There’s an interesting letter in this month’s Funeral Service Times from a funeral director, Brian Howard. Actually, it’s more of a suicide note, but we’ll come to that. He’s fed up with people ordering funerals they can’t pay for, or for which their dead people did not make any provision. “In our experience,” he says, “nearly every unpaid funeral is a claim from the social funeral fund DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], but unfortunately because of the data protection act the DWP will not discuss a claim or inform the funeral directors of a problem even though the cheques are made payable to us and we have paid for the funeral on behalf of the claimant.”
When someone who’s skint comes to buy a funeral, the funeral director advises them to apply to the social fund. You’ve got to be completely skint to qualify for a funeral payment from the social fund. You have to fill out a long form. It takes them several weeks to decide if you’re worth it. The sum it pays out is likely to be less than the cost of even a basic funeral. Some funeral directors will not arrange the funeral until they can be sure the funding is in place. Most go ahead and keep their fingers crossed.
Until the last few years, funeral directors displayed low aggression in pursuing bad payers, thinking it would damage their image if they did. They’re now going after them with a vengeance. They have to. There’s a cashflow-threatening amount of money at stake.
Gone are the days of two months’ free credit at the expense of the funeral director. Almost all now demand payment of disbursements upfront. Disbursements are the bills from service and merchandise providers the funeral director pays on your behalf.
Something that really bugs Mr Howard is this: “At present any member of the public can walk into [their local authority] bereavement services and purchase a burial plot, cremation, or cremation plot at the same price as a funeral director. And yet if we are not paid for the funeral we still have to pay the local authority, and the applicant receives the deeds in their name … It appears that we are actually retailing burial plots and cremation service/plots for the local authority, and if this is the case then we should have a mark-up price – at least this would give us a margin of profit to offset non-payment.”
Here is his radical remedy: “I propose that the local authority invoice the applicant for burial plots, cremation plots and cremations, or alternatively stay with the present system, but if we do not receive payment by the time the fees are due we obtain credit from the local authority. They have the machinery in place for debt recovery.”
We can sympathise with Mr Howard—up to a point. But we reflect that funeral directors have worked very hard to be indispensable: to be the sole gateway to all funereal merchandise and service providers. Their business model and their prestige require them to be a one-stop shop for everything a bereaved person needs. They pride themselves on doing everything for their clients, lifting the weight and worry of arranging the funeral off their shoulders. Their message to clients is that of Bob Marley: Don’t worry about a thing / Cos ev’ry little thing gonna be all right. And while this may seem to be very helpful, it is also very controlling and disempowering, both of their clients and their service providers. The Good Funeral Guide believes that the bereaved need to engage with funeral arrangements in a much more hands-on way; that, to paraphrase Beth Knox, once a person is dead the worst thing possible has happened: everything you can do from then on can only make things better. The more you do the better you’ll grieve at the best time for grieving.
Funeral directors have established a stranglehold over funeral arrangements, and this has come back and bitten them on the bum. Local authorities have become lazily dependent on funeral directors to collect their fees. There is no good reason why they shouldn’t collect their own fees from purchasers of graves and cremations. Why on earth don’t they? Because the funeral directors fall over themselves to do it for them. Mr Howard claims that “It appears that we are actually retailing burial plots and cremation service/plots for the local authority, and if this is the case then we should have a mark-up price – at least this would give us a margin of profit to offset non-payment.” No, Mr Howard. You are not a retailer, you are an agent. You make a charge for this in your professional fee.
Local authorities have also become lazily dependent on indispensable funeral directors to arrange for the disposal of dead bodies. The option which is never presented to people is that of refusing to accept responsibility. Citizens Advice gives wrong advice in this matter: “Some people do not leave enough money to pay for even a simple funeral. If this happens, the person arranging the funeral will have to pay for it.” No! Under the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, the responsibility for the disposal of dead bodies lies with the local authority. Anyone is perfectly entitled to walk away from the whole business. It was, therefore, perfectly logical for the government in the 1950s to consider nationalising the funeral industry, and for the same reason it is arguable that it was wrong to abolish the death grant. If more skint people walked away from arranging funerals, or more funeral directors refused to have anything to do with them, the government would very adroitly speed up social fund payments.
