the cd player hurriedly in between the previous service finishing and before ‘his’ dead one’s coffin came in so as not to eat too much into the miserable allocated half hour slot for the ceremony. He had to do this because? Because a perfectly reasonable (i.e. not obscure, recorded and released on album) piece of music the family had wanted had been ordered by Wesley but hadn’t arrived because of the ‘Christmas post’. ……..and even if the family downloaded the piece, the crem in question doesn’t have a cd player (what the….?)……. and anyway, if they did have one, who would operate it?
Is it me? Do YOU get the point? I was flipping fuming but I have started to think it is me who is out of step because when I dared to query this farce piece by piece to the crem staff and the funeral director, they looked at me with that expression of ‘is she hormonal or something?’ and responded indifferently, ‘well at least the piece of music will now be on library for the next person who wants it.’
I repeat, is it me?
THIS family wanted that music. A common piece sung by a renowned singer who happens to be a great friend of the family. This music was for THIS family, not next week’s family. THIS family had the right, surely, to expect that a downloadable system of music supply would be, er…. downloadable…. not reliant on the Christmas post. Even so, having begrudgingly to accept some really simple things are not possible even on the internet, there is the issue of a distinct lack of music-playing machine/cd player of any description available in this ‘room-and-oven-for-hire-at-£610 per-30-minutes’ for those families who DO want obscure or bespoke pieces of music. Don’t even ask if a slide show of pictures could be shown. Oh, and if you want an eco coffin here, think again. This crem has banned the majority of them. Don’t look for a candlestick on which to light a candle, or a table on which to place a picture of your departed surrounded by tea lights. They haven’t got one. They haven’t got time for one. And anyway ….’elf and safety….there are curtains, you know.’
If you hired the scruffiest of old village halls for 50 quid an hour, you’d get a hi fi system of some sort, more tables than anyone could ever want or need, an extension cable, a kitchen ….and a caretaker/keyholder to help out with technicals if necessary – even if it means bunging him an extra tenner. Of course, our current penchant for having the funeral at the place of despatch has much to commend it, most of all, the removal of the logistical and tiresome problems of going to one place for ceremony and another for cremation.
I suggest that this crematorium, in line with others in my working area, is barely fit for purpose in our fast-changing funeral landscape. Unfortunately, the councils and their staff are not changing anywhere nearly as quickly as their customers; they are operating a fire-brigade attitude to the changing face of funerals, responding too late to problems, being surprised by fairly benign ceremonial requests, but quick to take the money, reach the targets and throw the profits into the communal council pot instead of ploughing it back into their services. And we, the users and ratepayers are allowing this to happen.
Is it me? Is it?
The crematorium of which I speak is based in a particularly pleasant and leafy suburb of the West Midlands, serving the great and the good of their largely AB socio-economic community, and charges £610 for a half hour slot including cremation. The cost of an extra half hour is £172 for a room which just about holds a hundred people if you are standing sardine-like. When it’s full, the extra mourners have to stand outside – no loudspeaker – in all weathers come rain or shine – and all the time running the risk of being run over by the next funeral hearse keenly arriving. There is no breathing space between one service and another…….they are back to back all day long. The underpaid staff are nearly always pleasant but they are clearly stretched and totally de-sensitised by the production line, one- in-one-out-grab-as-much-money-as-possible-in-a-day system that they serve. The local users regularly tell me they hate the place but are never really aware that they could take their business elsewhere.
I pinpoint this particular crematorium only because it is the one that has got up my nose this week. I could tell you about the other local one which is so old and gloomy it has little to recommend it – and where the organist has complete control of the Wesley system so you have to give him stage winks and nods at appropriate places to start/stop – that’s if you ‘re tall enough to see him and assuming he’s watching you.……or the other crem, where admittedly they have a forty five minute slot, but where the organist who is in charge of the music buttons (because we funeral officiants can’t be trusted to operate buttons) sits behind a curtain so there is absolutely no visual connection. It’s all done by smoke and no mirrors. A mirror would be very helpful! You just have to rely on him staying awake and responding to your cues. Which sometimes he doesn’t.
Is it me? Is it?
