Overall, however, my time as an assistant funeral director proved relatively uneventful, if educational. I was surprised when I learned that one of our main duties was the collection of dead bodies from people’s homes, known as ‘removals’.
by Peter Everett
When I embarked on my journey into the world of death as a trainee mortuary assistant at University College Hospital, I needed to find a second job. The mortuary position was voluntary, and therefore unpaid, and so my savings soon ran low. One day, a funeral director arrived at the mortuary and announced that he had sacked an assistant for stealing a ring from a body. I stepped forward, offering myself to fill the vacant role, and the following Monday I started work as an assistant funeral director.
My new boss, Victor, was the director of a small firm based in North London, and his premises were like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. The basement, which acted as staff room/workshop/coffin storage, always had a fire going in the winter months. The company consisted of just three persons: Victor the director, a middle-aged, black-haired man who dressed impeccably in suit and tie on all occasions, save for the funerals for which he’d don the black funeral suit; Terry the driver, a pale-skinned man in his early thirties with an East End accent and a ready supply of roll-ups; and me.
We had one hearse. Pall-bearers and extra cars were hired in as needed. My first job was to visit a local carpenter’s shop and collect two sacks of sawdust, which was used in the lining of the coffins. I had a long list of duties, and first and foremost among these was fitting out the coffins with ‘inside sets’. This meant filling the base of the coffin with sawdust and stapling a silk sheet with a ruffled top to the sides before stuffing a silk pillowcase with yet more sawdust. Then, using wax, I’d polish the wood to a high shine before screwing the handles into place; brass for burials, plastic for cremations. Once this was done, I used a special machine to engrave the deceased’s name and dates of birth and death onto a plaque (again, brass for burial, plastic for cremation). I enjoyed the work, preparing each coffin in the glow of the fire while Victor or Terry regaled me with stories about their adventures in the funeral business.
It wasn’t long before I had my own stories to tell, suffering as I did the trials and tribulations of everyday life in a funeral firm. We were once on our way to a cremation in Golders Green when the hearse broke down. This not being the best time to call the AA, Victor and I had to get out and push. The hill was so steep and the cemetery so far away that we had to recruit the fitter members of the funeral party to pitch in. Victor gave them a discount.
On another occasion, we delivered a body to a funeral that was taking place at the Great Northern Cemetery (today it’s known rather less grandly as New Southgate Cemetery). A thunderstorm was raging and torrential rain had turned the cemetery into a swamp. As we carried the body from the hearse to the grave, and the waiting mourners gathered under their umbrellas, Terry lost a shoe in the thick mud but limped on stoically. Once we got the coffin to the grave, we placed it on the two planks covering the hole, ready to lower it down, which was when one of the planks snapped and poor Victor disappeared with the coffin into the watery grave with a splash. By the time we pulled him out, he looked like the Swamp Thing.
Overall, however, my time as an assistant funeral director proved relatively uneventful, if educational. I was surprised when I learned that one of our main duties was the collection of dead bodies from people’s homes, known as ‘removals’. I’d assumed that someone else did that and we prepared the bodies and performed the funerals, but removals proved to be a core part of the service. We performed this duty about two or three times a day.
One day, we were called to collect an old lady who had died in her sleep in her council flat in Camden. Crowds were gathered outside; she was a popular lady and everyone wanted to pay their respects. Over and over again I heard people say how sorry they were that she had died; how lovely she’d been; how she’d never hesitated to help a friend in need; how she’d worked tirelessly for her community, helping old folk who’d fallen on hard times, always baking a cake for the church raffle and tending the community gardens. The deceased lady’s face was a picture of serenity and happiness and I understood then that hers had been a life well-lived.
Our very next call was to Bishop’s Avenue in Hampstead. Bishop’s Avenue was known as ‘Millionaire’s Row’ (today it’s ‘Billionaire’s Row’) with good reason. Homes sell for tens of millions of pounds and residents include sheikhs, princes and presidents. We had been summoned to a house which was the size and style of a Greco-Roman temple, and we followed a tall, sepulchral butler up a marble staircase to the master bedroom, passing works of art hanging on the wall, as well as statues, urns and mosaics.
The deceased had, like the little old lady, lived alone (save for his staff) and had died in bed. But his face was drawn, pinched with deep lines turned down at the mouth. Also present, apart from the butler, who gave me the impression that he couldn’t wait to leave, were the man’s son and daughter, both in their middle age. They resembled their father, both having the same downturned mouths. They were discussing their father’s estate; in particular how soon they could meet their solicitor to make the necessary arrangements for the reading of the will. We took the frail body downstairs and placed it into the back of the hearse, which was when Victor realised that he’d left his wallet on the bedside table. He’d taken it out to present the man’s son and daughter with his card. I dashed upstairs to retrieve it but, upon hearing voices coming from the bedroom, I hesitated. As I raised my hand to knock, I heard the son utter the phrase: ‘miserly old bastard’, suggesting to me that while the man had obviously done well materially speaking, his life had perhaps not been as rich as the little old lady’s.
In this line of work, one can’t help but wonder about why people choose to spend their time on earth engaged in certain pursuits, particularly in the pursuit of money. This thought would strike me most often while I was in the mortuary, perhaps refrigerating the body of an 85-year-old former road sweeper next to a 45-year-old stockbroker, both having died of heart attacks. Rich or poor, the same end awaits us all; everyone shares the same mortuary refrigerator. Similarly, at the crematorium (our local was Golders Green which was, ironically, owned by a tobacco company), rich and poor alike went up in smoke.