Mr Howard concludes by sounding a warning to his fellow funeral directors: “As the wording on the burial purchase forms and application for cremation forms suggests that it is the applicant’s purchase and not the funeral director’s, unless we demand a change in the future the DIY service will be commonplace.” In other words, people will become their own funeral directors. We’re all doomed!
Here Mr Howard betrays a misunderstanding of his role—a misunderstanding possibly brought about by his job title. Were he to revert to the time-honoured title of undertaker he’d be able to see his role more clearly. When people take upon themselves the responsibility for disposing of their dead they make themselves accountable in law to their local authority and they cannot shift that legal responsibility to anyone else. They can, though, depute the care of their dead person to someone who will undertake to do that—someone who will also undertake to make funeral arrangements on their behalf as instructed. The local authority is in charge. The executor or administrator is the possessor of the body, the funeral director. The undertaker is custodian and agent, merely.
If funeral directors have become victims of their own self-inflicted indispensability, that is their fault. There are a great many coffin makers, florists, caterers, printers and secular celebrants who will greet this with a smirk. They’d be very happy to deal with the public direct. Coffin makers in particular would be happy to see their coffins sold at a far less exorbitant markup.
Mr Howard, I think you are going to have to bite the bullet on this one. It is industrious indispensability that maintains your pre-eminence. The price you pay is the odd unpaid bill. It’s worth it. If all providers of services and merchandise start to invoice funeral consumers direct, you unravel; you fall apart. Shh. Your letter exposes the extreme fragility of the funeral director’s business model.
To JH: if you will give me a good email address I want to reply to you.
An interesting thing about undertaking is that you don’t have to come at it from a position of actually being an undertaker. Does that make no sense? Let me explain.
I know how undertakers feel. I am a writer. It is very difficult to come at writing from the position of being a writer. My good friend Christopher is a writer. He wrote a very successful book. Nigel Slater, Monty Don and Anna Pavord raved about it. Result? Penury. Very few writers strike lucky enough to make a living from writing (though their agents and publishers do well enough out of them). They need to do other things. If Christopher wants to finish his next book (it’s about forests and promises to be just as brilliant as Forgotten Fruits) he needs to broaden his earning base, bustle a bit, do some journalism or copywriting, a few shifts pushing trolleys at B&Q, a newspaper round, whatever. A bit on the side. I once did time in prison. As a teacher. It was quite a good little earner—until I was sacked. I am now an occasional funeral celebrant. It keeps my financial scoreboard ticking over. But it keeps me from my writing. There’s no winning combination.
Just about everyone else can make a living by pursuing single-issue careers, lucky people. Surgeons. Electricians. Brazilian waxers. Dog groomers. They don’t need their bit on the side.
Undertakers began as portfolio workers. They were builders or joiners. Undertaking was a sideline. Nowadays, though they are undertakers first and foremost, they still can’t make a living out of it, dammit. No, they need their bit on the side, too. So they have to work hard to make themselves indispensable in all areas of funeral planning—to be a one-stop shop for everything you need. Which is why they collect fees on behalf of crematoriums, priests, celebrants and burial grounds, making themselves responsible for the debts of their clients. Desperate lunacy! It is why they have to hold all service and merchandise providers, people who do things they can’t, in hired dependency. Thrall is all.
It’s a terribly delicate business model and it can so easily fall apart. Why? Because undertaking is so easily relegated to an ancillary service. Because there’s so little to it. Result? Hirer hired. Anyone can set themselves up as a funeral arranger and turn the tables—a monumental mason, a celebrant, an event organiser.
Is it all unravelling for the funeral directors? Not necessarily. But they need to smarten up, definitely. Old school funeral directors have failed to address the disconnect between the care of the body and the creation of the funeral ceremony. For most, these remain separate specialisms—and where clients want a religious ceremony they’ll always be so. But the rise of the secular ceremony gives a funeral director the opportunity to offer exactly what their clients want: a joined up service. Most are intellectually incapable of this.