Drive ten miles down the road. And breathe……..different council, different ethos, different feeling altogether. The attendants have a relaxed attitude, the ceremony room is bright and airy with magnificent views across the local hills. Well, alright, if you are tall and sit up in your pew seat you can see a few roof tops of a housing estate, but mainly you can see sky and hills. You get my point. The ceremony slot is also 30 minutes……plus 15 minutes – allowing for in/out movement, allowing the room to breathe between congregations….or a little slippage time for when things go wrong or family speakers go on a bit too long. Their catchment socio-economic community is much lower down the scale than its aforementioned neighbour. The cost? £510. If you pick an early slot it’s £380 plus £135 for each additional 45 minutes. That’s a whole hour and half to celebrate the life of/give thanks for/pay tribute to your dead one — or simply howl with grief for your loss for less than the cost of a half hour slot with the next funeral banging on the door at the neighbouring crem fifteen minutes away.
Here, in this crème de la crem, there is a sense of peace and calm – of not being rushed. Any download cd can be played if the music is unobtainable via the Wesley system. They just test it first to see that it works. No fuss – no big deal. No great drama. The ceremony can be filmed, or recorded on cd without any real fuss other than some form filling. There is never any issue over candles being lit because the celebrants/ministers are treated like adults and are trusted not to set fire to the place. The attendants monitor the progress of the ceremony throughout and will cheerfully play your bespoke track on cd at the appropriate moment in the ceremony from their backroom control area where they watch you on cctv and can hear what you are saying. The in-house organist not only plays well but sings loftily and encouragingly to help along the choked and stifled voices of the bereaved.
It’s not perfect of course – it is a council building after all and there are some inadequacies. But I have worked there hundreds of times and have never found it stressful in any way. I have turned up during a quiet patch and caught the attendants ‘properly’ polishing the brassware – door handles, catafalque facias etc, cleaning windows ‘til they gleam, cheerfully singing as they do so. If there is a huge crowd – 200 plus, there is never any problem. Surplus mourners can stand in the large and warm vestibule with the chapel doors open, watch it on a tv screen and hear every word uttered. If something goes unexpectedly wrong, it is sorted cheerfully and helpfully……never a panic. I had the Home Secretary turn up unexpectedly for one funeral – she had her flunkies with her – there was no drama at all.
Here, in this financially poor old market town-cum-newtown, bereaved families are rightly happy with, and served well by, their local crem. The heat generated by the cremators is ingeniously transferred to heat the leisure pool next door. There is a ‘can do approach’ from the management right the way down, which seems sadly lacking in most of the other crematoria I work at, where the approach seems to be despatch’em as fast as you can and don’t let bereaved families or dead people – and especially not celebrants or funeral directors – get in the way of the sloppy council attitude to this very important service.
Which is why, of course, Redditch Crematorium’s staff were nominated and achieved runner up status (just pipped at the post by Colwyn Bay) in the national Good Funeral Awards this year.
And it is why I urge people all over the country to think hard and long about which crematorium they are going to use, come the day of reckoning. You are free to be cremated wherever you wish and can take your business to whichever crem you want – or to the crem which gives you the best service and value for money. And all you funeral professionals out there – tell everyone you know about the good crems and discourage the bad ones. Whilst people are still using them, they see no reason to change. Funeral directors and arrangers have great power – you can help bereaved clients to make good decisions and by doing so force the hand of the worst-run bereavement services.
I say vote with your feet – first of course!
In all so-called advanced cultures, funeral practices are becoming less elaborate. All this talk of baby boomers reinventing funerals as bespoke, themed, accessorised, more or less lavish performance events can seem to make good sense — but baby boomers, who by now have buried and cremated many thousands of parents, ain’t, experience now tells us, buying in to all that. Recession or no recession, the dying express the wish to keep it cheap and simple; and those left behind seem content to fall in with that. When people fall into conversations about funerals, the proudest boasts are made by those who spent least.
Where a funeral dwindles to its essentials — the body of a dead person and the body of people who cared about him/her — there’s not much margin for an undertaker. But where the expanding market is the one for cheap funerals, that’s where an undertaker needs to hang out. You need to do more funerals for less to make your business pay, of course – if you can get em in the first place.
So the earnings ceiling for an undertaker is getting lower and lower. This is especially evident in the US, where once comfortably-off morticians have been banjaxed by the rush to cremation. Growing impoverishment ought to act as a disincentive to new entrants. But the market in Britain remains saturated with undertakers because they are motivated by vocation rather than acquisitiveness. Altruistic people thrive on adversity; it strengthens their humanitarian resolve and enhances their sense sainthood.
