crematoria

Exclusive! Dover undertaker achieves UK first.

27 January 2011
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: crematoria, funeral cost, funeral directors

I was going to blog today about the public meeting at Redditch town hall to debate the contentious matter of whether or not the crem should be used to heat a nearby swimming pool. I wanted to give you a blow-by-blow account. But in the event it was a non-event. There were perhaps thirty people there. We listened to cogent presentations. We heard how the council has received messages of support from all over the world and even been approved by 90 per cent of Daily Mail readers. A ‘Christian’ stood up to protest, but he wasn’t a representative Christian, he was an oddball. And that was that, really. The peaceable, pragmatic and eminently sensible citizenry of this lovely Worcestershire market town were unanimously in agreement. A most satisfactory anticlimax.

Instead, let me tell you about something else.

Paul Sullivan recently set up on his own in Dover. Always a brave thing to do, open for business with all the established undertakers glaring at you — or worse, chuckling. Business is notoriously slow to begin with (“Forty in the first year would be nice,” they all say) but Paul has bucked that by offering a low cost funeral, keeping his prices transparent and generally being an exceedingly nice fellow.

He has now achieved a UK first. Using his website you can price your funeral before you even go to see him. You can spend time doing it, think about the sums, change your mind and try again. You simply go down the list checking the items you want, and it adds it all up as you go — a bit like being in a taxi only more alarming.

I think it’s brilliant. And I can think of reasons why other funeral directors wouldn’t dream of having one of these on theirs (if they’ve got one)(a website, that is).

Have a play with it. Find it here.

What do you think?

In the midst of death let there be life

22 January 2011
Charles
No comments
Categories: crematoria

There’s been a lot of interest in the US this week in what their media reckons to be a startling new trend. Owners of funeral homes, which over there are much roomier than ours, are reacting to shrinking profits – the impact of the rise in cremation and the slump in the economy – by hiring out their facilities to wedding parties and anyone else wanting to have a bit of a do.

The responses of the media are predictable enough – ‘creepy’ ‘bizarre’ etc – but it seems as if there’s been some uptake. I guess there has been some corresponding redecoration, too.

A good move, I’d say, likely to bring death back to life where it belongs.

In our own straitened times, as cuts begin to bite, the message for our crems couldn’t be clearer. Throw open your doors. Become a proper community resource. Pay your damn way.

Only good for goth weddings, of course, encircled as all crems are by tombstones and angels with one arm broken off at the elbow. But great gathering places for events of all sorts. Pity they can’t do food.

But they can start recycling their heat. Up here in Redditch they’re planning to pipe it down to the nearby sports centre. One local undertaker has already put the mockers on it. There’s a public briefing on Thursday. I shall join the citizenry, take the temperature and report back.

 

Bringing death to life

15 December 2010
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, crematoria

Like you, I haven’t a clue what this ‘ere Big Society is all about. They say, I think, that it’s all about empowerment. It sounds more like the government walking off the job. It certainly means less of everything and of course it’s entirely like politicians to try and kid us that less = more.

Wha’ever. If there’s an upside it is that publicly funded outfits are being creative, looking for new revenue streams. And it seems that, according to blogger Dizzy, Canon’s High School in Edgware is hiring out its hall at weekends for funerals. I can’t find any corroboration of this. According to Dizzy “This has meant some kids have witnessed the coffin, people in black and all that goes with funerals.” He concludes: “Not an image that many parents may want their kids witnessing you’d think.”

It’s a customary and not unboring response. The presence of a corpse in a room has been shown to lower air temperature by ten degrees centigrade for at least six months; to induce poltergeist activity; to infect children with melancholia, nightmares and religious mania; and, worst of all, to impact on teaching and learning, causing a school to miss its targets by miles.

If these cuts can break down the barriers between the bereaved and the ungriefed that will be a beneficial if entirely unplanned spinoff. We need more mortality in the community and less of the prevailing apartheid.

