The American Way of Death Revisited

by Jessica Mitford

  The funeral is usually held in the crematorium or cemetery chapel. (“They all have these horrid little chapels nowadays,” said Mr. Ashton.) The Ashton premises have a large room which he was intending to convert into use as a funeral chapel, but he found that there was so little demand for it that, instead, he uses it as a rest room. On an average, a “car and a half”—six to seven people—attend the funeral, although attendance varies tremendously; between two and three hundred may show up for the funeral of a prominent person. As in America, mourning is no longer worn except by the very old, who still think it proper to go out and buy “a bit of black” for the funeral. “Flowerwise,” said Mr. Ashton (once more springing this incongruous Americanism), he estimates that there would be an average of twenty floral pieces at an ordinary funeral. Workers spend a lot more on funeral flowers than do the middle classes; in fact, the latter tend to be more moderate in all ways.

  If a country dweller happens to die in London, his body is generally taken back to his home parish for burial. A private motor hearse may be used, or the body may go back by rail. They fetch the coffin and take it to the station in a hearse. I asked whether embalming is required when a body is to be shipped. “If it’s to go by air, it’s got to be embalmed, but British Railways don’t require it; they’re not particularly fussy.”

  An open-casket funeral is almost unheard of, said Mr. Ashton. Such a thing would be considered so absolutely weird, so contrary to good taste and proper behavior, so shocking to the sensibilities of all concerned, that he thinks it could never become a practice in England. He recalled the funeral of a Polish worker whose family requested an open casket: “The gravediggers objected very much to this. Rather absurd of them, when you come down to think of what their job is, don’t you know, but still they didn’t see why they should stand for having the thing opened. Cosmetics are never used. That sort of thing might go over in America, but really, I mean I don’t think you could get the people here to use it. If I had to say, ‘Come and see your loved one,’ I honestly don’t think I could keep a straight face.” Mr. Ashton added that Evelyn Waugh’s book The Loved One is one of his favorite novels, and that when it first came out he bought four copies for the amusement of his staff. But nevertheless, what about the adoption of certain American euphemisms—“funeral director” instead of “undertaker,” for example? Mr. Ashton thought that was originally instituted to stop the music-hall jokes about the trade, and because “the word ‘undertaker’ doesn’t mean anything.” He said that doctors and officials continue to use “undertaker,” although the telephone directory has recognized the new term and now has a listing for “funeral directors.” He added that some practitioners prefer “funeral director” simply because “it sounds more chichi, but personally I don’t mind.” As to other euphemisms—avoidance of words which connote death, “space” for “grave,” “expire” for “die,” “Mr. Jones” for “corpse,” and so on—he did not think these would catch on in England. “The attitude of the general public is, it’s a practical thing—if you don’t want to say anything about it, just don’t mention it.”

  All this led directly to the subject of embalming; if there is to be no viewing, why then embalm? Mainly, for the convenience of the funeral establishment personnel. There is an average lapse of four to six days in London between death and the funeral (it takes one full day to get a grave dug), and, said Mr. Ashton, “the unpleasantness can be simply appalling.”

  There is no restorative work done at Mr. Ashton’s place, and no cosmetics are used. Although he embalms routinely, without seeking permission of the family, he has not had any complaints. Over the past ten years, there have been perhaps three people who have specifically requested that there be no embalming. “When there’s been a long series of operations before death, somebody may say, ‘I don’t want ’er cut apaht anymore,” he explained. He agreed that the argument that embalming benefits the public health by preventing disease is not well founded: “We’ve tried to prove the disease factor, but we just can’t—we’ll have to accept the pathologists’ view on that.”

  The complicated procedures required by English law relating to obtaining the death certificate have often been condemned; I wondered whether there were any efforts afoot to get the law changed. Quite abortively, said Mr. Ashton, there are attempts in that direction; in fact, he himself is a member of a Home Office “working party” initiated by the cremation authorities to simplify the law and speed up the process of getting a death certificate. “But I’m absolutely outnumbered on that,” he said cheerfully. “The doctors are dead against it, because the embalming process can hide certain poisons, make crime detection very difficult.”

