Good afternoon — and welcome to Thursday’s Tribune.
The “duality of man” is the idea that every single human being has good and bad within them. Over the last five years, Sheffield funeral director Michael Fogg has made quite a name for himself with acts of high-profile altruism, including repatriating the body of comedian Freddie Starr and paying for the funerals following the tragic deaths of the “Shiregreen boys” Blake and Tristan Barrass. But is there another, darker side to Michael Fogg behind this public image? Dan Hayes reports.
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Some good news for anyone rooting for Mill Media (that’s our parent company! So hopefully you). In an era of endless layoffs, we are hiring. The plan is to double the size of our operations by the end of the year by hiring writers, editors, an advertising sales manager and a social and video producer. This has been covered by no less august an institution than the Financial Times this morning:
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Your Tribune briefing
🏗️ Planning permission has been lodged for several more buildings in and around Sheffield city centre. 128 apartments over two buildings will be built at 180 Shalesmoor (opposite the new West Bar Square development) while 234 flats will be built in a new 17-storey tower on Tenter Street. Also, a new image has been released which reveals how the massive new Capital & Centric development at the former Cannon Brewery in Neepsend will look when it is completed.
🚗 A Sheffield driver who thought her car had been stolen found out 12 months later that the council removed it for contravening temporary parking restrictions without telling her. When the letter finally did arrive, Madeleine Ruse, 22, was told the car would be destroyed if she didn’t collect it within two days and pay a fine and charges, including a £12-a-day storage fee, amounting to nearly £4,400 for the year (the council have now written the charges off).
📈 More evidence that Sheffield really is “a city on the up” (© Sheffield City Council) comes from The Guardian in this alternative guide to our city’s nightlife, cultural and food and drink scenes. The pieces covers the whole gamut of what Sheffield has to offer, from the internationally renowned DocFest (which starts next Wednesday) to the awe-inspiring new foodhall Cambridge Street Collective and the slightly more bijou bar and live music venue the Dorothy Pax.
Things to do
🎤 The Street Choirs Festival returns to Sheffield on Saturday morning, bringing 45 choirs to 13 venues across the city centre. This year’s event is the 40th anniversary of the festival, which originated from a street bands festival first held in Sheffield in 1984. After the choirs sing individually between 10am-12pm, there will be a mass sing at the Peace Gardens from 12.30pm-1pm. For a full list and map of when and where they will all be performing click here.
🧺 This Sunday sees the return of the ever-popular Nether Edge Farmers’ Market (12pm-4pm). As well as more than 50 stalls, all the local businesses will be open including Wickwire, Oxfam, Zeds Wholefoods, Kollective Kitchen, St Luke's Boutique, Bench, Nether Edge Bowling Club, The Byron, Edge Dental and Cafe#9. Entertainment will be provided by the Salvation Army, the Nether Edge Primary School Choir, Irish dancers Scoil Rince Nua and Blue Street Brass.
🛡️ Visit Sheffield Manor Lodge on Sunday for a day of medieval fun as the 15th century reenactment society Ferrers Household takes you back in time to the Wars of the Roses (10.30am-4pm). Activities on the day will include archery, jousting, dressing up and bill drills. There will also be craftsmanship displays at their forge, medieval food, clothing, leatherwork, armour, and an array of weapons. Tickets are priced £2.75 for children and £4.75 for adults.
Michael Fogg is Sheffield’s most famous funeral director. Does he also have a darker side?
By Dan Hayes
Michael Fogg knows how to play the media. Google his name and you’ll find dozens of local and national news articles about the “famous” Sheffield funeral director. He’s been doing the job almost two decades but it’s only in the last five years that his celebrity has begun to grow. In May 2019, he repatriated the body of Liverpudlian comedian Freddie Starr free of charge after the comedian died on the Costa Del Sol in Spain. At the time Fogg told the Liverpool Echo he wanted to do something for Starr as he “made him laugh” and didn’t want him to be “buried in a foreign land”. Just weeks later, Fogg also paid for the funerals of Blake and Tristan Barrass, the two teenagers from Shiregreen who died at the hands of their mother and father in a case that shocked the city.