So we may take heart from the prevailing financial plight of our crems, I think, as many of them wonder where the heck they’re going to find the money for new filters or even a fresh coat of paint.

There’s no way they can turn a profit operating as they do, five short days a week (around 40 hours out of a possible 168). They need to up their occupancy. There aren’t enough dead people to do that so they must set out their stall for the living. And what a great venue a crem would be for all sorts of things – lectures, recitals, taiko drumming, ballet classes, birthday parties…

Of course, they’d have to tear up the fixed seating. Hey, and that’s only the start!

Zombie journalism

2 November 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: cremation, crematoria

Here’s some nasty journalistic furystirring from the Daily Mail under the headline Councils to stockpile bodies to cut the costs of cremation

Bodies will be stockpiled for cremation under new rules to cut costs and carbon emissions.

Rather than being cremated straight after a funeral, corpses will be stored for days in coffins or body bags in local authority buildings so they can be incinerated in one go.

Council bosses claim the decision to use cremators during one period rather than after every service will cut down on energy bills and reduce their carbon footprint.

This is a reference to the practice of holding over, discussed in this blog in September. The Mail wails on:

The policy will leave families having to return up to a week later to the crematorium to collect the ashes, causing unnecessary additional stress … It is not the first time that councils have been accused of trying to profit from funeral services.

You get the picture? Stockpiles of corpses, like at Buchenwald. In back rooms at the town hall. Held there for a week.

A Conservative MP called Philip Davies has obliged with a ludicrous quote: ‘Councils have lost sight of what they were set up to do in the first place – serve the people and not obsess about climate change.’

A serious subject turned into horror fodder. Read the whole story here. Read as many of the comments you can bear.

The great unsung

23 September 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: Attitudes to death, crematoria, Formality vs informality

I’ll never make a funeral director. Yesterday’s experience reinforced that. No presence of mind. No eye for detail. In any case, I like things to hang loose, come a little unravelled if they will. But the mourning public likes to be held in a reassuring grip, I was reminded. They like someone to look to; someone commanding. To what extent this is a conditioned response, the product of strict timetabling brought about by the exacting demands of crematoria, I don’t know. But there is a decidedly British funeral behaviour and there’s more to it than Britishness. It goes with a lot of glancing at watches. Everyone except the dead guy, that is.

It all went well, just in case you’re wondering. Along the way I met some great people. And herein lay another reminder. Some of the nicest people we’ll ever meet work in the funeral industry. There was Richard who prepared the body and was so happy to be told what a very good job he’d done. There was Mandy at Adlam’s, where the body was being looked after. She couldn’t have been kinder or more generous. There was Margie McCallum, the celebrant. She gave up most of her day to this funeral and conducted the ceremony with clarity, intelligence and unhurriedness. And there was lovely Dave of ClassicRentabug whose fun lim followed me in the estate car in which poor Margie was crammed against the dashboard because the coffin was 6’ 8”.

Once at the crem my essential incompetence was made manifest. I even found I was unable to reassure myself that the coffin goes in feet first. So I threw myself on the mercies of the crematorium manager, confessing myself to be an imposter. This might have made him disdainful. It didn’t. With great magnanimity and gentleness he didn’t tell me what to do, he took over. He briefed the bearers, who were intent on shouldering the coffin. He arranged the procession. He seated everyone, and was alert to every latecomer. And while I have been to many crems and met many very nice people who work in them, this man, Nick Pearce, manager of West Wiltshire Crematorium, is, in my unwavering opinion, the Best in Britain. His staff are lovely, too.

Perhaps you have your own local hero whom you would like to nominate. Please do. I’d be happy to settle for equal best (if grudgingly).

They think it’s all over…

6 September 2010
Charles
6 Comments
Categories: alternative funerals, ceremony, cremation, crematoria, funeral customs, funeral trends, home funerals, natural burial

It’s interesting to note that two of the most important drivers for change in modern funerals have come, not from pro-active consumers or wild-eyed visionaries,  but from urgent if mundane economic and environmental needs. They are, famously, natural burial and’ less famously, the held-over cremation.