Down in Devon, green fuse hire mortuary facilities from local funeral directors, where they care for the bodies entrusted to them. Family Tree and the Green Funeral Company, both of whom have their own mortuaries, are also rare, triumphant exceptions, the best it gets—but, like my friend Christopher, I don’t suppose they’ll ever be troubling the financial services industry. They are content in their honourable estate of relative poverty, happy in their own skins, terrifically nice people.
Funeral directors live in ever-present danger of someone better coming along and enslaving them. And the news is that their newest threat has arrived. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for: the funeral consultant!
I have been contacted by two such in the last month, both of them ex-funeral directors who can use their insider knowledge to muscle down prices for their clients. One is Andrew Hickson at Your Choice Funerals. I won’t tell you who the other one is until he has got his website sorted.
Will the news of their advent cause the marmalade to drop from the nerveless fingers of breakfasting funeral directors the length and breadth of the land?
There’s always going to be a market for a cheaper funeral . But my feeling is that people are going to be reluctant to accede to the care of their dead person being subordinated in any way. What do you think?
While you consider, go straight to Amazon and order your copy of Forgotten Fruits.
Interesting piece in this month’s Funeral Service Journal (FSJ), the undertakers’ trade mag, by Howard Hogson.
Howard Hodgson? He was the young turk who bought his dad’s ailing funeral home in Birmingham for £14,00 in 1975 and embarked on an acquisition spree which had landed him 546 branches by 1991, at which time he pocketed the cash, some £7 million, and retired to dabble in other areas of enterprise, mostly with conspicuous unsuccess. Something of a futurologist, our Mr H. Or not, as we shall see.
In FSJ he bewails the passing of the old-school funeral director. Where is he now, he asks, the “well-respected local man who arrived at the deceased’s home and announced he’d be conducting the funeral? The man who established which were the family flowers to be placed on the coffin. The man who then noted down the names of the mourners for each limousine and proceeded, when all was ready, to nod from the front door so that the hearse could pull forward and the hearse driver return to open the limousine door as the first limousine pulled into place and the conductor returned inside to read out those first six names and repeat the exercise until all the limousines had been loaded outside the front door. The man who thanked the people in the street for having taken the trouble to pay their last respects before walking the cortege down the road, gliding on board without the hearse stopping, and setting the route and speed in order to arrive three minutes before the service time so that the opening sentences were said by the priest bang on time.”
Sorry, it’s a long quote, but it almost amounts to a valuable if, at this remove, slightly risible historical document. And I guess a lot of people who saw this piece chuckled ironically, for this historical figure from the Golden Age of funerals was also the person dumped on his arse by Mr Hodgson’s management methods.
“Old chaps,” he calls them, now. “A dying breed. The conductors of today would do well to learn from them before there are none left and their art is dead.”
Does Hodgson have a point of any potency? Yes, I think he does. If it’s a so-called traditional funeral you want, a funeral conductor occupies a ceremonial role. As such it’s not a role that can be discharged diffidently or scruffily. Everything must be just so. Uniform, bearing and performance must be impeccable. Sense of occasion is all. The conductor must set the tone by lending majesty to the obsequies.
And a great many conductors today are not smartly turned out. Zitty twerps, hulking yobs, cocky shortarses—we get all sorts, these days. It’s worse than just a letdown to see the hearse paged by some unimpressive physical specimen with bad hair, flat feet and an unconvincingly arranged facial rictus. Top hats and morning coats are often of little better than costume-hire quality. Shoes are awful. Scuffed, cheap, squashy, AWFUL!
To what does Mr Hodgson’s near-mythical conductor owe his ceremonial eminence? Why, tradition, of course. Today’s funeral procession is the descendant of the Victorian funeral procession, itself the descendant of the ancient heraldic funeral devised in the mists of the Middle Ages by the College of Arms. There’s a proud history here, a wealth of ‘eritage—and, of course, a lingering Victorian aesthetic.
