Over Your Dead Body: the history and future of how we deal with the dead

This blog is (mostly) about a book I've written about the business of death. 

It's partly based on my own experiences in the undertaking trade some years ago, and it looks at what happens when we die and afterwards, down the ages. It also has practical advice on arranging funerals and DIY undertaking, and the ecology of the different ways to go. 

It's full of bizarre facts from the worlds of history, science, warfare, religion and crime, from the middle ages to now, and it's peopled with strange characters who led truly remarkable lives, some of them prominent figures in history. There is also, surprisingly often, humour.

It takes in the after-death existence of pharaohs, kings and dictators, a recipe for a medieval funeral cake, the appearance of the first department stores - which served the huge Victorian industry of death and mourning - explains how 20,000 people in post-communist Poland were murdered by health carers because they were worth more dead than alive, and why we wear black at funerals.

The final section explores the future of what we do with the dead, and new methods of disposal set to replace cremation and burial, with an ecological audit of the different methods, old and new, plus Green burial and advice on DIY funerals.

Buy it online here, or if you're in the US, here, or as an e book here
or at Watkin's, Cecil Court or Neseblod Records, Oslo. 

Victorian Gothic and the Industrial Revolution of Death

From Over Your Dead Body: The History and Future of How We Deal with the Dead, Chapter XII  The History of Undertaking From 1087 to now - kings, commoners, crape, jet, plumes 

(photo ©jordanhoffman)

"Georgian funerals and mourning were relatively perfunctory in terms of the time, paraphernalia and, most importantly for undertakers, money involved.

But fashion moves in cycles, and as is the way of these things, as people get bored with one thing and turn to another, what they turn to next tends towards a diametrically opposite pole of fashion in relation to the old style.

The first signs of stirrings against the rule of Classicism appeared in the Regency interest in the bizarre, the exotic and the excessive – in fashion think of Beau Brummell, in architecture, the Brighton Pavilion.

The influence of the Romantic movement in literature led a general fascination with the melancholy and soulful, and this combined with the anticlassical tendency to produce Victorian Gothic.

In parallel with this, funerals and mourning began to be celebrated more thoroughly. And there was a lot more death around to celebrate, too.

Industrialised agriculture – Jethro Tull, Turnip Townsend, Compton’s Mule, Reaper McCormick – meant that a larger population could be fed.

The mechanisation of agriculture meant less people were needed to work the land, and people moved to cities to work in the industrialised production of things the increased population wanted.

The increased population supported by industrialised agriculture had more children, and being crowded together in cities and towns with poor sanitation and rudimentary medical provision meant more death from illness, and, there being almost no health and safety legislation for the factories they worked in, there were also more deaths from accidents there.

As the industrial revolution industrialised the scale of work-related accidents, it also created more possibilities for accidents in day-to-day life, at the same time industrialising the scale of those accidents – the coming of the railways meant railway crashes, rather than horse-drawn coaches losing a wheel for instance.

Iron hulls and steam power meant bigger ships with correspondingly greater loss of life when they sank. Boilers blew up, factory and foundry fires spread to burn down swathes of overcrowded housing, sparks from ships’ steam engines set fire to the rigging which still existed on early steam vessels, the flames spread to the dockside warehouses, and huge fires regularly engulfed whole areas of port cities.

Red Sky at Night, Newspaper Proprietor’s Delight

Alongside religion, music halls, and gin palaces, one of the favourite communal diversions of the Victorian public was going to watch fires, which took hours or days to burn out and were reported as ongoing entertainment in the daily press.

This was when undertakers really came into their own. The increased interest in death combined with the increased incidence of death led to greater attention to the marking of death. Funerals became more and more elaborate and expensive, with an ever-increasing staff of attendants and more and more paraphernalia and rigmarole, all of which had to be hired from or organised by the undertaker." 

Belief-beggaring Things That People Like to Tell Each Other

By which I mean stories that persist as adult fairy tales, "facts" that a moment's reflection will reveal as not just highly implausible, but impossible, including, but not limited to, so-called urban myths.

Here's one example that I mention in Over Your Dead Body, my book about the business of death  (see here for some architectural examples).

"Sex & Death and Art & Law

The possibly higher than average incidence of gayness amongst funeral directors seems, in my experience, to have escaped the prurient attention of the general public, perhaps because that attention seems to be so well focused on one prurient subject in particular.

There seems to be a well-established branch of the urban myth or factoid bank of apocryphal knowledge that everyone draws on that leads them to “know” of some kind of fourth or fifth-hand tale of an undertaker’s employee or morgue attendant being caught on the job with a stiff.