Ken West, for all that he is a visionary, made the case for natural burial at Carlisle by adducing United Nations Agenda 21 and, most persuasively, showing his local authority how it could check ever-rising cemetery maintenance costs. There were those who said at the time that natural burial would never work—consumers would spurn it. They should have asked those consumers first. The rest is history. Natural burial has established itself, for those who are environmentally concerned, as the alternative to cremation, and they are unlikely, Ken plausibly argues, to be seduced by green alternatives like resomation, promession or cryomation. Why would they be?

Crematoria want to reduce emissions and operate more efficiently. Because there are lulls (summer’s less busy than winter; Mondays less busy than Fridays), it makes sense when things are quiet to hold bodies over until there are enough of them to make the firing up of the cremator economic. Chilterns crematorium now holds over bodies for up to 72 hours (in practice rarely for more than 48) and, combined with a restructuring of its workforce, is now saving 30% on its fuel cost. The ICCM is keen that all crematoria should follow suit:

It is current practice to pre-heat cremators at the start of each day and cool them down after the last cremation of the day and repeat this process throughout the week. Apart from the excessive use of fossil fuel for daily pre-heating, the risk of emissions of pollutants from the first cremations of each day is increased.

Holding cremations over for a limited period will allow continuity of use with resultant reductions in fuel consumption. Industry codes of practice have attempted to address this situation with the Federation of British Cremation Authorities code stating that the cremation should take place within 24 hours of the funeral service whilst the Institute of Cemetery & Crematorium Management’s Guiding Principles for the Charter for the Bereaved states 72 hours. Despite these codes of practice being in existence very few crematoria hold cremations over for any period. This lack of action by authorities is perpetuating the impact on the environment. Source.

It’s remarkable how commonsensical consumers can be. They need to be handled with care, for sure, but it’s always a mistake to make over-careful assumptions about them. Do they mind having metal hip joints recycled? Not a bit. Until they were asked, the assumption was that they would, and expensive metals were reverently, absurdly disposed of by burial. Do consumers mind if graves are re-used as they are on the Continent, and remaining remains reburied beneath the new burial (the lift-and-deepen method)? Increasingly they don’t.

The holding over of cremations is of high psychological significance. Probably most people at a funeral suppose that, when the curtains glide shut, the coffin straightway lurches into the blazing, fiery furnace—which can give them a funny feeling afterwards if they think about it when they’re eating their sausage roll. The fact that they are not bothered when they find out that, actually, their dead person is still waiting to go in is significant. Let’s take it one step further: If the bereaved do not mind their dead waiting up to 72 hours to be burnt, how much longer would they find tolerable? More research is needed. Even so, 72 hours is three days. It’s plenty.

The holding over of cremations has an even higher ceremonial significance. If incineration does not follow hard on the heels of the funeral ceremony there is no need for the incinerator to occupy the same building as the ceremony space or ‘chapel’. Hardly anyone goes to see their dead person loaded into to the incinerator, anyway. Would mourners mind if that incinerator was a few miles away? Again, more research needed. I’d confidently hazard a guess that they wouldn’t. If that is so, their opinion would render conventional crematoria redundant. Hurrah.

A funeral needs a going-going-gone moment (the committal or some form of farewell) because a funeral is a journey (continuum, if you prefer) ending in the obliteration of the body. At a cremation funeral the ‘gone’ moment is effectively and satisfyingly achieved by the closing of the curtains, for all that this is an illusion. This being so, it is not the act of disposal which people need to tell them that here is The End but the provision of what Tony Piper brilliantly terms a vanishing point.