At the same time, we must observe that Victorians would regard today’s funeral procession as a pale and diluted version of the sort of show they were accustomed to put on. Yes, the Victorian funeral procession has evolved, of course it has, thank god it has.
But, crucially, you’ve got to ask yourself whether that evolution has simply brought it to the verge of extinction.
A funeral procession, like any procession, is only any good if it can proceed at a walking pace and incorporate both vehicles and pedestrians. It is welcome only if the populace agrees to give it road room. And while the inhabitants of Wootton Bassett readily give over their high street to corteges bearing the bodies of dead service people, and while the inhabitants of countless towns and villages give over their roads to their festive carnivals, it is a sad fact of modern life that, for most of our citizens, a funeral is a private, not a universal, event. It does not arrest people as they go about their business. It is not accorded reverent attention. On the contrary, a funeral procession to most is a matter of indifference and, to most motorists, a lumbering nuisance to be parped at and cut in on. As a result, a hearse is customarily followed only by a small number of vehicles. The majority of mourners go straight to the venue, park and wait. Why are they not accorded an opportunity to gather at, say, the gates and follow the coffin on foot? Is a hundred metres or so too short a distance for a proper procession? No, it is not. But here another fact of modern life comes into play to harry and deplete a ceremonial procession: at crematoria, in particular, there simply isn’t time for all that.
Is it time to pronounce the funeral procession dead? I think not. Humankind has formed processions of all sorts since the dawn of time. It’s something we’re hardwired to do. The funeral procession will revive, no doubt about it. But will it revive in the Victorian tradition of Mr Hodgson’s “old chaps”? I think not.
Why so? Simply because, for the “old chaps”, every funeral conformed to the same look, the same style, the same level of formality. But we do not live in an age of conformity, Mr Hodgson, not any more, we live in an age of unique, personalised, participative funerals which owe nothing to Victorian values or a Victorian aesthetic and, increasingly, nothing to orthodox religious practice. At events like this the traditional funeral director and bearers look increasingly anachronistic and out of place, if not downright unpleasant.
The Victorian funeral was all about hush and awe. The modern funeral addresses itself to celebrating the life. It is in this context that the clobber favoured by so many funeral directors is not a delightful nod to the past (as are the uniforms of, say, Chelsea Pensioners), but an underworldly, Hammer Horror fancy dress which casts dread over the event.
The funeral of the past, every one the same, belonged to Hodgson’s “old chaps”. Not any more, they don’t. In the words of Thomas Lynch, “the dead belong to their people.” So do their funerals. And if those people want every one different, it is for funeral directors, in their role as event organisers, to cater for this.
That’s why, Mr Hodgson, you see “the smartly turned-out [conductors] of today … standing by as the eldest son of the deceased seems to be conducting proceedings.” Deplore it all you want, I’m afraid you’re going to see more of it: funeral directors doing what they are bloody well told, tables turned. It is time for your “dying breed”, undeniably wonderful in their day, to be DNR-ed. Let us hope they will not spin in their graves.
Meanwhile, up in Solihull, John Hall at Colour My Funeral has arranged insurance for any mourner over the age of 25 to drive his hearse. That’s a first, yes? Way to go, John! Love it!
The Guardian ran a short piece on Saturday about those who work in the death industry. One of the themes was humour as a coping mechanism.
One of the interviewees was Andrew Leverton of Leverton’s, by appointment undertaker to HRH the Queen. Asked if he found aspects of his work darkly funny he replied, “I don’t find it particularly humorous.” He went on to say, “I keep away from the emotional aspect of it … I try to keep things at arm’s length.” Professional detachment for him means that mishaps are things like flowers being put on the wrong coffin or corteges running late. Nothing about people.
Now, that’s quite a trick, to steer clear of emotion in the funeral business. Amidst the wailing and the trauma, Andrew’s problems are all logistical. “If you can keep you head while all about you / Are losing theirs…” You’ve cracked it, Andrew.
