Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It

by Craig Taylor

  That was a really satisfying job. That’s the kind of job that you join the Ambulance Service to do. It just feels fantastic when something like that happens.

  At the end of a job there are three main types of fags, really. There’s the euphoric fag when you’ve just delivered a baby or when you’ve just saved someone’s life you really didn’t think was going to make it, or you hear good news about a patient that you brought in earlier who’s walked out of hospital. There’s the run-of-the-mill fag, which you don’t really need but you’ve taken someone with a cough into hospital and you’re a bit bored and you want to smoke.

  Finally, there’s the fag to stop you crying. That’s an important fag. I’ve only ever cried once at work and that was after a dead baby that we couldn’t save. So we took it into Ealing. I was just kind of keeping it together. I was quite new at the time and working with someone that was also on my course, so neither of us had been there before. I booked the baby in and I just kind of went and lit up and that was … yeah, that was a pretty grim fag.

  JOHN HARRIS

  Funeral director

  In his office at his family’s funeral home in Canning Town, there are two editions of The American Way of Death on the bookshelves. The soft ring of the landline mixes with the clattering bell of his mobile phone. It’s a clear, sunny day. We walk around outside and he turns on the small Chinese fountain near the stand of bamboo.

  My great-grandfather started this business. When he put his name above it, that was it. He was a stickler for things being absolutely right. He wasn’t really a businessman; as a businessman you’d take him outside and shoot him tomorrow. He was a funeral director. You could rip him apart into as many pieces but every bit was a funeral director. If he thought to make the job wholly right he had to lose money at it, it was more important that the job was done right and that was the legacy he gave us. His actual saying was ‘a funeral director is bred and born, not bread and butter’, which means to say … you’re not there for the money, you’re bred and born as a funeral director to do the job properly. The lovely part of that was in the end he built up such a reputation that if someone walked in they knew they would get a standard. That’s actually quite good business. In the end he got to a stage with the business that in the morning all he had to do was open the door and sit back. The people would walk in. We didn’t have to advertise because we had no mobility. If you was born in the East End you died in the East End. Everyone knew about funerals, everyone talked about funerals. Funerals were big then, you know. The working classes, you had to go out with some style. We didn’t need Yellow Pages, we didn’t need fucking fancy adverts on the telly.

  I came in when I was 18, so I’ve been down here thirty-seven years. You did your bit of church advertising but that was to keep you in with the church. The East End then was still very, very strong. The foreigners we had then were leftovers from the war or pre-war. We had a Polish community – always have had – because you got to remember this was a dock area. You pick out any dock area in the world and it has an immigrant population. Name a big city in the world that doesn’t have a Chinese community, an enclave somewhere, the Vietnamese, the Poles, and some of the Caribbeans, and certainly in a port like London there would be little pockets. But they didn’t make a significant amount.

  Now you make this quantum leap to today. In just the time we’ve been speaking a few more Muslims will have moved into the area. They’re coming over in vast numbers and they do make large ghettoes. The population is so mobile and the new people coming into the area are invariably foreign. They don’t know what we stand for. All our people move out. I went to a house yesterday and the family had moved down to Clacton now. That was an old East End family but when this chappie died he had to be done by T. Cribb & Sons. That’s why we’ve moved down. We’ve got an office in Benfleet and Leigh-on-Sea. We’re following the East End out, because that’s our strength. The first generation as they move out still come back to us, but the second generation ain’t going to know T. Cribb & Sons. So we’ve got to strike there now while the first generation is still … We can open up an area in Essex which is strong, Pitsea, Basildon area, still a strong East End population. If we go down there now we will still get a lot of people walking through that door because it’s T. Cribb & Sons. That’s it. We have time to spread it to the next generation and we can continue that. If we don’t strike now it’s gone for ever. We’ve lost our window as it were.

  And then we’ve got to look and think, here we are, we’ve built this monolith of a building. We still need to get people walking through that door, not a door we’ve got in Essex. We need people through that door. If you asked any funeral director: this is where your office is, so what are you hoping to do? You’re hoping to administer to the people around you, aren’t you? If half of that now is no good to you, we’re left with this half. How do we get them?

  Some of the Eastern Europeans we can work with. We’re looking at the Polish community at the moment. We looked at it and saw that the Poles are just driving over, picking up the body and driving back. Polish immigrants we’ve got coming over here at the moment are a migrant workforce – the majority of houses around here, you’ve got 5–6 people living in a small unit. They come over, they’ll probably have two or three jobs going, they can easily clear £300–£400. What happens when that 400 quid goes back to Poland? It is sixteen times more valuable back there. It doesn’t sit in this economy. It goes back there. You see the amount of cars going backwards and forwards with three, four, five people in it, back to Poland every four or five weeks and the money migrates with it.

