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.

Telling Detail Captured by The Eye of The Camera

I've just noticed something in the photo of the undertaker's shop window in the previous post - if you look through the door into the shop, you'll see a box of tissues underneath a table light (which is probably never turned off), with what is almost certainly a condolences book in front of it.

Brand identities

Here's an English undertaker's shop window, followed by my thoughts on what we might call undertaking corporate style from Over Your Dead Body:

"A persistent whiff of Victoriana often surrounds the appurtenances and procedures of undertaking.

Take the traditional window display. The look is Victorian High Church Gothic with fumed oak, stained glass and polished brass, or the more austere Arts & Crafts look with blonde oak and bright metal fittings. Traditional contents include cinerary urns, flower holders for graves, and photos of horse-drawn hearses. And when this is replaced by dried flower arrangements flanked by corporate slogans and logos, in a cack-handed attempt to make the front office look like an estate agent’s, the changes usually stop at the STAFF ONLY signs.

(The best window display I ever heard of was the Co-op’s in Blackburn. It was a tropical fish tank with lumps of coal sitting on crushed coal on the bottom, with black fish and a purple light at the back.)

Other modernising efforts will also be limited to what meets the public gaze - shiny grey two-piece suits instead of black jackets & waistcoats with grey pinstripe trousers, and a Volvo or Mercedes hearse instead of a Daimler."

Curious Swedish Customs

Speaking of Skogskyrkogården (see previous post), one of my visits there included a behind-the-scenes tour not available to members of the public. On it, I was surprised to discover that there is a huge mortuary in the basement, a gigantic white space with trolleys covered with sheets standing in it, in which perspective seems to fade into a snowfield-style horizonless whiteout reminiscent of the overexposed look that Lucas used in his first film, THX 1138.

Dozens of bodies are stored there awaiting disposal, almost always by cremation - an undertaker in Stockholm that I know only does perhaps two burials a year. Burial is prohibitively expensive in Sweden unless you have a family plot with room left in it.

It's America, Australia, Britain and France where undertakers look after the body - and the countries of the former British and French colonial empires? If anyone knows other places where undertakers take charge of the body and store it on their premises, please leave a comment here. 

Everywhere else, they just do the paperwork and put the body in a box before the funeral. The body is stored in a hospital morgue, and the hospital does the embalming, too.

The odd thing about Sweden, though, is the amount of time they leave between the death and the funeral, at least three weeks, and not unusually, two to three months.

They're usually surprised when I tell them everyone else does it a lot quicker (Jews and Muslims being the winners here), and I've been given two explanations for this:

1. "It's because people might have a long way to travel." - And then again, they might not, and people might have to travel a long way everywhere else, too, but they don't arrange the funeral months after the death.

2. "It's historical: over most of Sweden, for most of the year, the ground's frozen too hard to dig a grave. That's why Swedish graveyards have a special house that was used to store the bodies until summer came." - Sounds more like it, and yes, Swedish churchyards do often have a charnel house. We have them in old churchyards in Britain, too, but ours were used to store bones which had been removed to make room for more burials.

There's a problem, though - it gets just as cold in Norway, but they don't do that there. They just light a bonfire on top of the plot to thaw the ground before the grave is dug. 

So if any anthropologists or experts on Swedish funeral customs know a better explanation, please post a comment.

THX 138 (George Lucas)

Most Beautiful Cemetery

All cemeteries have a kind of rus in urbe appeal - open space, greenery, mature trees - and then there's the added appeal of statuary and monumental stonework. Also, paradoxically, they're usually full of life. 
Excepting the over-neat mown-and-clipped-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life municipal cemetery with gravestones conforming to council regulations, most cemeteries are ecological enclaves for insect and wildlife, pockets of the nearest thing to actual countryside in or near towns. 

Considering the actual countryside itself isn't that much like countryside anymore, more swathes of pesticide-drenched monocultures with no hedges or margins, cemeteries are often the nearest thing to country in the country. And they aren't just parks without the football, children and dogshit in towns, either; they're a network of nature reserves.

So they're all beautiful in one way or another, but which is the prettiest that you know?

Let's have some tips and recommendations, places to look out for when we visit new towns, or unsuspected gems in our own area.

My tip might be a bit of a way off for most of you, but it's actually worth a trip in its own right. Skogskyrkogården in Stockholm.

Pronounced skog-shirker-gordon, "The Woodland Cemetery" is a Unesco world heritage site, and it deserves to be. It's an immaculate marriage of landscape and architecture, designed by Gunnar Asplund (one of the inventors of Swedish Modernism) and Sigurd Lewerentz.

The first time I went there it was covered in snow, and the only other people we saw all day were Marc Newson and his mate. He's an Australian designer (Marc Newson, not his mate. But I suppose his mate might have been an Australian designer, too, for all I know).

It's like a giant landscape sculpture that you walk around and in, where everything is perfectly placed and balanced. If you're in Stockholm, make the effort. You won't be sorry, it's only 15 minutes from town on the green tunnelbana line and it's got its own station.