Part of me admires that. Grief is the responsibility of those who grieve. We hire an undertaker to take care of the practicalities, not to take away the pain. Andrew quietly sets about his business.
But most of us in Andrew’s place would find it hard not to make a human connection of some sort and, once you’ve established some sort of rapport with your clients, you’re bound to have a feeling for what’s happened to them. There’s the matter of client expectations, too. There’s got to be more to the contract than corpses and coffins and cars. Consumers expect more than courteous indifference. They need their undertaker to enter into the spirit of the arrangements to some degree.
People who get that close to death need to be able to cope. I doubt whether emotional disengagement is the way. People who reckon catastrophe to be inexplicable will never be able to process human misery and let it pass through them; they melt down. People who feed on grief (there are quite a few grief vultures out there) glut on it and go mad. Those who are more emotionally mature can take it on, then let it go. This, they would say, is the way the world is, and I accept that.
So, Andrew, I’m sure you’re doing a fine job. But, old chap, I think there’s more to it than getting to the crem on time. This is a job for emotional grown-ups. As John Milton had it:
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.
Did you read about that undertaker in Middlesbrough? The one who stole the keys from a rival undertaker’s hearse as it sat obedient and empty outside the Salvation Army citadel? It had to be hotwired to get it to the cemetery. It had to be seen to be believed.
The story has been reported around the world. Read it here.
Disgraceful, you mutter. But since when did you believe what you read in newspapers? They exist to sensationalise or sentimentalise. They are never less than superficial. Come on!
In rural areas most funeral directors coexist in peace and harmony. They help each other out, lend each other a hearse or a bearer, greet each other as friends. They’re not in competition, that’s why.
But in urban areas it’s different. There are too many undertakers. Kindly, ethical undertakers have to compete with smarmy predators. In almost every town in Britain there’s a very nasty turf war going on. It’s not a war that manifests itself in drive-by shootings, broken legs, blazing mortuaries. Oh no, it’s much more a thing of insidiousness, backhanders and backstabbery. The public face is smarm, oodles of smarm. It rarely breaks the surface as it did in Middlesbrough.
Can you always tell the difference between the nice guy and the smarmy bastard? Have you never been had? As Shakespeare’s King Duncan so aptly had it, and I’m sure you agree, “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” Or as his Hamlet had it, “one may smile and smile and be a villain.”
This is just one reason why I want to list best funeral directors in the Good Funeral Guide. To save people from sharks. To save the kindly, ethical undertakers from the smarmy bastards.
I bet there’s a lot more to this story in Middlesbrough than meets the eye. And I’m prepared to take a punt on this. Instinct sides me with the undertaker who pinched the keys (though not with what he did, obviously). What goaded him?
If I can get to the bottom of it I’ll let you know. Of course, I could be wrong. But, dammit, I doubt it.
Here’s a problem for a species of mathematician: Exactly how big can a funeral directing enterprise get before it topples into incompetence and scandal?
The same law of economics would, you think, apply to funeral directing as to, say, cars: expansion creates economies of scale and efficiencies of production which make your product both competitive and technically advanced. Big = better; biggest = best. Most of us wouldn’t be able to afford to drive cars if they were handbuilt like, say, Morgans. The production line is the consumer’s friend.
This simple law doesn’t apply to funerals. In the first place, no funeral director needs to reinvest profits in research and development because the technical aspect of their work has nowhere to go. Indeed, the technical side of funeral directing is very simple and can be summed up in three sentences: Keep cool. Wash it. Pop it in a box.
Secondly, the big conglomerates and chains do not pass on their economies of scale to the consumer in the form of cheaper funerals. They have interest to pay on capital raised from venture capitalists. They have shareholders to satisfy. Dignity is eyebrow-raisingly pricey—and profitable. Independent funeral directors (the handbuilt Morgan people) find it easy to undercut the big boys and still make a perfectly good living. Co-operative Funeralcare, the people’s undertaker, could easily afford to offer working folk cheaper funerals, but for some reason it obtusely doesn’t.