A bit like everyone seems to know of someone whose eye has come out of its socket (an industrial accident, or during surgery under local anaesthetic, etc) “so that they could see their own cheek” before it was put back. Or maybe this is a working class thing? Not talking of an eye being like a button on a bit of dangling thread, but “knowing” stories like this. But surely everyone tells each other stories like this when they’re at school?

Anyway, it’s rubbish. An eye isn’t on a bit of elastic, once it comes out it stays out. And it doesn’t come out very easily either; aside from the fact that the optic nerve isn’t elastic, there are muscles attached all round the edges.

And I’ve never heard any stories of necrophiliac funeral or hospital staff.

People dying on the job, I’ve heard of – reaching orgasm… like running for a bus… strain on the heart etc  – but the only Sex & Death story I can do is that the best pair of tits I’ve ever seen were on a dead woman in her 60s – no, that trivialises it – the finest pair of breasts I’ve ever seen.
 

It was a removal from a posh house on a fringe of Balmer’s territory that bordered on an upmarket area.

The first surprise was being led into a room on the ground floor, immediately after walking through the front door, that wasn’t made up as a bedroom – most people who die at home die in bed, or on the toilet (straining at stool… unaccustomed exertion… weak heart etc again).

The second was that the body was laid out on a big sideboard against the wall, like a buffet from a Peter Greenaway film – laying out is rare nowadays even in working class homes with rural Irish connections, and this was a middle class home, and the name on the jobsheet was English. And in a laying out, the body’s normally in a coffin on trestles in the middle of the room.

The body was draped with a sheet, and underneath it more surprises: the eyes were open, and the body was dressed in nothing but a pair of white panties. But the most remarkable thing of all was the sculptural perfection of the physique, like something carved in alabaster; most notably a pair of breasts of quite exceptional pert- and upstanding-ness.

Believe me, they would have been exceptional for any woman of any age lying on her back, but particularly, outrageously, in the case of one who was dead and in her mid sixties. Not large, but with absolutely no sag, and a perfect double-curvature, ogee profile like the cupolas of the Taj Mahal, and beautifully proportioned nipples. And before you ask, yes, they were real, there were no scars where any silicone bags had gone in."

 

Arizona execution and capital punishment in the US

(Disclaimer: This post is topical comment, and not from my book)

In 2014 a man who was sentenced to death in Arizona took two hours to die. This is an eye-witness account.

This sounds like a description of Cheyne-Stokes respiration.

Someone exhibiting Cheyne-Stokes respiration for any length of time would score low on the Glasgow Coma Scale, with a characteristic EEG pattern.

In which case, he wasn't conscious, he wouldn't have been suffering, and resuscitation attempts would have been abandoned if he'd been in hospital. So, not cruel, within the terms of the 8th Amendment to the US Constitution, and sadly, not unusual either; in fact this type of thing seems all too common in the ultimate commission of legal sanction in the US.

So, arguments about the death penalty being archaic and uncivilized aside (and the US must surely find the company it's in surprising if it considers which other countries still administer the death penalty), it's just puzzling that so many states administer it so inefficiently. 

Another point to consider is that in the event of anyone waking up from this condition (which does happen), it's almost certain they would have suffered more or less disabling brain damage.

When there are tried and tested methods that work reliably and almost instantaneously – the guillotine, the firing squad, even judicial hanging when it's done the British way and the neck is broken (but not strangulation, as often happens in the US) – it seems odd that so many US states use this harrowing (for the spectators if not the subject in this case) and unpredictable method. 

I understand it's only unreliable because they can't get drugs that are proven to work from pharmacy companies that have branches in the EU, because the EU does regard the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment, and EU companies are forbidden to aid or abet. And of course, giving legal advice on what would do the job quickly and reliably is ethically impossible for any properly qualified medical expert. 

But given that this is the state of play, why do some states persist in using unreliable combinations and doses of drugs that give unsatisfactory results like this?

It must be that:

1. They're either indifferent to the quality of the experience for the person dying, or actually prefer that the procedure should be lengthy and harrowing, for the sake of a theoretical deterrent effect, or

2. They choose this method over methods that are proven to work properly because they're worried about the PR associations of such brutal-sounding methods. 

In any case, it would seem political or PR considerations are taking precedence over humanitarian ones.

As for the supposed deterrent effect of the death penalty, that someone will think twice about doing something if they know they could die for it: Dr Johnson was a keen supporter of the death penalty until he saw pickpockets at work in the crowd watching a pickpocket being hanged.