  So I employed a Polish girl for a few months to contact all the Polish funeral directors – email, fax, whatever, phone. We offered them a service. They have to come over and they waste a day here because they’ve got to get up to the embassy, get the paperwork, all that. So what we said, phone us, we’ll go pick up the body, we’ll embalm it, get your paperwork, so you can come in, turn around. You may have three or four funeral directors all coming over here, we can get all the bodies back, you can send one man over and he can take four bodies back in one shot. We earn two bob out of it. You look at that and think, why the fuck would we bother for a couple of bob? But in 10–15 years’ time the Polish community, a certain amount of them are going to be resident here. They still like their funerals, they have burials, they like nice coffins. That could be our mainstay for the next generation of T. Cribb & Sons. If you’ve established yourself in the Polish community or in the Lithuanian community, your name is there, isn’t it?

  The Hindus and Sikhs, a lot of the African countries, they do traditional washing. If you go to an average funeral directors it’s around by their garage. We’ve done it in a clean area. They can use showers, they can use jugs, bowls, however they want to wash the body, it’s all in there. We put a different god up on the wall for whoever’s coming. It’s not just pushed to the back to some work area.

  When we have Chinese ashes staying here, they’re not like you or I. Ashes are ashes. With them, they have a two-soul system so the soul that goes for rebirth is one and that’s what we look after in there. But some of it stays in this country with the ashes, so if you’re storing ashes here there is a spirit in those ashes. So we set this up for the Chinese so they can come. The spirit left here has to be tended, so they bring along drink, they light the joss sticks, which are a form of prayer. There’s food and drink and prayer, which go to keep that spirit happy. When we have a Chinese service here now we’ll get 60–80 people turn up. They’ll see all this. I know they can’t get looked after like this anywhere else.

  The Filipino community, they like to do an all-night vigil. They sit with the body all night, they bring food in, and you can have 200–300 turn up. The average high-street funeral director ain’t going to cope with that. Whereas they’ll come down, they’ll use our big service room in there. We can seat sixty to seventy in there to have a nice service. They can have that. Then they take over – because
we’re closed – they take over that reception, put tables all the way down, and then we have food all laid out like a buffet and they literally stay here all night and we stay with them and then they might stay all weekend and then on the Monday they all go home, we send the body off to the Philippines and that’s it. It’s quite a big population. But that might not last for ever because the new generation … will they want to fly the bodies back to the Philippines? No. The ones I’m sending back are 50-, 60-, 70-year-olds. They were born in the Philippines, their families are back there. The younger generations: they’re English. They want burials here. We’re doing a few Filipino burials already. It’s a bit like the Africans. This generation, 95 per cent flown back. The next generations: not so many. By the time you get down to the third generation, they’re all going to be buried here so that traffic will stop.

  Will they know our name? That’s what we’re banking on.

  I ain’t going to give up, no. We just need to change things. I make it up as I go along. We’re not double-glazing, we don’t have a product we can export, we don’t have something we can load into a lorry and ship up to Leeds. So how do we get people from a wider area through that door to still make this a functional business? We think, hold on, we’ve got to specialize in a way that’s going to make people want to travel. Hence our involvement in Africa.

  I got on a plane, went out to Ghana, had a look at the situation, and thought, we can have a go out here as well. And it was big, like when we started up with the horses. Dad, Graham and myself, we went out one Friday night to Holland to see if the breed was still there. By the time we came back on Sunday we had bought two horses. They were being quarantined by the time we come back. Within thirty days we was going to get them and we knew cock-all about it. Dad was brought up as a stable boy at 14. He knew what end of a horse was what. I knew a horse had a leg in each corner, but we knew the standard we wanted to get. The only reason we went out there was because we was tired of what was being offered in this country. My dad said when I was a boy, grandad’s turnout was second to none and so we needed to get that quality, bring that back. Father was ashamed of what he was walking in front of. When someone was saying to us we want a horse-drawn funeral, we was going to a chap, a lovely old boy, supplied all the film trade, did all the Hammer Horrors, you know, but … If you looked at his turnout, it was great for your films. But to stand outside with a coffin on and people walking round it – it was shit. No disrespect to the old chap, he’s died now. It was great for the job he was doing. But it wasn’t … Grandfather’s carriages were just pristine. The horses were immaculate. The harness was just right. Everyone was dressed right. There was this quality about everything. It was something.

  When I went out to Ghana I was happy to link up with someone out there who could say, we could get bodies back to the villages, we could do all of that. But when I got out there … I realized within a couple of days of visiting mortuaries, this was just rubbish and there was no way we could link our name to it.

  I knew absolutely fuck-all about Ghana, I didn’t have a scooby. It was like landing on Mars, really. The first few journeys out there I was staying in a hotel. There were South Africans, Australians, most people were in mining, things like that. A lot of Lebanese, French, Belgians. A few Chinese too, they was into construction. The people I knew there, the Ghanaians I made contact with, they would say, yeah, we’ll come pick you up at one o’clock. Three o’clock would arrive – typical African time. I got used to that over the years.

  It takes them four or five months to arrange a funeral so the body is around for all this time. It gets deep-frozen. Here our fridges run at six degrees above freezing. They’re running at six degrees below. It’s like a branch of Iceland out there. Because once you take a body out of a freezer it will deteriorate quite quickly. Now bearing in mind they have their traditional washing, they will have the body on show during the wake. There’s a notice on every fridge I ever went to in any hospital – you need to give them three days. That’s one to find the body and two to defreeze it. And more often than not they’ve found and defrosted the wrong one. If you don’t keep up your payments they take the body out.