  Having in mind the “do-it-yourself” efforts of certain American funeral reform groups, I asked whether in England it would be possible for a survivor to bypass the funeral establishment altogether and take the deceased directly to the crematorium. Such a thing actually did happen once in Mr. Ashton’s experience. Two young men drove up in a Bedford van and said they wanted to buy a coffin. Mr. Ashton told them he didn’t sell coffins, he sold funerals. The young men insisted they did not wish a funeral; their mother had died, they had procured a properly issued death certificate, they had been out to the Enfield Crematorium to make arrangements, they intended to buy a coffin and take the mother out there themselves. “We chatted and chatted,” Mr. Ashton recalled. “Finally I was convinced they were on the level, so I sold them a coffin. What could I do? They weren’t doing anything wrong, there was nothing to stop them. But it really shook me. Afterwards I rang up the chap at the crematorium. I said, ‘Did that shake you? It shook me.’ ”

  My final question was about “pre-need” arrangements; is there much buying and selling of graves and funeral services to those in the prime of life? Practically none, it seems. You can reserve a grave space, but it is almost never done. Once in a great while, said Mr. Ashton, some old lady may come round to the establishment, explain she is all alone in the world and feeling poorly, and ask him to care for all arrangements when her day comes. “We just put her name in our NDY file,” he said. “Meaning?” “Not Dead Yet, don’t you know. But nine times out of ten she’ll start feeling much better, might live another twenty years.”

  Throughout our discussion Mr. Ashton impressed me as a realistic businessman, a kindly and responsible person, straightforward and practical in his approach to his work, with a good dash of wit in his makeup. One cannot even quarrel with the innovations he has introduced; the pleasant appearance of his premises is undoubtedly an improvement over years ago. It reflects concern for the comfort of those he must deal with, but does not remotely approach the plush palaces of death to be found everywhere in America. Whatever one may think of his practice of embalming all comers, at least he advanced truthful and comprehensive reasons for doing so.

  If Mr. Ashton is a typical representative of the English undertaking trade, traditional English attitudes towards the disposal of the dead may after all be safe from the innovators for some time to come.*

  Funerals in England Now

  A cartoon depicts a group of sorrowing goldfish gathered round a lavatory bowl in which one of their number floats belly-up. The caption: “He always wanted an open casket.” Another shows two somberly suited pallbearers shouldering a casket, each wearing an outsize button inscribed HAVE A NICE DAY. One exclaims, “Always dreaded an American takeover.” Thus with a mixture of groans and ridicule was the advent of SCI greeted in the British press in 1994, the year in which SCI acquired two of the largest British funeral chains, the felicitously named Plantsbrook Group and the Great Southern Group, comprising more than five hundred undertaking establishments, cemeteries, and crematoria:

  The Independent, June 12, 1994—

  GRAVE UNDERTAKING: GROUP THAT BURIED ELVIS WANTS TO TAKE OVER U.K. FIRM. “I’m here to do a deal, and I’m here for the duration,” said Bill Heiligbrodt, SCI’s Texan president.… Mr. Heiligbrodt has been called a cowboy but he loves the term.
“I gather it’s not such a compliment in Britain, but I am a cowboy.… I just love being competitive,” he said.

  The Telegraph, August 11, 1994—

  The Texas-based Service Corporation International is plotting a takeover of Britain’s third-biggest undertaker, Great Southern. However sensitively it approaches the British market, inevitably any U.S. involvement is bound to raise here the spectre of the American way of death. Across the Atlantic, death has long meant big money.

  The Tqqwelegraph, August 13, 1994—

  TEXANS OUT TO MAKE ANOTHER KILLING. The Texas funerals group Service Corporation International has become trigger-happy.… These Texan undertakers have mastered taking-over rather quickly.…

  The Guardian, September 3, 1994—

  Last night SCI president, Bill Heiligbrodt, was jubilant about the success of his lightning campaign, which started on May 30 when he landed in the U.K. with the fixed intention of building a major business in the U.K. “I’m having a lot of fun now,” he said.… “We are here now for the rest of time.”