That vanishing point can be achieved in other ways. Rupert Callender shows us how in this example: “We are doing a home funeral next Wednesday for a family who felt they didn’t know what to do having had two dreadful family services at crems, one of them ruined by the awful ubiquitous sound system, but wanted to honour their dead mum’s wish to be cremated. The answer seemed obvious. We are taking her coffin around to their house at midday, and collecting her at four. We go to the crem alone.” Presumably for these mourners the vanishing point was effectively and satisfyingly provided by the sight of Rupert’s venerable but immaculate Volvo disappearing round a bend in the road. Jonathan Taylor tells the story of a funeral for a local woman to which he appends: “Oh yes, and the cremation – it happened the next day, incidentally.” He doesn’t say what the vanishing point was, but I guess it was something similar.

The possibilities offered by held-over cremation are, well, revolutionary. Crems now need to follow the logic and take things a step further: they need to form clusters and outsource their cremating, preferably to a dedicated plant that cremates around the clock. As for the bereaved, if it’s not the act of disposal that matters but, instead, the provision of an emotionally satisfying vanishing point, what impediment is there to evening funerals and weekend funerals held at venues of all sorts?

It’s not the future we’re talking about here, it’s the present. Funeral consumers are being slow to catch on and funeral directors aren’t exactly falling over themselves to explore the options with their clients. It’s time they did.

There’s nowt so crap as a crem

25 August 2010
Charles
18 Comments
Categories: celebrants, ceremony, crematoria, funeral directors, funeral trends, home funerals

Over in Lufkin, Texas, a new funeral home has opened. What’s different about it? It offers one of those familiar back-to-the-past initiatives which mark progress in funeral service: it’s owner is making his clients aware that they can have the funeral at home – if they want.

“It used to be that before there were funeral homes, the funerals were held at home,” said Philip Snead, CEO and Funeral Director of Snead Linton Funeral Home. “We’re just going back to the way that people used to do business. We do in-home visitations too, and we’re always mindful of health issues.”

I like it. So much better to hold a funeral on familiar ground than up at t’crem. So much better to hold a funeral on your own terms, in your own way. Best of all, it gives families so much more to do (decorating the venue, bringing the food…), and makes it so much easier for them to  run the show, buy tadalafil australia stand up and speak, do away with professional strangers. You don’t have to have the funeral at home, of course. There are community centres, hotels, cricket pavilions…

So forbidding is a crematorium, so alien, so marginalised, so exclusive of everything but death and deathmongers and the grieving bereaved, it is little wonder that people outsource the terrifying ordeal of running the show to someone they’ve briefed.

Says Mr Snead: “Since we’ve been offering the at-home services, people have responded favorably. The older generation grew up seeing their grandparents brought back to the home instead of being taken to a funeral home.”

How many UK funeral directors explore alternative venues with their clients, I wonder?

We will know, as a society, that we are getting funerals right when every crematorium ‘chapel’ in the country stands roofless, derelict and hooted at by owls. Of one thing we may be certain: there’s nowt so crap as a crem.

Yes, we can

4 May 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ashes, crematoria, direct cremation, funeral cost, no service by request

A few weeks back I lazily asked whether a private entrepreneur could open a crematorium in this country. I say lazily because I hoped someone would know the answer and spare me research time.

I supposed that only local authorities can get permission from the Secretary of State to build a crem. I was wrong, and I am very grateful to Tim Morris, Chief Executive of the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management, for putting me right. There is, he tells me, nothing to stop a private operator from doing this – subject, he warns, to the usual planning procedures which would, of course, be influenced by the responses of people close to the proposed site.

We discussed the uneconomic model of our crems. In order to be more or less fuel efficient a crem must burn as many bodies as it can in a day. But because its incinerator is attached to a ceremony space (sometimes more than one), it must hurry the living through with indecent haste. It’s a thinly disguised production line. When winter comes it can’t keep up; when summer comes it hasn’t enough to do. You pay for the ceremony space whether you want to use it or not. Your fee is further inflated by a sum used to subsidise the maintenance of the cemetery. This is economically and environmentally a bad deal. It may also be bad value emotionally.