Which is why the smart money is now increasingly going into crematoria and natural burial grounds of 20 acres+. Here profits remain fattening. Dignity and the Co-op are moving in bigtime. Bibby, the corp behind GreenAcres, is showing no interest in buying out undertakers.
There’s a race on to buy out council-owned crematoria and build new ones – they’re going up everywhere. Here’s a bubble that’s going to end in rubble. Where low cost scores highest with consumers, and at a time when funeral poverty is stalking the land, it won’t be long before people wise up to the fact that the cheapest cremation provider is the one who cremates most economically by blazing round the clock 365 days a year (not 250 as at present) in a standalone plant with a viewing gallery set in a very few nicely appointed acres. There’s nothing to stop anyone from building one of these now. In the US they’re called crematories. That’s what we need: crematories, not more crematoria.
By how much would efficient cremation bring down funeral costs? The US gives us some idea. You can arrange a direct cremation in New York for £860 including all undertaker’s fees. The cremation part of that comes to just £265. In Florida you can buy the complete direct cremation package for £525. In Maryland, using a particularly nice-looking crematory, you can buy the complete package for £618. And in San Diego you can do the whole thing for just £416 all in.
Go figure, Bibby. You read it here first. Send us a bung when it all comes good.
Q: What’s Big Money to do? The industry big beasts, Dignity and Co-op, can’t make scale pay except by hiking prices (this may be incompetence). And funeral plans are beginning to look… well, decidedly subprime.
A: Burn, baby, burn!
Yes, buying and building crematoria is the Next Big Thing in Funeralworld. Already we’re in the midst of our first nasty public spat. Mercia Crematorium Developments is in a ruckus over plans to build a crematorium at Hackington, Kent. Nearby Barham crematorium, owned by Westerleigh, is allegedly priming protestors, including five undertakers and the Dean of Reculver, to abort the development. You can read about it here. There’s going to be more of this sort of thing according to senior analysts here at the GFG, just you watch.
Memo to Big Money: Building crematoria is next best thing to feeding money into a blast furnace. Why? Because the way we do things now is bonkers, and when something’s bonkers someone’s bound to notice eventually, and when they do notice your bottom will fall out and we’ll all look back on the way we did things as the Age of Stupid.
A funeral venue with an incinerator attached is nuts. More of the same won’t help us out of our present problem, which is:
We’ve got too many incinerators and not enough venues.
Our incinerators don’t work hard enough because they only function for an average of 6 or so hours a day, 250 days out of 365. The way to fix this is to house incinerators in nice wee buildings in around an acre or so of nicely landscaped grounds serving a number of funeral venues and operating round the clock all the days of the week. This would bring down the cost of cremation hugely. Add staffing costs to the raw cost of cremating someone — presently less than twenty quid for gas, leccy and reagent — plus the capital cost of the equipment, and you’re probably looking at something under £100.
Okay, but what about the venue shortage, you cry.
We’ve got more of them than we think. All manner of public and private spaces in the hearts of our commmunities are under-occupied from village halls and cricket pavilions to churches.
Yes, churches. Lovely things. We’ve got thousands of them, all echoingly underoccupied. Except that:
In Aberdeen, every Friday, Imam Ahmed Megharbi leads Muslim worshippers in their lunchtime prayers inside St John’s Episcopal Church in the city centre. His mosque had become too small for all his worshippers, so the incumbent, the Rev Isaac Poobalan, invited them in. Imam Megharbi and his flock seem wholly at ease with the Christian inconography all round them. You can read the full story here(£)
Let’s applaud the C of E for its ecumenical spirit and, at the same time, let us recall the words of CS Lewis: “A church is the only organization that exists primarily for the benefit of non-members.”
So it is that, down in Slough, an interesting thing has happened to the local C of E school. 75 per cent of its pupils are now Muslim, so it is conducting its assemblies without Christian hymns and has allocated separate prayer rooms to boys and girls. The headteacher, Paul McAteer, says: “The Church of England describes itself as a faith for all faiths … Our assemblies consider humanitarian and spiritual issues that concern everyone. We don’t have it as part of our philosophy to do assemblies based on the Bible.”
