memorialisation

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

Running until 2 March at London’s Somerset House, Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! is an exhibition celebrating the extraordinary life and wardrobe of the late patron of fashion and art. To promote the show, one of her many protégés, milliner Philip Treacy, talks here. As the interview progresses, he gets increasingly emotional as he remembers a remarkable woman for whom life became too much.

If you’re out in Soho on a Saturday night chances are, as you reel from one nightspot to another, that a fresh-faced young person will greet you with the somewhat discordant question, “Would you like to light a candle in a church?” 

Being idealists, these gentle, big-eyed souls are used to being rebuffed by all manner of derision, indifference and obscenity. But they keep going because they know that, sooner or later, someone’s going to say yes. 

When they do, they are conducted to St Patrick’s church where they duly light their candle and either sit in the calm for a bit or even read a bit of scripture. They pop in for a moment, all sorts of people, some maybe for a bit of a laugh, but they often stay for up to an hour. By the end of a typical evening, more than 300 candles are dancing and flickering. 

Those who come are not sold religion. The space is as soothing for atheists as it is for holy folk. For them the church is a haven of serenity, somewhere to enjoy a time out from bustle. 

The project is called Nightfever. It started in Germany in 2005 and is catching on over here. 

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Yes, let’s take it further. What a good idea it would be if churches of all denominations were to offer this invitation to bereaved people: Would you like to come inside and light a candle in memory of someone in our church? 

Funeral directors could offer the same invitation. 

And have you noticed how crematoria are happy to offer you somewhere to stash your flowers, but nowhere to light a candle? They should do it too.

Yes, yes, fire risks, terribly dangerous, insurers won’t have it, etc. 

But if churches can, crems and undertakers can. Do it. Lighting a candle in memory of someone who has died is a powerful thing to do. And there is fellowship in all those dancing flames. 

The arrival of slave trading ships at Bristol’s port helped make the city rich in the 18^th century. But there are few memorials to the thousands of Africans put to work around Britain in that century.

It was, therefore, interesting to learn that the modern Pero’s Bridge at  Bristol Harbour is named after the slave of John Pinney, a successful sugar merchant whose Georgian town house is now preserved as a museum exemplifying the domestic interiors of the age.

When the bridge was opened, a Liberal Democrat councillor, Stephen Williams, condemned it as ‘gesture politics’.

A more historic, and therefore more remarkable memorial can be found in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church in the Henbury area of north Bristol. There’s an unusual, painted headstone and footstone, featuring black cherubs. The grave belongs to Scipio Africanus, who died, aged 18, in 1720 while in the service of a Charles William Howard.

The epitaph on the footstone reads:

I who was Born a PAGAN and a SLAVE
Now sweetly sleep a CHRISTIAN in my Grave
What tho’ my hue was dark my SAVIOR’S sight
Shall Change this darkness into radiant Light
Such grace to me my Lord on earth has given
To recommend me to my Lord in heaven
Whose glorious second coming here I wait
With saints and Angels him to celebrate

The sun that bids us rest is waking
Our brethren ’neath the western sky

The words of the well-known hymn put us in mind of our undertakerly comrades, slow adopters in everything — justly cautious of novelty. In the last year there’s been a lot of waking up to the benefits of online charity fundraising for communities of bereaved people. High time. The practice of collecting cash at funerals is in many ways breathtaking, leaving an undertaker open to heaven knows what imputations of impropriety. In any case, cash collections have poor yields.

Here at the GFG-Batesville Shard our specialist finance team has been looking at online charity fundraising from the point of view of consumers — who else? We’d be grateful for your feedback on their findings.

If you’re an undertaker who doesn’t yet get it, wake up!

Fundraising in memory 

It is increasingly popular to ask for donations to charity instead of funeral flowers. 

Yes, you can have a cash collection at the funeral service. Your funeral director will be pleased to organise this for you and send the money to your chosen charity. There’s unlikely to be a separate charge for this. 