Fogg’s high-profile altruism isn’t the only thing that has attracted press attention. Later in 2019, he appeared in The Sun after he was given a parking ticket while picking up the body of a child from Sheffield Children’s Hospital. “Freddie Starr’s funeral director slapped with parking fine while picking up six-year-old girl’s body at hospital,” read the headline. And in 2022, a piece in The Star based on a YouTube video he had made on the way to visit the family of a murder victim gave some insight into his political views. “If you take a life, I believe we should put them in one of (those vehicles) that carry sh*t around farms and take them up to Knowsley, where there’s a safari park, and in that safari park there are some lions,” he says in the video. “And I think if you take a life that’s what should happen. They should take you up to Knowsley Safari Park and throw you into the lion cage.”
This media savvy has garnered him 50,000 followers on Facebook, an unusually large amount for an independent funeral director in Sheffield (by way of comparison C & A Reed Funeral Directors on Duke Street have just 112). Expanding his social media presence onto YouTube in 2022, Fogg has been running the “Mick and Cheryl” channel, which currently has more than 2,500 subscribers. In the videos he talks about his life both as a funeral director and outside work. He posts videos of himself on the way to visit bereaved families, and picking up bodies from Sheffield Coroners’ Court. He also posts videos from his farm in the Yorkshire Dales, and talks about his health problems: diabetes, dyslexia and, in particular, mental health problems. The bio of his YouTube page reads: “Trying to deal with Depression and anxiety. Eaven (sic) Funeral Directors Have To Deal With Trolls On Social Media.”
Some of those videos have raised eyebrows among other funeral directors that The Tribune has spoken to. Several are filmed outside the Medico-Legal Centre (Sheffield’s main coroners’ court) on Watery Street in Upperthorpe while Michael Fogg is waiting to pick up a body. Nothing about this is illegal, but funeral directors in the city say it is quite unusual, and could be considered disrespectful. Meanwhile, other clips on the YouTube channel are concerning; in a video filmed in his car last March, he flippantly describes another driver using a racial slur, calling him a “p*** kid”.
I’ve been aware of Michael Fogg since 2019, when he hit the headlines over the Freddie Starr and Shiregreen boys cases in the space of a matter of days. I used to joke in the office of The Star where I then worked about Sheffield’s “celebrity undertaker” and what motivated him to get himself in the papers so often. In some ways you have to admire someone who is successfully playing the media game but there was also a part of me that found the way he elbowed his way into stories a little distasteful. In the years that have followed, his regular appearances in the media have continued. But I’ve also seen some posts on social media that suggest he’s not all he’s cracked up to be.
The Tribune has heard claims that Michael Fogg has been insensitive towards bereaved families, including by talking in graphic detail about their condition in death, and that he uses people’s loved ones’ ashes as a bartering chip to make sure he gets paid. We have also been told that he has “pursues vendettas” and regularly bad-mouths other Sheffield funeral homes on social media, and that he was even banned from one Sheffield crematorium because of his unpleasant behaviour. The Tribune contacted Michael Fogg Funeral Directors on Monday. The person who answered the phone said Fogg was “busy with a family” but took my number and said they would pass it on. “It’s up to him if he wants to get back to me,” they added. The following day, he called us and said that if we went ahead and published this story, he would take legal action.
Many complaints have been levelled at him in a Facebook group, “Awareness Stories and Support for Victims of Michael Fogg Funeral Directors”, which has more than 6,000 members. Started in 2020, the group has hundreds of messages from people who have had dealings with Fogg and his business. Some are positive — but most are not. In the group, people allege that he has been insensitive and bullying in his dealings with bereaved families. When we spoke to Michael Fogg, he described the allegations on the Facebook page as a “hate campaign” for which there was no evidence, and suggested the people posting on it were only interested in getting compensation.