First Few Pages

"More than 20 years ago I worked for a funeral firm in a big city. I always said I’d write a book about it, that the first sentence would be “You always know it’s a bad one when the copper’s stood outside.” and that the title would be “Confessions off an Undertaker”.

The memories of events that I included are those that have stayed with me; they are even now still extremely vivid, distilled from my experiences by the passage of time and retained in all their immediacy in pin-sharp recall. They are all in various ways remarkable by normal standards of existence, but not at all strange in the world they are part of.

But this turned out to be much more than a collection of stories about undertaking.

The firm I worked for no longer exists (but I have changed the names to protect the innocent - and the guilty - nonetheless), and as I interviewed people working in the trade now to check the details, somehow that process spread to include Europe, and then America and Australia.

As interesting facts discovered along the way led to other interesting facts, and brief digressions became whole sections, it expanded from a personal account of what undertakers do, to include their history, and how they came to take over something we used to do for ourselves, the science and ecology of death today, and the future of how we deal with the dead."

Over Your Dead Body looks at what happens when we die, and what happens afterwards, down the ages. I think the most interesting part is the final section, which is about the new technologies set to replace burial and cremation.

I’ve written it so that it works as something you read from start to finish, but also as something you can dip in and out of wherever you like.

It begins by giving you an idea what it's like to deal with the dead day to day.

Here's the first few pages:

I

A Day in the Life

“You always know it’s a bad one when the copper’s stood outside.”  (instead of sat inside having a read of The Sun).

It was a flat above a shop, with very steep stairs right behind the front door, and the flies started as soon as you got in. Upstairs they were so bad that they were crawling up your nose and in your mouth. The smell was atrocious, the kind that gets in your hair and clothes, and that you can’t wash off.

The room was knee-deep in empty beercans, so it was difficult to get through the door, and the cloud of flies was so dense it was difficult to see across the room. Somewhere in there was what the technician at St Dunstan’s called a jolly green giant.

I won’t go into the details of getting it out – we had to use a shell instead of the stretcher. It made you think, though. It was a woman, probably middle-aged from the amount of flesh on her (old people are, as you may have noticed yourself, usually skinny; handy in this line of business). You can’t tell from the clothes - counterfeit designer sports gear is a uniform that transcends age among the drinking classes in that part of town.

Had she got a final stock of booze in, put it to hand, and buried herself in a drift of White Diamond as she drank herself to death? Or was this some kind of interior decoration quirk? I’ve noticed teenagers like to blu-tack cans or beermats to their walls, girls as well as boys, these days.

Jobs like that stand out, of course, but really they’re all extraordinary, because working in the funeral business, you’re involved in something that no-one knows about and no-one talks about.

 Death is, as they say, the last taboo – but the endlessly repeated corollary to that endlessly repeated cliché, that death is for us what sex was to the Victorians, is not quite true.

Everyone, even Victorians, thinks about sex, and most have personal experience of it on a regular basis, but death now really is kept out of sight and, if not out of mind, as much as possible physically separated from life.

 It seems ironic now, but I took the job because I thought I’d get funny stories out of it. A friend of mine had worked as an embalmer when he was a medical student, and according to him it was one long round of pranks and practical jokes from day one:

Two bearers eyeing a body and a coffin, shaking their heads and saying repeatedly to a new recruit

“’E won’t go in there, oh no, ... E’ll never go in there …”,

then, finally,

“SO WE’LL ‘AVE TO PUT ‘IM IN!”

They told me at the Job Centre that they didn’t get many adverts from undertakers, and that this one specified previous experience essential.

That was a load of bollocks, and I could have spared myself the effort of inventing a past as a casual bearer in another time and another place, because after they’d hired me it dawned on them that everyone else there was a midget compared to me (I’m six foot one). Which made the bearing very undignified, not to say precarious, my shoulder being about 8 inches higher than the other three under the coffin.

You’d think they might have thought of that beforehand. Anyway, after that they got in a young lad who didn’t even pretend to any previous, who turned out to be what I can only describe as a ghoul.

Tim was a gangling streak of piss with prominent knobbly joints and a prominent knobbly adam’s apple and a bad haircut. I suspect he may have even have been ESN, and I certainly had plenty of time to investigate that suspicion, because of course they paired him up with me.

It didn’t help with the bearing, though. What happened was that the coffin took a pronounced foot-down attitude (the head is always at the back) and almost the entire weight was thrown onto the two at the front, which didn’t make me and Tim very popular, however much we pointed out it wasn’t our fault.

Having us at the front was out of the question. Experiment proved that aside from looking even more absurd, the centre of gravity being nearer the back meant that the coffin slid in that direction uncontrollably as soon as we set off.

We were forced to adopt a peculiar gliding walk with our knees bent and our backs crouched. This, coupled with the fact that professional bearers walk with hands clasped in front (not gripping the other side of the coffin, except going up or down steps, at least at funerals), made us look like Uriah Heep in stereo.

On his first day I was called into the boss’s office, introduced to the lad, and was told they’d hired him because he was the same height as me.

“And you’ll be taking him out and showing him the ropes.”