Gangland Face Offs

Here's what I have to say about crime family funerals in Britain in Chapter XI of Over Your Dead Body, Underworld Undertakers (where it is followed by a section on gangland funerals in the US, mafia and street gangs):

"After the First World War, the ritual of the Victorian funeral with horse-drawn hearse was only observed by the urban working class and royalty, and by the 1960s it had more or less died out.

Likewise for state funerals – Winston Churchill’s casket travelled in a motor hearse when it wasn’t on a gun carriage, or, at one point, a police launch on the river Thames.

Nowadays it’s more or less only for urban working class royalty, or more precisely Cockney working class royalty: Pearly Kings and Queens.

Another branch of urban working class aristocracy that stuck with the old-fashioned funeral was also London-based. An aristocracy that ruled their manors with a fist of iron (or in Ronnie Kray’s case, a hoof of iron) – the crime families of Old London Town.

“No-one locked the front door” (in the limos in the cortege)

It looks like the tradition died with Reggie Kray in 2000, because Charlie Richardson went off in a motor hearse in 2012, even if it was a vintage Rolls Royce.

One of the limos in Charlie’s cortège had a floral tribute that spelled out “240DC” in white chrysanthemums.

This commemorated a WWII army generator of the type used to set off explosive charges which featured prominently in the evidence at the trial of Charles and his brother in 1966. It was apparently used to punish the taking of liberties, being attached to the victim’s genitals or nipples while a charge was cranked up.

The brothers always denied using torture, but it’s hard to see what the joke would have been in having a voltage-based floral tribute if that were the case. Where would the humour be in celebrating a perjury that was used to fit you up for 18 years inside?

Bruce Reynolds, mastermind of the Great Train Robbery, went off in a modern hearse and a wicker coffin, and without the benefit of any mailbag or locomotive floral tributes.

His funeral’s remembered more for Ronnie Biggs’ response to the press corps photographers at what turned out to be his last public appearance – an old fashioned two-fingered ‘V’ sign delivered with the back of the hand outwards.

(Note to younger readers and those from outside the UK and the Commonwealth: with the hand this way round, rather than ‘V for Victory’, this signifies ‘Fuck Off’. Interestingly, there are many photographs of Winston Churchill flashing this variation, always with a cheeky grin.)

Ronnie Biggs himself, most notorious of the train robbers, went for the same modern hearse/wicker coffin combo as Bruce Reynolds, and in an even bigger departure from tradition, people were asked not to wear black, although most of them did anyway.

The coffin was draped with the Union Jack and a Brazilian flag, with an old-fashioned barber’s pole Arsenal scarf and his hat laid on top, like a field marshal’s uniform cap and medals. He also had a New Orleans jazz band leading the hearse, and a Hell’s Angels motorcycle escort.

Rather than a cosh or a mailbag, the single floral tribute celebrated Ronnie’s appearance at Bruce Reynolds’ funeral, flashing a giant V sign as Ronnie’s last message to the world from the back window of the hearse.

Since “Mad” Frankie Fraser, in-gang electrical and dental practitioner for the Richardsons, chose the same modern Rolls-Royce hearse from the same firm as Charlie Richardson, and eschewed voltage or pliers-based floral tributes for a family-centric DAD/GRANDAD/FRANK hearsetop set, the last hope for an old-fashioned crime family horse-drawn funeral lies with Eddie Richardson, but the signs aren’t good  –  a depressingly modern Richardson trend has been set by Charlie and Frankie."

                                                                      

                                                                      photo telegraph.co

Going Out with a Bang

This is from Over Your Dead Body, my book about how we deal with death, how it became a multi-million dollar industry, and the history & future of how we deal with death (order from the US here).
In it I mention the problem of exploding bodies at ceremonial funerals, a not-uncommon result of poor understanding of the science involved in embalming, or until the advent of the arterial method, more accurately pickling:

"The method the Russians have used on Lenin, Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, and other personalities whose cult needed extending, along with the variant used for Eva Peron, is the Rolls Royce of modern embalming treatments. Although done in the service of totalitarian political regimes, it’s actually a continuation of the traditions for royal or state funerals dating from medieval times, when the body needed to lie in state for some time, and perhaps go on a farewell tour round the country.

This was originally performed by monks, the ones who normally did the butchering for the abbey. Methods varied, as did the effectiveness of the results, but best practice involved removing the soft organs, washing out the blood and body fluids, and using a pickling solution.

We can presume the pickling solution was made by the monks working in the kitchen (refectory?), using skills they had learnt preserving food. Typical ingredients include wine, vinegar or spirits, pickling salts and herbs and spices.