I have a feeling that any ceremony space (chapel if you like) devoted exclusively to farewelling the dead is always going to be bad value emotionally.  Churches, set in the midst of living communities, do a much more rounded job, incorporating as they do all rites of passage. Crems are set apart – in much the same way the public hangman used to be in English towns. In spite of the best and most careful efforts of those unsung people who work in them them, they have the wrong aura. We need to bring funerals back into the land of the living.

Our crems have, it turns out, addressed the environmental and economic issues. A few years back Wandsworth borough council proposed the model of a central crematorium serving several satellite ceremony spaces. The idea was that neighbouring local authorities could decommission their underused cremators and send their bodies over to a really efficient plant for incineration. The proposal foundered. Local authorities, it seems, take too much local pride in their crems to give them up. How would the idea have been greeted by users? Perceptions were never tested.

To get back to the main question. Could a private entrepreneur build a crematorium to serve the direct cremation market? It seems there would be no legal hurdle. Mr Morris reckons that securing the Secretary of State’s approval would be no problem. What would be harder, much harder, would be getting planning permission. In the US and Canada a great many crematories are built in industrial parks. That might not go down so well over here. In any case, there isn’t enough of a market for it yet.

But will people grow weary of schlepping joylessly to the crem for their funerals? Will a significant number begin to question the value of having the body at the funeral? Will they begin to opt, as so many do in North America, for a celebratory memorial service held at a more congenial venue with (optional) just the ashes present?

I see no reason why not. In the meantime, the model of a central crematorium serving several satellite ceremony spaces is an idea well worth revisiting. Public opinion should be tested.

Read past posts for more on this discussion and on the merits or otherwise of direct cremation.

Time to privatise cremation?

20 April 2010
Charles
5 Comments
Categories: crematoria

Over in Apple Valley, Ca, Stephen Atmore, 11 years retired from the local phone company, has gone back to work. He’s opening a crematorium in a strip mall and trying to get his head around it: “I still wake up every morning asking myself why I am doing this.”

Like a lot of people in the death business he was inspired to get stuck in as a reaction against the exploitative practices of service providers which he experienced when two close family members died. He was further affected by the spectacle, common enough in the US, exceedingly rare in the UK, of families on the side of the road advertising car washes to help pay for a funeral.

Says Mr Atmore: “This is for the economically challenged families who don’t want to and can’t spend the money on cremations.”

He’s not set his prices yet, but he’s going to keep them as low as he can.

He’s providing a service which no one in the UK is allowed to offer. You can bury people as a freelancer over here, but you can’t burn them. Under the terms of the 1902 Cremation Act only a local authority (Local Government Board) can do that:

The powers of a burial authority to provide and maintain burial grounds or cemeteries, or anything essential, ancillary, or incidental thereto, shall be deemed to extend and include the provision and maintenance of crematoria:

Provided that no human remains shall be burned in any such crematorium until the plans and site thereof have been approved by the Local Government Board, and until the crematorium has been certified by the burial authority to the Secretary of State to be complete, built in accordance with such plans, and properly equipped for the purpose of the disposal of human remains by burning.

The model of a British crematorium doesn’t work. In order to be more or less fuel efficient it must burn as many bodies as it can in a day. But because the incinerator is attached to a ceremony space it must hurry people through with indecent haste. It’s a thinly disguised production line which can’t, when winter comes, even keep up. You pay for the ceremony space whether you want to use it or not. Your fee is further inflated by a sum used to subsidise the maintenance of the cemetery.

What’s more, for the poorest people in Britain the state provided funeral payment will almost certainly fall short of the full cost. A budget cremation service would make all the difference.

Why should a Brit not be permitted, like Mr Atmore, to offer an alternative to that provided by the state? With local authorities increasingly contracting out their crematoria to big corporates like Dignity and Co-operative Funeralcare, there’s already more than a whiff of privatisation in the air.

How, under the Cremation Act, will it ever be possible for anyone to build a pyre for open-air cremations? This who want to do it must be thinking it through. I hope one of them will tell us.