Necropolis: London & it's Dead (26 page)

The Victorian funeral was a major rite of passage. Many individuals had more money spent on them dead than alive, a tendency sustained by the aspirational middle and working classes, obliged to organize an elaborate send-off, whatever the ruinous expense. Families verging on destitution earmarked money for funeral expenses through burial clubs, unscrupulous organizations run by undertakers and the licensees of the pubs where the meetings were held. These clubs, which preyed upon the self-respect of working-class Londoners, induced them to contribute massive premiums towards future funeral expenses. Of the £24 million invested in savings banks, at least a quarter was earmarked for funeral expenses.

Investigating the high cost of dying, Sir Edwin Chadwick discovered that over 200 such clubs existed in Westminster, Marylebone, Finsbury and Tower Hamlets, with membership ranging from one to eight hundred, and deposits from around £90 to £1,000. The undertakers profited from the funeral orders, and the
publicans got the custom. Chadwick even found stories of suspected infanticide: a child could be buried for £1, but it might be in four or five burial clubs, the multiple premiums adding up to ten times that amount. Up in Manchester, there was a common phrase: ‘Aye, aye, that child will not live; it is for the burial club.’
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The bereaved were easy pickings for the unscrupulous undertaker.
Cassell’s Household Guide
warned its readers to beware of ‘the dismal trade’:

If there ever is a time when people find it painful to attend to any business, it is when oppressed with grief at the loss of someone who was both near and dear to them. This is especially the case when that business relates to the funeral of the one whom we have lost from earth for ever…The consequence is that he too often falls into the hands of persons who take advantage of his affliction…The only means of guarding against this is to obtain in time sufficient knowledge of this subject, so that, if death should suddenly visit the household, it may not find the mourner unprepared.
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Chadwick estimated that, in the 1840s, London saw over 100 deaths a day; with more than 250 undertakers competing for the bodies. This did not have the effect of driving down prices. Instead, the undertaker made it his business to find out how much insurance money was available, and tailor the funeral to fit. Bereaved families were scarcely in a position to haggle. Chadwick estimated that in London alone, nearly £1 million a year ‘was thrown into the grave’.
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As a result, undertakers had not become any more popular since the trade was established in the late seventeenth century. A favourite music-hall song, performed by a leering ghoul in a crape-draped top hat, contained the enquiry: ‘Would you care to view the body before we screw down?’ His vocation made the undertaker a sinister figure, the personification of Death, little better than one of the dreaded Resurrection Men.

Dickens explores this theme in his caustic portrait of Mr Mould the undertaker in
Martin Chuzzlewit
. ‘Why do people spend more money upon a death than upon a birth? I’ll tell you why it is. It’s because the laying out of money with a well-conducted establishment, where the thing is performed upon the very best scale, binds the broken heart, and sheds balm upon the wounded spirit.’
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Money, says Mould, can provide four horses to each vehicle, velvet trappings, drivers in cloth cloaks and top-boots; the plumage of the ostrich, dyed black; any number of walking attendants, dressed in the first style of funeral fashion, and carrying batons tipped with brass; it can give him a handsome tomb; it can give him a place in Westminster Abbey itself, if he choose to invest it in such a purchase.

In an earlier novel,
Oliver Twist
, the young orphan is apprenticed to an undertaker, who sports a snuffbox shaped like a coffin. One night, he is taken home to the shop:

Oliver, being left to himself in the undertaker’s shop, set the lamp down on a workman’s bench, and gazed timidly about him with a feeling of awe and dread, which many people a good deal older than he will be at no loss to understand. An unfinished coffin on black trestles, which stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and death-like that a cold tremble came over him, every time his eyes wandered in the direction of the dismal object; from which he almost expected to see some frightful form slowly rear its head, to drive him mad with terror. Against the wall were ranged, in regular array, a low row of elm boards cut into the same shape; looking, in the dim light, like high-shouldered ghosts with their hands in their breeches-pockets; coffin-plates, elm-chips, bright-headed nails, and shreds of black cloth, lay scattered on the floor; and the wall behind the counter was ornamented with a lively representation of two mutes in very stiff necklaces, on duty at a large private door, with a hearse drawn by four black steeds, approaching in the distance. The shop was
close and hot. The atmosphere seemed tainted with the smell of coffins. The recess beneath the counter in which his flock mattress was thrust looked like a grave.
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Oliver’s brief apprenticeship with the undertaker begins soon afterwards, with a shocking dose of reality when he accompanies his master to measure up the body of a woman who has starved to death, and whose demented husband refuses to part with the corpse.