When it works, pickling can work very well indeed. A scientific study found nitrite pickling salts and alcohol were better than formaldehyde for embalming (Nitrite pickling salt as an alternative to formaldehyde for embalming in veterinary anatomy--A study based on histo- and microbiological analyses, Janczyk, P et al, 2011).

The science goes like this (but because the monks didn’t understand the science, their results were hit and miss, and the misses could miss by a very large margin, as we shall see):

Pickling salts in the right concentration could remove water from the body by osmosis: if the pickle is more concentrated than the solution inside the body tissues, there would be a gradient across the cell walls, and just as gravity tends to make things on gradients level off, osmosis would make water move out of the cells to dilute the stronger solution outside the body. (Osmosis means freshwater fish never stop pissing because they need to get rid of all the water that comes into their bloodstreams through their gills, blood being thicker than water.)

Dehydrating the body kills the bacteria that cause decomposition.

The pickle gets into the body by diffusion, which works in the other direction to osmosis: because the solution in the cells is less concentrated, molecules of pickle move across a concentration gradient to where it’s less crowded on the other side of the skin and tissue cellwalls.

The pickle is too acid for the bacteria to live in, and ethanol (alcohol) is poisonous, as are chemicals in the herbs and spices."

Failure to understand what they were up to led to a premature and unwelcome climax to the proceedings on a number of occasions, the first recorded being at the funeral of William the Conqueror, king of England and France, in 1087. 

The last was, incredibly, in 1958. 

Pope Pius XII didn't want his body messed about with, so there was no post mortem and no arterial embalming. Instead, he arranged beforehand with his doctor that he would do it, using a technique supposed to be identical with that used for Jesus, invented (and so far untested) by a Professor Nuzzi, an embalmer from Naples. Dr Galeazzi-Lisi wasn't himself qualified as an embalmer, and, from the results, Professor Nuzzi's qualifications weren't worth much either. 

The procedure involved putting the body in a big plastic bag with herbs, aromatic oils and spices: boil-in-the-bag pontiff. 

Unfortunately, the weather was unusually hot, even for a Roman summer, and since there was no refrigeration involved, it turned out to be not far off actual boil-in-the-bag (and yes, the papal flesh really did 'simply fall off the bone'). And Jesus wasn't dead as long as Pope Pius was before his funeral. 

The result was that gases produced by anaerobic putrefaction caused the body to explode  in its coffin while lying in state at St John Lateran cathedral, only four days after Pius' death, growth of the anaerobic ('without oxygen') bacteria having been promoted by the sealed plastic bag.

Shakespeare Buffs May Just Be Wrong

On my other blog http://robocono.blogspot.com/2014/05/and-ive-just-changed-name-of-book-to-in.html I mention the problems of avoiding retread titles for books (or anything else, I suppose), given that there are only a certain number of ways to pithily sum up your oeuvre, and a similarly finite collection of widely-recognised allusions and associations to be drawn upon.

Shakespeare and the Bible usually come up trumps, but my 'Biblical' title, via the Order of the Burial of the Dead, from my copy printed on waxed paper in prudent anticipation of outdoor use in the UK, was already taken, and Shakespeare only uses the word undertaker once, apparently (see "Shakespeare Oddly Reticent").

It's in Othello, when Iago volunteers to kill Cassio by saying "Let me be his undertaker".  

Notes to the text usually explain that was in the sense of undertaking to do a job, and that undertakers in the modern usage of the word didn't appear until the late 17th century. But in that case, wouldn't Iago say something like "Let that be my undertaking"?

In fact, undertakers as we understand the word began to appear around the time Othello was published in 1603. 

They diversified from making coffins to providing funerals for people who had money but no coat of arms. 'Wealthy' had been synonymous with 'aristocratic' until the dissolution of the monasteries and the expansion of trade with the new world created a new merchant class of commoners with money.

They showed they'd arrived by splashing out on big houses, flash clothes, jewellery, and everything else that money could buy, but they couldn't have posh funerals, because they were done by the College of Arms (as in coat of arms). You had to have heraldry for the heralds at the College of Arms to organise your funeral. 

Fortunately, the dissolution of the monasteries also meant that monks were no longer available to deal with royal and aristocratic bodies for heraldic funerals, so the heralds got the people who made the coffins to extend their brief. Instead of just delivering a coffin, they prepared the body, put it in the coffin, and looked after it until the burial.

And unlike the heralds, they didn't care whether you had a coat of arms. They would undertake to provide a funeral for anybody that could pay for it, and did.

So I think it's possible Shakespeare was using the word in its modern sense, and that perhaps it only crops up once because it was so new.