  I went into one mortuary and there were bodies laying on the floor at various stages of decomposition when they’d not kept up the payments. It was like Beirut on a Friday night. There were bodies everywhere. It was surreal. You had to see this happening. The state of the bodies – as they are defrosting they’d have their ritual washing and dressing. It’s a two-, three-, four-hour operation depending on who’s doing it. Once they’ve dressed them in these robes and have got seven bits of kente around them and all this other stuff – by the time they finished it was soaking wet and and bloodstained. Horrible.

  You think to yourself, I can make a difference here. The premises that was doing it was just awful. We went and found this piece of ground. This is what we built out there … [He tilts his PC monitor out of the March sunlight to show me snapshots of the new facility; in one shot he stands in ceremonial dress, wrapped in fabric with one shoulder showing.] This is a restaurant and bar area for people travelling. This is the actual chapel. This building here is the washrooms and mortuary. We’ve done all the landscaping now. This would be set on three and a half acres. We are T. Cribb & Sons. That’s the business that’s set up and running, T. Cribb & Sons, Ghana Ltd.

  SPENCER LEE

  Crematorium technician

  Londoners are weird. Very, very, very strange. But I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone, every area has a strange side to it. Every person has something that’s, you know, ‘Hang on, that’s strange.’ It’s only because it’s different to what I know. They might think I’m strange. ‘Look at this weird guy who works in a crematorium.’ You know? ‘What’s wrong with him, why can’t he just go and work in an office like everyone else?’

  There are a few cremators on the north side of the building made by Toibo in Stockholm.

  Nearby is the cremulator, which is ‘like a big tumble dryer with seven ceramic balls of different sizes’, he says. ‘It’s used to break down the brittle bone.’ To the right of the cremulator are trays of ferrous and non-ferrous metals. ‘That’s a hip,’ he says. ‘That’s a bigger hip replacement. That’s the socket.’ Most are collected by a Dutch company but other pieces are picked up by friends and relatives. ‘They’ll say, it was part of him. It used to wind up the bloody security at Heathrow. I want it back. And they’ll come in and claim it.’ It’s surprisingly cold because it’s unethical to heat a room with remains. His gloves have a Hessian outer layer, like an oven-glove. Nearby is a collection of blue boxes made from recycled cardboard. Each blue box carries the 2–3 kg of ash. ‘I notice the names that are disappearing from London,’ he says. ‘Violet, Hilda, Beatrice, Edgar, Percy, Gladys, Edith, Ethel, Eliza.’

  Go back seven years, when I started here, we used to do twenty-eight services a day. Now, the average is about twelve or thirteen. It’s just the death rate has fallen. They predicted it would. Cos you’ve got the generations, and when one generation begins to, they all die out. And then you have a gap before the next generation starts to get to that age. So it has peaks and troughs, the death rate. And also, a lot of people move out of the area. It’s becoming more of a Muslim community, and their way of burial is different. We’re on the down part of the death rate. Soon it’s gonna be picking up.

  It’s a strange thing when you think about it, because the industry talk about ‘Oh, you busy?’ And you go, ‘No …’ That’s a good thing, isn’t it?! It means less people are dying, you know? But as an industry, people worry about it. The funeral directors, a lot of them are private concerns, it’s their livelihood. So it’s quite stressful.

  Repatriation is a big business at the moment, for the funeral directors. There’s all different types of paperwork needs to be completed. I mean, I don’t make out to understand it completely. In the Muslim community, their burials have to take place within twenty-four hours, that’s thei
r culture. So everything’s got to be done quick, paperwork’s got to be gathered together, and you’ve got to contact the cemetery, they’ve got to dig the graves very quickly. It’s amazing how they turn it around.

  We don’t offer a section, as such, for the Muslim community. We’re not saying they’re not welcome to use our cemetery. But they kind of like to have an area of their own where they’re all buried together, in that area. But we just haven’t got that sort of space available. And it’s not a policy of ours to offer specific areas for specific denominations or religions. This is, you know, for everyone. But we’re not going to say, ‘You can’t have yours there because you’re not this specific faith.’ That’s something that we wouldn’t go for, at all.

  Always the worrying thing, which obviously you don’t want to happen, is your pandemics and your epidemics. You know, you’ve got the bird flu worry. Once one gets it and it’s airborne, that’s it – that’s a major problem. I mean, when I think when we did like 5,700 cremations in one year, I think that was an epidemic. But with a pandemic, you can need to do that in six weeks. Each crematorium may need to do 5,000 cremations in six weeks.

  The last stage of a pandemic is that all funeral services are cancelled. If you want a service, you have a quick service in a church. And then basically we would just have hearses bringing coffins. Straight in, straight down to the basement, ready to cremate. Straight in, another one, next one that come in. Maybe we would have a minister for each chapel, so as we received the coffins, couple of prayers, send it down. Just a nice touch.