Might our churches therefore be prepared to extend a welcome to all those who presently huddle outside the crem waiting for their 20 mins-worth?
Well, pretty much every funeral in Britain considers ‘humanitarian and spiritual issues’. Pretty much every funeral expresses spirituality of some kind. An awful lot have a Lord’s Prayer and The Lord’s My Shepherd. If the elastic of the C of E stretches to embrace worshippers of another creed, it seems already to have stretched quite far enough to embrace the troubled Vale and his ilk. Might it be agreeable to inviting them all to come on in and take all the time they like — and, if you want, the vicar can pop in at the end and dispense some juju?
I think it’s time we asked them.
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 here, wrote this of its ‘rear of house’ facilities:
I should have made no attempt to follow the coffin had not Bernard Shaw, who was standing next to me, said: ‘Take the boys and go behind. It’s beautiful’. When I seemed to hesitate he whispered: ‘I saw my mother burnt there. You’ll be glad if you go’. That was wise counsel and I am very grateful for it. I beckoned to my two sons and we went together to the furnace room. The little coffin lay on a carriage outside the furnace doors. These opened. Inside one saw an oblong chamber whose fire-brick walls glowed with a dull red heat. The coffin was pushed slowly into the chamber and then in a moment or so a fringe of tongues of flame began to dance along its further edges and spread very rapidly. Then in another second the whole coffin was pouring out white fire. The doors of the furnace closed slowly upon that incandescence. It was indeed very beautiful. I wished she could have known of those quivering bright first flames, so clear they were and so like eager yet kindly living things.
For a virtual tour, click here.
The GFG can exclusively reveal that Downton star Matthew Crawley will be cremated in a way-out guerilla funeral on the ancestral estate in a ritual created by the grief-stricken family.
Devotees of toff-soap Downton Abbey were left dazed and heartbroken at the end of the 2012 Christmas special when heir Matthew Crawley was violently killed after his motor car flipped as it swerved to avoid an oncoming lorry.
According to plot notes for upcoming series 4, jotted by writer Julian Fellowes and seen exclusively by the GFG, a distraught Lady Mary will banish local undertaker Grassby’s men when they come to take Matthew’s body into their care.
In heartrending scenes that follow, viewers will see Lady Mary supervise sobbing servants as they wash Matthew’s body, dress it in his favourite suit and lay it out in the state drawing room flanked by bowed footmen and surrounded by candles and essential oils. Here, it is reverently watched over by members of the family.
Meanwhile, it’s all hands to the pump downstairs as the servants are enlisted to build Matthew’s coffin and refurbish a derelict cremator (pictured) which was last used to cremate Lady Mary’s convention-busting great-grandfather Lord Bertram Crawley in 1882.
In a final agonising development, the funeral procession, led by butler Carson, is surrounded by police tipped off by villainous valet Thomas Barrow. After a tense standoff the proceedings are allowed to go ahead in a ceremony led by real-life funeral celebrant and GFG commenter Gloria Mundi.
The storyline is believed to be inspired by Fellowes’ near neighbour and cremation pioneer Captain Thomas Hanham, who lived just 20 miles away in Blandford Forum. Hanham illegally cremated his wife and his mother in the grounds of his estate. The authorities did not prosecute him and a few years later the first Cremation Act was passed.
The GFG believes that Fellowes intends to raise awareness of family-arranged or home funerals, sometimes termed DIY funerals. He was overheard at a funeral he recently attended to exclaim, “Why on earth do we hand over the whole bally shooting match to strangers? We really should jolly well do more of this ourselves.”
Fellowes’ plot notes reveal that he even considered cremating Matthew on an open-air pyre. A scribble in the margin betrays second thoughts: “No. A twist too far. Maybe for Maggie [Smith].” Dame Maggie Smith plays the part of the Dowager Countess of Grantham.
NOTE: Journalists and bloggers are asked as a matter of courtesy to acknowledge the GFG as their source when reporting this story.
Story in The Times
Staff at Mortonhall crematorium, Edinburgh, have since 1967 been telling families that no ashes can be retrieved from the cremation of babies who die at or around the time of birth. They have been secretly burying the ashes in a mass grave. We covered this here.
In response to public outrage, the crematorium is now indicating where the babies’ ashes are buried. The manner in which they have done so has done nothing to slake the anger and grief of those parents who were lied to.