But you will almost certainly raise much more money, and therefore do more good, if you ask people to contribute through a fundraising website. It’s far less painful for them to part with virtual money than five pound notes. 

What’s more, a fundraising website enables you to make the most of the money subscribed because the website can reclaim Gift Aid (tax back), which adds 25% to each donation.  

With Gift Aid, a £10 donation is worth £12.50. 

Which is the best value fundraising website?

The best known fundraising website is JustGiving. But there are lots of other fundraising websites out there offering different terms and levels of service. 

By the time JustGiving has deducted commission and a fee for processing a credit card, your £12.50 is reduced to £11.74. Some charity-giving websites offer better terms than JustGiving — but few are as easy to use. Some of them are not-for-profits, some are charities and a good many, like JustGiving, are for-profit and very rich. 

All fundraising websites enable you to make a donation to a major charity. Some of them, though, charge charities a joining fee and/or an annual subscription. All of them ask new members to fill in forms and submit paperwork to verify their credentials. 

So if it’s a little, local charity you want to support, check first and make sure it’s already a member of the charity-giving website you favour, or you could cost it some expense and a lot of hassle.

 Choose with care

In addition to its level of charges on donations, you also need to check out how easy a website is to use. According to CivilSociety: “A survey of charities conducted by civilsociety.co.uk in 2012 found that on average just 11 per cent of charities were recommending their supporters use BT MyDonate, compared with 43 per cent recommending JustGiving and 27 per cent for Virgin Money Giving. Asked to rank the platforms based on performance, MyDonate did not perform as strongly as competitor products in the market, specifically JustGiving, Virgin Money Giving and own-site platforms – topping the rankings only on the question of ‘value for money’, given that the platform is entirely free for charities to use.”

The two specialist ‘in memoriam’ fundraising websites (*)

There are two fundraising websites, Memory Giving and MuchLoved, dedicated exclusively to people wanting to make donations in memory of someone.

Some of the best

Here are some of the best fundraising websites together with their charges:

MyDonate – 15p-1.3%

Charges: 1.3% credit cards, 15p debit cards. No commission payable on donations. Some users find the website clunky and baffling. MyDonate is a not-for-profit run by British Telecommunications plc. 

Charity Choice – 0-25p

Charges 25p to process donations made by card unless the donor opts not to pay this fee. No joining fee for charities.  CharityChoice is a member of the Wilmington Group plc. 

Virgin Money Giving – 3.45-3.6%

Charges: 2% transaction fee + 1.45% card processing fee for all cards except American Express 1.6%. PayPal 1.6%. £100 joining fee for charities. A not-for-profit service owned by Virgin Money. 

Every Click – 5.8%

Lists all charities. Will contact your chosen charity once the money is collected and ask it to register if necessary at no charge. Everyclick is a limited liability, for-profit company. 

*MuchLoved — 4.5%

3.6% on the donation + 3.6% on gift aid where applicable. This is inclusive of all debit/credit card fees. Regardless of whether debit or credit card it’s the same all-inclusive 3.6% to keep the charges clear. No other VAT or membership fee for charities. All processing via the Charities Aid Foundation who administer the service and have been established for over 80 years as the leading UK charity donation processor. No joining fee for charities. MuchLoved is a charity. 

MuchLoved raises money for charities through its excellent online memorial website. It enables people who are unable to afford a donation to write a message. It also enables people to share memories and participate in, say, commemorating the anniversary of the person who has died by lighting a virtual candle. 

MuchLoved is a charity, so all profits are ploughed back into improving its service. It is highly sophisticated but very easy to use. Your funeral director can administer the donations process or you can do that by setting up an ‘in memory’ page yourself. Your memorial page can be public or private, and you can choose the administrators, as many as you like. Through MuchLoved you can link to any other fundraising platform and also to social media — so you can, for example, link through to your Facebook page. You can fundraise for all UK and international charities. In terms of branding, MuchLoved takes a low profile and puts the chosen charity in the spotlight. 