Upshot? We can all afford the handbuilt Morgan. So why the heck would we shell out for a production line funeral?
Fortunately, we do not have the depth of scandal over here that they are prone to in the US (check out this story). But it is observable that our own dear Funeralcare is especially vulnerable to bungling.
Here’s a very good analysis from the US which applies as aptly to the UK. It’s by Kathy Jackson, it appeared on the ConnectingDirectors blog, and it is entitled
I Am Sad To Report The Death Of A Funeral Home
Left to mourn are the funeral directors and funeral assistants and the extended family, the community which the home served for seventy-five years. Unfortunately, the funeral home, which had been well until eighteen months when it was struck by malady for which there was no cure. The onset of symptoms was slow and insidious and was not recognized immediately. By the time the syndrome was diagnosed, there was little hope of returning the Funeral Home to a state of good or at least better health. Donations may be made to the other local funeral homes which have maintained their health and continue to serve families with respect, compassion, understanding and dignity.
Vanderlyne Pine (1975) described two types of funeral homes – community and cosmopolitan. His discussion focuses on the differences in the delivery of funeral service to bereaved families and the relationship of the funeral directors in their work relationship and with the community where they are located.
The funeral homes which are gaining momentum are those who provide their families with a sense of building a relationship, of continuity and stability during what is often a very chaotic and distressful period. While having the name of a funeral home on local sports team’s shirts is good advertising, it is not the influencing factor which will bring a family to the funeral home when a death occurs. Funeral home reputation is crucial. Community funeral directors are active in local churches as well as civic and business organizations. Pine observes that community funeral directors demonstrate a conviction that personal contact with the bereaved a well as taking care of their deceased is important (Pine 1975:74). The funeral director and the bereaved form a team whose task it is to carry out the funeral process.
In contrast, funeral directors working in cosmopolitan funeral homes are members of complex organizations which serve a large and often anonymous population. Funeral directors in these funeral homes are assigned specific tasks such as arranging, embalming, and directing funerals according to their expertise. Because their work is oriented to specific tasks, funeral directors in cosmopolitan funeral homes often appear efficient but impersonal to bereaved family members (Pine 1975:143, Laderman 2003:189).
It is no secret that I support the community funeral home as the ideal model for all funeral homes regardless of the number of calls per year or the type of ownership, independent or corporate.
In the past eighteen months, I have watched a highly successful community funeral home evolve into a cosmopolitan funeral home. Initially the changes were exterior changes, the name and colour of the funeral home sign. Families barely noticed the change because the faces they were familiar with remained constant, the delivery of service remained constant. Change began to happen with in the funeral home, three new managers, the loss of the hearse to a central pool of vehicles (and along with the vehicle, the elimination of a team member), the loss of “in home” embalming to central embalming, increased pressure to sell products, packages for funerals and later to pre-arrange funerals during aftercare meetings. With the closure of another funeral home, came an influx of new staff in greater numbers than the “old staff” who proceeded to take over and manage the funeral home without any insight into the families they were to serve or their special needs. Families began to notice the unfamiliar faces, the new routines, changes in the atmosphere of the funeral home and an uncharacteristic slovenliness. Even more so, families began to discover they were being passed from person to person over the duration of the two or three days at the funeral home. One family complained that they were “served” by three different teams, met seven different staff members and on the day of the funeral had no idea of who ‘their funeral director” was. Word began to spread – new management – new staff – high prices – and of course, the dreaded phrase, “they are interested in my money, not me” surfaced.
Sadly, more funeral homes which will die, leaving funeral directors bewildered at how it is possible for a once thriving business which was well respected and an integral part of the community to become a skeleton of its former self. Of course there is an answer, a way to save these funeral homes but in a society which seems to place little value on tried and tested ways, it is unlikely to be the first method of choice. It is not personalization or even innovation which is at stake. Certainly both of these contribute towards meeting the needs of today’s funeral or memorial consumer. Rather, what I suggest is that we look to older models of service, when our families were our priority and dividends were not.