While working with Victor and Terry, I noticed that the ‘happiest’ funerals were often hosted by the poorest families. It was wonderful to see relatives really wanting to give their loved ones the best possible send-off, to the extent that they would themselves suffer financial hardship as a result. These were genuine celebrations of life, and, even though we could see the family, friends and neighbours had already broken the bank to give the deceased the best possible funeral, a £5 note would without fail be pushed into my hand, to give the funeral team a thank-you drink.
Wealthy funerals could be spectacular, with a dozen cars and a hearse carrying flowers while the coffin was borne on a glass carriage, drawn by four black horses, but these were invariably dull affairs where people seemed to have come for the sake of appearance and seemed to me to be going through the motions. No one wealthy ever tipped.
Now, I don’t mean to say that the pursuit of money is the root of all misery, but I do know from bitter experience that some ways of spending your highly limited time here on earth are better than others. All too often, the pursuit of money or power or a career sends us headlong into a strange maelstrom of our own making. Trust me, life can be over before you know it. It pays to stop and take a good look around every once in a while, to see where you’re headed. Because of the stress I was under while at Southwark, I was bound for an early grave. Luckily for me, I managed to transform life from something I dreaded into something I loved.
As to what’s ‘better’ exactly, I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. It’s hard to imagine anyone who lived a more productive and enjoyable life than Professor Keith Mant. He died of natural causes at his home in Walton on Thames on 11 October 2000, aged 81. The prof loved people (dead or alive), and every year he invited students to spend Christmas with him at his family home where he made a great scene of expertly dissecting the turkey, much to the horror of his beloved wife Heather. He met Heather in occupied Germany, where she was teaching in a British Forces school. They had three children and were married for 42 years before she died in 1989. After the prof retired, shortly before my breakdown, he continued to lecture and occasionally accepted independent commissions as a pathologist. But he also got to spend lots more time with his orchids (he won prizes at flower shows) as well as trout fishing.
Similarly, Dr Iain West also packed a great deal into his life, a life he lived with great energy and enthusiasm. He died much younger however, aged just 57 in 2001, by which time he was arguably Britain’s leading forensic pathologist. He had also taken over Professor Mant’s role as head of Guy’s Forensic Pathology Unit. His achievements were many: he was president-elect of the British Association in Forensic Medicine, and an active member of the Home Office policy advisory board for forensic pathology. In my opinion, his full-speed do-it-all-now approach to life (overworking, drinking, smoking and partying late into the night) shortened his life (he died of lung cancer). He was survived by his wife (a fellow pathologist) and two children from two marriages. In the years before his death, he bought a manor house in Sussex, and with the same determination he brought to his career, he set about restoring its huge garden, while at the same time developing a fascination with rifles and a love of wild-boar hunting.
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Two extraordinary lives, lived to the full by very different characters with significantly different lifespans. But who could say in this instance that one life was lived better than another? If Dr West had not worked and played so hard, he might have lived longer, but then he would have been a different person and perhaps less happy as a result. He certainly managed to cram a lot into just 57 years.
But then there was Professor Hugh Johnson, who died inside the Old Bailey from a massive heart attack, at the same age as Dr West, just 57 years old. He had lived his life, at least from my perspective, in a near constant state of furious alertness. His life was full of remarkable achievements and he was undoubtedly one of the nation’s greatest pathologists, but I didn’t ever get the impression that he was actually enjoying the experience very much. He had never really got over losing the Chair of Forensic Medicine at the London Hospital to Taffy Cameron and, when I look back at my memories of him, he always seemed to be angry or frustrated. While the PM might have found that Professor Johnson died of a sudden heart attack due to coronary atherosclerosis, I would suggest that the real cause was the stress he put himself under.
When I come to consider my own odd little life, I ask myself, knowing what I know now, what could I have done differently? What, if I could, would I change? The obvious answer is that I should have resigned from Southwark much sooner than I did, but that’s easy to say with hindsight. When you’re in that moment, caught up in all the confusion, the stress and anxiety, it’s hard to see clearly beyond your immediate situation and to recognise that, no matter how bad things seem right now, you can change your situation. In no time at all, whatever’s causing you seemingly unbearable stress will seem like ancient history.
Like Professor Mant, Professor Johnson and Dr West, I loved pathology. I loved working with the dead and I would choose to do it all again – going about it a little differently this time of course. Even so, as strange as it might seem, I’m grateful for my breakdown because it taught me to stop, look around and assess my life’s trajectory. And that’s the best advice I can give you – to take a moment to really look at where you’re headed. A good way of doing this is to try writing your own obituary. Write about your life up to the present day and then continue describing what you would like to happen from now until the day you pass through the mortuary doors.
My breakdown has also taught me to recognise when exhaustion is drawing near. When it does, I think back to my time recovering in Suffolk, walking with Wendy and my son under those huge and peaceful skies. Then I remember what’s most important to me, and I step back from the precipice. This approach, as simple as it seems, has brought me 32 years of happiness (so far).
AND FINALLY, LEST my gruesome tales of mortuary life have disturbed you, please rest easy. Your body is today in good hands. The UK’s mortuaries are now housed in modern, well-lit and temperature-controlled buildings, with proper operating theatres and with qualified and vetted staff dressed in full protective clothing. Thefts and mix-ups are extremely rare. In 2017 I was commissioned by Al Jazeera TV to find out whether UK human organ harvesting still existed. Despite my best efforts, I’m delighted to report that I could find no corruption whatsoever. The dead finally rest in peace.
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