You can use MuchLoved as a one-off fundraising platform, or you can use it for continuing remembrance of the person who has died. 

*Memory Giving – 5.02-5.96%

5% on the donation + 0.96% UK credit card transaction charge/17p debit card charge. No charge on Gift Aid reclaim. No membership fee for charities. Memory Giving is a private limited company owned and operated by 5^th Generation funeral directors Julian and Matthew Walker, based in Berkshire. 

Simple, straightforward and easy to use. Ideal for a one-off charity fundraising effort. Collects for any charity or multiple charities per collection page, full reporting to you, your charity and your funeral director. Charity funds transferred weekly, independently audited and HMRC compliant. Charity- and funeral director-friendly system also offering conventional off-line collection process alongside on-line giving. SAIF and NAFD supplier memberships held. 

JustGiving – up to 7.55%

5% on the donation plus Gift Aid, hence 6.25% on the actual donation before credit card fees of up to 1.3%. Variable fee for charities 2-7.55%. Annual £180 annual membership for all charities. Website very user-friendly. JustGiving is a private limited, for-profit company.

Posted by Richard Rawlinson

As the big chill looms in the UK, it’s already snowing in Philadelphia. I know this as I’ve stumbled across a Facebook page dedicated to Andy Warhol’s grave in a Pittsburgh cemetery. Here. 

It seems the page is updated daily with images taken by fans of the pop artist who visit the grave, come wind or snow, to leave mementos such as Campbell’s soup cans.

An even more appropriate tribute is the painting of the grave by a Jeff Schaller. He created a rubbing of the headstone, and then silkscreened it on top of a hand painted image.

And taking inspiration from Warhol’s film-making phase, another endeavour is a live 24/7 webcam feed of the grave. Warhol’s movie ‘Sleep’ famously filmed a man sleeping for five hours. If you watch the grave webcam long enough, it promises to be more eventful: you might spot the next visitor arriving with a can of soup.  Here. 

All other things being equal, the manner of the death and the age of a dead person determine the response. Diana, sudden, young = vast outpouring of grief. Mandela, protracted, old = vast outpouring of celebration.

They said when it was all over that a factor in the lamentation for Diana was unresolved grief — that people, prevented by social convention from having been able to express what they felt for the deaths of their own, sublimated it instead by mourning the stranger they only knew through the media.

What has not been theorised about Mandela is that he is a focus of unresolved gratitude. Is he? I think it’s a tenable theory.

We have an all-or-nothing culture when it comes to thanking lovely people when they die. Global heroes like Mandela do just fine. But when the lady who brings my post dies she won’t be a news item and my neighbours and I will probably never get to know. There’ll be a little family-and-friends funeral, probably. We may learn about it subsequently, accidentally. We won’t get a chance to ‘show our respects’. I’d certainly like to.

Because the point is, she’s a hero, too. Okay, the record shows that she hasn’t saved Redditch from oppression and civil war. But she is indomitably cheerful, even on the snowiest and slipperiest of days. She is very nice. She has raised, with love and dedication, a son with learning difficulties. Her life — like yours, like mine — has had its adversities and disappointments.

No one’s life is easy. There is much heroism in the lives of ordinary people, much patient endurance of suffering, much unselfishness, much sacrifice, much good done, much lovingkindness shown. It’s undetectable in the people queueing for a bus or shopping in a supermarket. The public face obscures we know not what, but this heroism is general. 

Life’s misadventures make heroes of pretty much everyone. A person who occasionally comments on this blog, Quokkagirl, likes to talk about ‘the extra-ordinariness of ordinary people’. She puts is well.

Today, you can lay your flowers in grateful memory of Mandela in one of lots of places worldwide but you can’t do the same for the extraordinary ordinary members of your community, your local heroes — except in the cases of those whose deaths inspire roadside shrines marking the spot.

