All blood runs red
“By all means have memorials. Make them out of Government stone if you like. Make them uniform. But you have no right to employ, in making these memorials, the bodies of other people’s relatives. It is not decent, it is not reasonable, it is not right.” “When the widows and mothers of our dead go […]
Calling all you snappers
The Memorial Awareness Board (MAB) invites you to commemorate the centenary year of the First World War with a national photography competition Launch date is on the 30th May with entries closing on 31st July, with the winner to be announced on 1st September. Now in its fifth year, this critically acclaimed competition calls on […]
A Concerned Priest in South London
On a hot June Sunday morning, David Hall, of Vintage Lorry Funerals, set out at 0600 hours in his 1950 Leyland Beaver for a Monday morning funeral in Walworth, South London. When David was a lad in the 1960’s, Sunday was a sacred day and there would be very little traffic on the road during […]
That was then
“When the place was packed full the undertaker he slid around in his black gloves with his softy soothering ways, putting on the last touches, and getting people and things all ship-shape and comfortable, and making no more sound than a cat. He never spoke; he moved people around, he squeezed in late ones, he […]
Death on the island
The dead of the First World War were tucked up in cemeteries designed and regulated by Those Who Know Best. Edwin Lutyens was one of the architects. Rudyard Kipling was in charge of what was inscribed. The result is, most people agree, fitting and splendid. It was achieved by denying the families of those who […]
Death by chocolate #bovo2014
From the Birmingham Post 25 May 2014: They’re the Oscars you definitely would be seen dead at – and there’s guaranteed to be stiff opposition for a gong. The inaugural Ideal Death Show, a top of the plots for the funeral industry, promises to be a celebration in Birmingham of everything that’s good about slipping […]
Owl you need is love
The natural death movement in the UK of the early 90s was very much a child of its time. Its parents were the natural childbirth movement and the environmental movement. The happy coupling resulted in the birth of twins: the DIY funeral and natural burial. The natural burial movement grew strappingly, but the DIY […]
MuchLoved launches multi-charity fundraising in memory
Example of a MuchLoved online charity giving page We’re always happy to promote the work of top people we really like. One of them is Jonathan Davies and his team at MuchLoved. MuchLoved is the pioneer of online charity fundraising at funerals. Enhancements to the website’s functionality means it’s now possible to fundraise for any number of charities. “This in […]
Why undertakers don’t post their prices
The following is by Charles Manby Smith writing in London Life magazine in 1853. Messrs. Moan and Groan know well enough, that when the heart is burdened with sorrow, considerations of economy are likely to be banished from the mind as out of place, and disrespectful to the memory of the departed; and, therefore, they […]
Less is more
ED’s WARNING: Very long, boring post today. Dig down into the history of any profession and you quickly hit dirt. Medicine, for example. Go back a couple of hundred years and your spade clunks up against a deplorable assortment of scoundrelly self-taught barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives and drug peddlers wreaking all manner of unscientific havoc on their patients. Or take dentists — tooth-drawers. […]