Today’s papers have enjoyed this story—the ones you’d expect, the funloving Sun and the _____________ (supply your own adjective) Daily Mail.
It’s a story which emanates, so it seems, from the Wales News Service, whose website offers this enticement: “Have you been betrayed by your man? Or did you get revenge on your love rat? Maybe something bizarre or funny has happened to you? Have you overcome tragedy or found love when you least expected it?”
It’s that sort of a news agency.
It’s a story which makes me pulsate with ambivalence. I guess she’s actually a very nice lass who also happens to be young and pretty. I fear she’s being exploited. I want to think the best.
But the image takes us to some pretty dark places. As does the caption in the Sun: Serious business … babe Louise at work
When the present looks awful we seek refuge in the past. We fix on a time when we would have been safe. Is that why, when someone dies, we look for an undertaker who still dresses as he did in 1873?
Maybe.
There’s a lot of call for it. And Brits have a weakness for uniforms. From beefeaters to barristers they like to strut their stuff looking well marinaded in history. And, let’s be uncharacteristically ungenerous, a uniform bigs up a little person. A great many undertakers dress like that because it makes them feel important. There aren’t many jobs that can make a stupid person feel important, but undertaking is one of them.
It also makes them powerful. They deal every day with people whose expectations of a funeral are zero. This makes it all the easier softly, solemnly to invoke tradition and sell them the same funeral they sell to everybody else. You’d think it would bore them to death. It certainly makes for an uncomplicated life.
Anything which deviates from a ‘traditional’ funeral, the standard fare, is labelled alternative, and not in a nice way. In the land of the living we celebrate choice, it’s what drives consumerism. The deathmongers take the contrary view. Even more regrettable is that those undertakers who come out of a big chain and bravely start up on their own, brimming with best intentions, lapse, so many of them, under the influence of the uniform, into same old sameness. THS, John Hall calls it. I’m coming to him.
Up here in Birmingham we have, possibly, the most backward looking undertakers in Britain. THS holds them in its thrall. You see them at the crem resembling nothing so much as hapless extras in a Hammer Horror film. So nothing lifted my spirits more today than going to visit a brave new Solihull-based start-up, Colour My Funeral.
It takes some brass neck to call your business Colour My Funeral. It takes some chutzpah to take potshots at your competitors and say in your brochure: “It seems the days are passing when people are happy to allow a funeral director to take charge of their family funeral and conduct it more in a fashion the funeral director wants than how the family or deceased would have liked” and go on to say: “We also thought it strange that, although we now live in the 21st century, it seems that, when we die, we go back to the 19th for our funeral.”
No one could say that John Hall, who heads up Colour My Funeral, suffers from THS. He doesn’t clad himself in shudder-making clothes, neither does he clad his walls in framed certificates, photos of sepia ancestors and pictures of horse-drawn hearses. There’s no hush and awe here, nor yet dignified gloom. All is light and colour. There’s an LCD screen in the waiting area telling you what your choices are and another in the front window facing out onto the pavement. The steel shutters that come down at night are painted with a woodland burial scene. John offers his clients everything from the cheapest funeral in town, the Forget-Me-Not at £950, to the most expensive in the country at £32,000. He’s advertised in an eyebrow-raising way on Smooth Radio.
True humility is the product of self-assurance and a deep respect for other people. That’s John. He’s not a theorist, he’s a practical person. He’s emotionally intelligent, one of life’s lovely guys. He likes to explore with people what they want, and give it to them. He’s also a detail person. He loves to give a funeral as many personal touches as he can think of. He’s very, very good, the real deal. Ask his clients. His market is not just those looking for something different, it is everybody from Solihull to the wider community of nearby Birmingham.
But this is a very tough business to get started in, where one undertaker looks like all the rest. Well, John certainly hasn’t made that mistake. His is a brave all-or-nothing, high-risk approach and this is a laudably THS-free enterprise.
He deserves to do well.
Sorry? What’s THS stand for, you ask? Top Hat Syndrome.