The stories of those of your fellow-citizens who have lived and struggled  and won some and lost some are moving and inspiring. All celebrants know this, and many undertakers. Every day their stories are rehearsed in crematoria and churches and gravesides up and down the land. They are extraordinary stories. It’s not their achievements that gild their eulogies, it’s their personal qualities. In this final appraisal, death is the great leveller: we are what we meant to others. 

We set aside space and erect monuments to our glorious dead but not to our ordinary dead. Thus do we lose the lessons they could teach us, the examples that might inspire us and the opportunities to say thank you.

Imagine a structure that would enable you to do this. It would be at the heart of your community. It would accommodate separate spaces for the accommodation of memorials to a number of the recently dead. Each space would be large enough for a short biography, some photos and a place to lay flowers and other tokens. There might be a box where people could post messages. Each memorial would be granted a period of, say, a month.

There you might see the photo of that nice person at the supermarket checkout who always had a cheery word. You might read the story of a schoolteacher you’d never even known who’d inspired so many children to think well of themselves. And you might feel moved to buy a single flower and lay it down with the others.

Pretty much all life stories make for compelling reading. We are all part of each other. There aren’t that many people we want to forget. There are lots we’d like to say thank you to. 

A people’s memorial. What do you say?

FOOTNOTE: So far as I know, the only memorial to ordinary people is in Postman’s Park, London. It was created by the Victorian artist George Frederick Watts as a memorial to ordinary people who died while saving the lives of others and who might otherwise be forgotten. 

Once upon a time photos were physical things that you gathered together and painstakingly stuck into an album. Nowadays, our photos are virtual — digital — and we merrily scatter them across our social media. Photos used to accumulate. Not any more, they don’t. The result is that the memories they evoke become fragmented among many people and easily evaporate. 

The selfsame technology that encourages this willy-nilly scattering also enables a community of people linked together on a social network like Facebook to act collaboratively to bring their photos, with their memories, together in a compilation that can be shared as a pdf or  a physical book. 

Take an example. Lots of people go to a wedding. They blaze away with their smartphones and cameras, then post the best on Facebook. All very fragmented and transient. Photosharing software enables one of these people to ‘author’ an album of the wedding by asking everyone to contribute their best photo/s together with a few words of text. The compilation album can then be shared digitally or fed through to a printer and made physical. 

There’s a growing number of photosharing outfits out there. I’ve been talking to one of them, PastBook, about compiling an photo and tribute album when someone dies, enabling the dead person’s scattered and fragmented social media community to contribute a photo and a few words about them to a photo album which tells their story — and which can then be browsed on the web, downloaded as a pdf or printed as a book. 

PastBook has now developed an In Memoriam app and trialled it at the Salon Funéraire (the big French deathcare expo) where, founder Stefano Cutello tells me in an email, “We got picked up as the most innovative company of the entire fair!” Read Stephano’s blog post here. 

Anyone can use the PastBook app to create an album. It’s all free — but you pay for the physical book. That’s clearly where they make their money back. Prices are reasonable, starting at under a tenner for a hardback book containing 24 photos. 

PastBook has rolled out a white-label version for celebrants and funeral companies so that they can provide the service under their own brand and domain.

It’s not at all easy for us addle-brained oldies at the GFG to get our heads around this sort of stuff, but we do our best for you, all in the cause of duty. We’re not in any sort of commercial relationship with PastBook, obviously; we don’t do commercial. But if you think the concept is one which is likely to take off, you’ll probably want to check it out. The video at the top sums it up. (We had to watch it a couple of times before we got it.)

In many Western countries graveyards are seen as sinister or even frightening but not so in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

As with other eastern Orthodox countries, it is common for Georgians to honour their deceased relatives by taking food and wine to cemeteries, and having feasts beside the graves.

Although practised thoughout the year, Orthodox Easter is one of the busiest times for the tradition.

BBC News Magazine online.

Is this the sort of commemorative practice that could translate to Britain?