I’d only been there a month or two, and I was passing on the torch of knowledge as it had been passed to me, like a baton in a relay race. A torch that was burning dimly, my instructor having had no great enthusiasm for the job, and me even less.

I was down to drive the van all day, so no funerals, just shuttling bodies to and fro, from shops to and from embalming. Which might be why I’d been landed with him – you don’t want someone who’s never done the job before on a funeral straight off.

I waited while he was given a second-hand polyester suit that didn’t fit, a mac whose sleeves were three inches too short, and a pair of black leather gloves from the wardrobes in what was obviously once a bedroom, presumably when this was the family home above the shop.

Hand in glove in glove

Tim liked the gloves. When we were sat in the van later, him proudly stroking the sleeves of his uniform as if it was from Savile Row, I watched as he took some disposable latex gloves from the box on top of the dashboard and then put them on over the leather ones that he was already wearing, so that his hands looked like packets of cling-wrapped dates.

I looked at him, baffled, while he grinned shyly.

“What have you done that for?”

“I dunno. It feels good.”

We had just collected a body from the downstairs back room and put it on the van (for some reason bodies are always put ‘on’ the van, not ‘in’). I got the impression he was fulfilling a long-held ambition when he first handled a body. It was, predictably, someone’s grandad, the funeral business’s number one customer. Men are supposed to die before their wives because they’re worn out by a life of work and stress. I think it’s just genetic – men’s bodies wear out quicker. I bet that man’s wife had just as hard a (pre-welfare state working class) life as he did.

Tim had had an almost touching look of childlike wonder on his face as he prodded the body’s flesh and manipulated its hands.

“It’s not what I thought at all. It’s all soft and floppy like a big white rubber doll.”

A big cold white rubber doll. At least this one was dressed and ready to go. On my first day I had been sent into the same downstairs back room with a big carrier bag full of clothes that I’d been told to put on someone’s grandad.

I was quite sure that this was the first of that endless round of pranks and practical jokes that I was expecting. After all, I’d read ‘The Loved One’ and ‘The American Way of Death’, so I knew they had special shirts and suits that had a slit up the back for dressing corpses in their coffins.

My new oppo, Dave, tasked with showing me the ropes, in the same way that I would be with Tim, leaned against the wall smoking a roll-up and looking out of the window. I looked in the bag. Everything was in there, all neatly folded: shoes & socks, a three-piece suit, shirt & tie, even singlet & Y-fronts and, on top of the pile, a hankie. He won’t be wiping his nose where he’s going, I thought.

“Is this an open–coffin job, then?” I said, trying to go along with the joke.

Dave shrugged and stared at a bit of tobacco he’d just picked off his lip. After a bit of waiting for him to laugh and say “Gotcha!”, I tried again.

“But this is a joke isn’t it? I don’t really have to dress him up in this lot do I? Who’s going to see it?”

Dave shrugged again and said nothing. At that point Maurice, the head of the firm, who’d just given me the bag upstairs in his office, stuck his head round the door. He’d obviously been listening.

“Something wrong, Bob?”

I wasn’t sure how to play this – if it was a joke, then the boss was in on it.

“Do you really want me to put these clothes on him? Aren’t there special suits for this that fasten up the back?”

But Maurice obviously hadn’t read Evelyn Waugh or Jessica Mitford.

“This is someone’s grandad, Bob. The family have given us these clothes because they want him to be buried in them.”

“So do I cut them up the back to get them on?”

Maurice frowned, and looked at me as if he wasn’t sure if I was trying to wind him up.

“No. They want him to be wearing these clothes, so that’s what he’ll be wearing, not a load of rags.”

I realised it wasn’t a good idea to point out that unless they opened the coffin and took him out to look round the back, there was no way they could know.

“Ah, I see. Right, okay then.”

Maurice gave me a long hard look, then left. I heard him go back upstairs, and realised I hadn’t heard him come down. I got the impression I hadn’t done myself too many favours there.

Grandad was wearing a shirt, cardie, polyester slacks and slippers. Getting those off was hard enough, and Dave made no move to help.

Although this was very obviously the body of an old man in his late 70s with grey hair and a moustache, fit-looking, in an ex-army kind of way, I found I was unable to rid myself of the impression that it was a cunningly-made lifesize wooden doll covered in silicone, or, yes, rubber.

I couldn’t help wondering what kind of job I’d got myself into while I was trying to wrestle the pair of newly-laundered Y-fronts over his wedding tackle. The shoes were surprisingly difficult, too, because his ankles were so floppy, until I stopped trying to hold his ankle and worked out that I had to cup his heel in one hand and cram the shoe on with the other.

I realised I’d been trying to use the same technique as you would with a child, who, however unhelpful, has ankles that don’t wobble all over the place.

Which gave me a marketing idea for Clarks. You remember Start Rite shoes for toddlers? Well, they could look after the other end of the market with End Rite – biodegradable and inflammable, with velcro up the back of the heel to get them on, and a clip for morgue toetags.

I was never asked to dress a body again, nor did I hear of any of the other chauffeur bearers being asked to do it. It was normally done, I think, by the embalmers, who also did the make-up."