Oliver’s experience was very different from the top end of the trade. Funeral directors such as Banting, undertaker By Royal Appointment to the Crown, would organize the entire occasion. Their role was to ensure that a funeral was conducted with due propriety, that the hearse conveyed the body to the cemetery, that the ceremony passed off smoothly with a suitably uplifting interment, and that the weeping mourners were returned to their homes in the black funeral coaches. Funeral directors catered for all aspects of the event, as a description of Dottridge Brothers dating from 1878 illustrates:

The first room contained the funeral department, various palls, rich purple velvet. Bordered with gold fringe, interest with a text of scripture, HIS worked in gold thread in the centre…then the ‘wareroom, with metal ornaments’ including breastplates, handles, lid ornaments and crosses; then the drapery department with cloths, silks, cambrics, gloves, flannels, etc; then ‘a mysterious department reserved for wicker baskets’; [biodegradable coffins pioneered by the originators of the natural burial movement] then the dipping room, where metals were oxidized to improve their appearance; the burnishing room, where electroplating, coppering, bronzing was carried out; the lacquering room and the japanning shop, where women worked; the Coventry room, where women sat at sewing machines and pinked, goffered and embroidered the shrouds; then the general
metal working room for the draughtsmen, engravers, chasers, polishers, turners, etc; the stamping room, where presses of which the largest weighed three tons, embossed designs on tin and other metals.
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Dottridge Bros valued their ‘solemnity’ but boasted that they could have a coffin ‘of the most artistic finish’ ready for thirty shillings in seven minutes. And speed was of the essence. Embalming did not become commonplace until the 1920s, so funerals took place as soon as possible. Hence the mission statement in a coffin-plate manufacturer’s catalogue:

PROMPT ATTENTION GIVEN TO URGENT FUNERAL ORDERS
PLATES ENGRAVED AND DESPATCHED BY THE FIRST POST

An elaborate funeral was a mark of respect, but the cost caused understandable resentment amongst all but the wealthiest of clients. It took strength of character verging on eccentricity to hold out against such conventions. Bertram S. Puckle, author of
Funeral Customs
noted that:

There is no doubt that many undertakers exploited their clients, despite their best efforts ‘to break down these horrid conventions’. The scene of the following incident was a house in one of the ‘best parts’ of a well-known London suburb. A death had taken place in the family, and it had fallen to the lot of the eldest daughter to make the arrangements for the funeral. She asked for a plain elm coffin without any ornaments. ‘Elm!’ said the horrified undertaker. ‘But you can’t have anything but polished oak in a road like this!’
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There was more to organizing a funeral than buying a coffin. ‘There are the coffin-furniture manufacturers, the funeral robe, sheet, and ruffle makers, the funeral-carriage masters, and funeral
feather-men,’
Cassell’s
reminds us. ‘All these supply at first-hand the furnishing undertaker, who, in his turn, supplies the trade and the public.’
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The choice of coffin, and the type of funeral ceremony in which it featured, was dictated by price.
Cassell’s
lists eight types of funeral, ranging from £3 5s to £53.

The cheapest bought a modest ‘patent carriage, with one horse; smooth elm coffin, neatly finished, lined inside, with pillow &c. Use of pall, mourners’ fittings, coachman with hatband; bearers &c.’

A funeral costing £4.14s included:

Hearse and pair of horses; a mourning coach and pair; fifteen plumes of black ostrich-feathers, and complete velvet covering for carriages and horses; stout elm coffin, with inner lid, covered with black cloth, set with two rows all round of best black nails; lead plate of inscription, lid ornaments, four pairs of handles and grips, all of the best improved jet and bright black; tufted mattress, lined and ruffled, and fine cambric winding-sheet; use of silk velvet pall; two mutes with 2 gowns, silk hatbands, and gloves, eight men as pages and coachmen, with truncheons and wands, crape hatbands, &c.

For £53, one could obtain a spectacular example of the Late-Victorian funeral:

Hearse and four horses, two mourning coaches with fours, twenty-three plumes of rich ostrich feathers, complete velvet covering for carriages and horses, and an esquire’s plume of best feathers; strong elm shell, with tufted mattress, lined and ruffled with superfine cambric, and pillow; full worked glazed cambric winding-sheet, stout outside lead coffin, with inscription plate and solder complete; one and a half inch oak case, covered with black or crimson velvet, set with three rows round, and lid panelled with best brass nails; stout brass plate of inscription, richly
engraved four pairs of best brass handles and grips, lid ornaments to correspond; use of silk velvet pall; two mutes with gowns, silk hatbands and gloves; fourteen men as pages, feather-men, and coachmen, with truncheons and wands, silk hatbands &c; use of mourners’ fittings; and attendant with silk hatband &c.

The amount of ‘new goods’ added much to the cost of a funeral. Kid gloves, scarves, hatbands, most of which were retained by the mourners, had to be bought new. The clergyman officiating at the burial service required a fee, and then there was the cost of the grave:

All orders for interments are to be given at the office of the cemetery company, and all fees and other charges are to be paid at the same time…It is usually required by the directors of most cemeteries that notice shall be given and fees paid at least thirty-six hours previous to interment…if a vault or brick grave is required, four clear days’ notice must be given. Otherwise there is an additional charge for working at night.

Even the day upon which one was buried was an indicator of status. Saturday was traditionally the ‘aristocratic’ day for funerals. And although London’s Victorian cemeteries are haunts of ancient peace at present, in the mid-nineteenth century they were far from tranquil. Highgate alone saw over thirty funerals a day. Horseshoes clattered across the cobbles; sextons grunted with effort as they sank graves up to twenty feet deep in six foot-by-two foot shafts, without shoring, in imminent danger of suffocation; hammers rang on bronze as workmen set yet another pair of elegant bronze or copper doors onto a newly-built mausoleum. Tennyson himself wrote to Highgate Cemetery to complain bitterly about the noise levels during his brother’s funeral.

To be buried on a Sunday, the Christian day of rest, was regarded as vulgar, although it was the only option for poor families, who
would be working for the remainder of the week. During a busy period, Sundays would see up to seventy funerals at London’s biggest cemeteries, with teams of twenty gravediggers starting work at six o’clock in the morning. Sunday burials were not popular with undertakers. Frequently, there would be no hearse, and the coffin would simply be placed on the floor of a coach, beneath a pall. During cheap funerals, one horse would have to pull a coach bearing between eight and twelve people.

Interment in a brick vault is the most costly, and is only suited for those in comfortable circumstances. The price of such a vault at Highgate or Nunhead Cemeteries is £49 7s 6d; Brompton, £40 7s 6d;…for interments in the catacombs the lowest charges are, for Highgate or Nunhead, £17 10s; Brompton £12 12s…it must be remembered that additional expense attends interments in vaults and catacombs, owing to the regulations, which require lead coffins to be used.
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The hearse was the centre of the funeral procession. The term derives from a French word for ‘harrow’, a frame with metal teeth for breaking up the earth. Over the centuries, hearses became increasingly elaborate, with considerable craftsmanship expended on their construction. Once funeral processions had to travel considerable distances to the new burial grounds, some other form of transport was necessary. Bodies could no longer be ‘chested’ to the churchyard and borne through the lych-gate on the sturdy shoulders of family and friends. Instead, they had to be transported out of town by a special horse-drawn vehicle, with a series of carriages following at a stately pace. Once through the cemetery gates of a burial ground on the scale of Brompton or Kensal Green, there was a further distance to be covered to the cemetery chapel. By the 1860s, glass-sided hearses, with elaborately engraved patterns of flowers, became shop-windows for the undertaker’s art, with the coffin clearly visible within.