The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [118]
Mr. Ashton, whose establishment in Clapham Road is easily the most imposing building in the vicinity, is in some respects far from being a typical English undertaker. Whereas most of his colleagues are very small operators indeed, and generally perform this work as a sideline to some other trade, Mr. Ashton is the owner of nine London branches with a total volume of around twelve hundred funerals a year. Few English establishments could compare with this. Furthermore, he is among the tiny minority in England who routinely embalm all comers, and who might therefore have been expected to have absorbed at least some of the concomitant American approaches to the funeral. For these reasons, he seemed the ideal person from whom to seek clarification about likely trends in English funeral practices.
Mr. Ashton was a charming host. He led me through his entrance hall, conservatively decorated with neutral wallpaper and wine-red upholstered furniture, up the stairs to his private office, where we chatted over a cup of tea. I wanted to know about his own firm; something about the funeral trade as a whole; and, above all, the steps taken and procedures followed in the average English funeral.
Like a great many English undertaking concerns, Mr. Ashton’s is an old established family firm. It has been in existence for a hundred and fifty years, and he is of the fourth generation in the business. There is a growing tendency, he explained, for large firms to take over smaller ones, and this is how he acquired the nine establishments, all located in South London. The smallest of these averages about fifty funerals a year, the largest, three hundred. The clientele is mostly middle and lower class, and comes from South London. He runs his own coffin factory, in which he employs twelve factory hands, woodworkers who make the coffins. He also employs nine managers, nine drivers, an office staff of five, and three full-time embalmers. It takes four months to learn embalming, he told me; the minimum embalmer’s wage is 12 pounds a week (about $34) and “perks”—use of the car, etc. The managers do no embalming; their function is entirely separate.
There are in all Great Britain perhaps ten firms the size of Mr. Ashton’s, in the larger cities such as Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, London. In London, there are some 350 major firms, compared with 800 in New York, serving a population of about the same size. The larger firms all make their own coffins. There are a few wholesale coffin companies, which in many circumstances also furnish cars, embalmers, and all services for the smaller establishments.
Discussing the routines that follow between death and the funeral, Mr. Ashton positively exuded the no-nonsense, humbug-free attitudes so prized by this “nation of shopkeepers” in all their dealings, and in this particular calling so reassuring to find. I asked him what happens when a person dies in the middle of the night. American undertakers, to a man, take the greatest pride in rushing to the scene at no matter what hour; in fact, high on their list of “essential services”—and a major justification for their high charges—is maintenance of a twenty-four-hour operation, their ability to remove the deceased any time of the day or night within minutes of death. “I’d send along in the morning,” said Mr. Ashton. “Well, I mean unless the chap dies in the lavatory, or something, which did happen once, and then I had to go along at once, you see.” He explained that they are prepared to come in the night if necessary, “but we certainly don’t encourage it as long as the family is under control. Personally, I’m all for a quiet life and a little peace, and anyway people are more intelligent about such things these days. They realize that nothing can be done until the morning.” Death at home is anyway the exception. Eighty percent of deaths occur in hospitals. In that case, a relative goes to the hospital