  Across the pond, the funeral trade press was in a celebratory mood. The Southern Funeral Director (September 1994) offered some predictions about the future of British funerals now that SCI was on the scene:

  The British cremation rate runs about 75 percent. This is not necessarily by choice, but because nobody markets “Americanized funerals” to them. The British aren’t real big on selling the casketed service. But leave it to SCI to educate them. SCI will establish yet another stronghold market for caskets.

  Resistance to SCI’s pedagogical incursion was soon apparent. Pharos, organ of the British Cremation Society, called its account of the takeover INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. It warned of “possible price rise and the arrival of U.S.-style high-pressure sales methods.” Imported American coffins, it noted, may have a markup of up to 900 percent.

  Unkindest of all was a prizewinning television documentary deriding the SCI takeover, scathingly titled “Over My Dead Body,” unanimously praised by the television critics and chosen as “Pick of the Week” by the Times. It was broadcast on November 27, 1994, just three months after SCI had consummated its U.K. transaction.

  Set forth for British viewers to gape at in wonder are a funeral directors’ trade fair at which are displayed a gruesome array of embalming fluids, tools for removing the innards, cosmetics for corpses, and a dazzling assortment of caskets, culminating in “our top-of-the-line” item priced at $85,000. Jerry Pullin, SCI’s man in London, explains:

  We feel the opportunities are greatest in offering a broader range of merchandise and services which will enhance our revenue base by offering enhanced consumer choices.

  L. William Heiligbrodt, president of SCI, tells the viewing audience why the average price of Australian funerals rose by 40 percent after his company entered that market:

  We have found in Australia in the short time we’ve been there that people have chosen to spend more on funerals. I want again to emphasize “chosen.” It’s been their choice. The fact that our revenues per funeral have grown in Australia is because the Australian public have demanded it. In the U.K., that’s our goal, as well.

  There is a segment on SCI’s immediate predecessor, one Howard Hodgson, known as the “yuppie undertaker,” a great fan of Mrs. Thatcher and one of the entrepreneurial stars of the Iron Lady’s regime. He describes how he achieved economies of scale via the “clustering” strategy, refurbishing funeral parlors, buying new hearses, and adding services like embalming, in fact, preparing the ground for SCI, to whom he eventually sold.

  According to “Over My Dead Body,” 50 percent of the British dead were embalmed in the Hodgson era; yet the Independent of January 7, 1992, quoted Peter Hall, general secretary of the British Institute of Embalming, as saying that “a quarter of all corpses in this country are now embalmed.” He voiced the unappetizing suggestion that “the difference between a well-embalmed body and an untreated one is the difference between a plum and a prune.” If these figures are accurate, Mr. Hodgson had succeeded in less than three years in doubling the number of British dead transformed from prune to plum, an encouraging portent for the newly arrived SCI.

  I was fortunate to be given what is known in the trade as a “cameo appearance” in the video. This took place in a large and well-appointed undertaker’s showroom where Derek Gibbs, owner of the London Casket Company, explained the offerings. He obligingly raised the casket lids to display a variety of beauteous linings in “luxury velvet” or “high-quality crepe.” Best of all was “The Last Supper,” described in the catalogue as “mahogany finished poplar timber, cream madeira crepe interior. Scene of The Last Supper colour insert in lid. Swing bar handles and adjustable bed. Angel corner pieces supplied on request at no extra cost.”

  “Oh, how absolutely smashing,” I said. “I think they’re lovely, they’re absolutely top-quality,” replied Mr. Gibbs. “We do not hard sell them at all. They really just sell themselves.” We had the following conversation:

  JM: But they must cost a fortune. First off, how much is the wholesale cost?

  DG: Well, we supply purely to the trade, so what funeral directors do in this country is they buy the casket from us, and then they add it to the cost of their traditional funeral service.

  JM: How much do you charge them for this, for example? You charge them how much?

  DG: Well, I would be loath to say, because as I say we supply to the trade and they would actually add this to their traditional funeral.

  JM: That’s why I wanted to find out. How much do you pay for it?

  DG: I don’t really want to discuss what we pay—is this a rehearsal?

  Long accustomed to the reticence of American funeral directors on the sensitive subject of the wholesale cost of caskets—one of the best-kept trade secrets—I was not surprised by Mr. Gibbs’s reluctance to disclose prices. But as it turned out, this was by no means the end of the matter. Some weeks later, on January 30, 1995, Mr. Gibbs wrote to the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, which is responsible for maintaining standards of fairness and privacy. (Its function is roughly parallel to that of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.) His letter was full of anguish:

  Apart from one small moment, I thought that I handled myself well and gave sensible and reasonable answers. I accepted that my products are very foreign and extravagant but explained that there was a demand for elaborate high quality burial caskets.

  It was to be my first appearance on television and so I told all my customers, friends and family to be sure to watch it. You can therefore imagine my acute embarrassment when the program turned out to be a complete hatchet job on the industry that I serve.…

  At the time, I tried to laugh it off.… As time goes on, I felt increasingly angered by the whole affair. Every customer that I visit taunts me with the phrase, “This is only a rehearsal, isn’t it?” …

  Reading this letter, I could not fail to be impressed by the poignancy of Mr. Gibbs’s experience. However, it hasn’t hurt his business. In April 1996 he told an interviewer that his casket sales for 1994–95 had been 312—up from 242 the year before. “It was slow going to begin with,” he said, “but our sales have grown steadily over the years. This last quarter, January, February, March, has been our busiest quarter ever. So it’s getting better. People like the idea of preservation. That is the point of the sale.”

  Fast-forward to 1996. SCI has now held sway in this scepter’d isle for two years, long enough for a preliminary estimate of its impact on the British funeral scene. The Guardian led off February 27, 1996, with the headline HAVE A NICE DEATH:

  The Americans pioneered a fast-food, hard-sell approach to death. It is not the British Way. Sarah Bosely and Peter Godwin investigate creeping disneyfication—and soaring prices—in the British funeral industry.

  It’s the ultimate commercialisation—the final tastelessness. McDeath is on its way to a funeral parlour near you. The Americans are here, although you may not yet h
ave noticed it. We British don’t talk about these things. But there they are … gearing up to effect a huge change in the British way of death.

  The BBC’s “Public Eye” obliged with a documentary broadcast on February 17 entitled “Pay Now, Die Later.” Unsurprisingly, the presenter tells us that SCI refused to be interviewed for the program. But as is often the case, some of the best copy was mined from “internal documents” procured by some light-fingered sleuth on the “Public Eye” team.

  For example, we are treated to “notes” issued to “SCI funeral directors in Britain to help them to overcome their ‘difficulty combining their helping role with that of a business role’ when helping a client to choose a coffin.” And here are the notes, eerily reminiscent of SCI’s directive to its Australian employees (see chapter 16, “A Global Village of the Dead”). It’s a small, small world.

  Present the coffin range to its best advantage.

  Direct the attention of the family to the highest quality item on display (perhaps the Regal).

  Next present the Crown.

  Then present the Classic Royal, and so on in descending price order.

  Know how to respond to objections: Respond with empathy, not defensiveness or aggression or impatience. For example, “I can understand your concern about the price but let me explain the difference in design and manufacture again.” Or for example, “Yes, I can see your point about them just going into the ground, but we need to provide an extensive range like this in order to suit everyone’s taste.”

  So far so good, but that’s only for starters. Through more internal documents, “Public Eye” discovered that SCI was disappointed with the low income from “memorial sales,”* which, according to a memo to its general managers, is “without a doubt the single most important area of our activity to be improved.” To remedy the situation, SCI launched a new sales program, its details spelled out in the memo: