Funeral horror
In the 1960s, comedy writers Galton and Simpson created a one off-play called Cliquot et Fils, about the antics of a shady undertaker faking the death of a General to hold a funeral to bolster his reputation. This was very much in the tradition of black comedy representations of undertakers measuring people up and drumming up trade by fair means and foul. Obviously, it is only right for us to laugh in the face of the inevitable; and the unenviable task of those who see us off on our final journeys.
When played out in reality, the situation, though, is horrifying. As the relentless testimony of the victims of Robert Bush, the manager of the funeral home Legacy on Hessle Road in Hull, showed. Although he pleaded guilty to the 67 counts against him, the victim impact statements before sentencing took five days. These even included statements by police officers affected by what they saw in their investigations. The judge, Mr. Hilliard, said in his sentencing remarks: ‘the awful truth is that anyone whose loved one went through Legacy at any time when it was operating can now have no confidence as to how they were treated or as to whose ashes they have’ (Judiciary report PDF).
Many of the details are too harrowing for us to publish.
Bush ran the firm for 12 years, persistently and covertly providing a substandard service. It was only uncovered when he went on holiday to Arizona, and a temporary worker he hired called the police after seeing the state of the premises.
Thirty bodies were just laid there. Bush had neglected to pay for proper refrigeration. He delayed sending bodies for cremation. As Hilliard remarked: ‘Most of the bodies were uncovered and on racks on both sides of a cold storage area within the premises. There was a naked body lying on a stretcher on the floor. Two people were lying on the floor of the cold room’ and ‘They had not been washed or dressed.[…] There were clear instances of inadequate identification of the deceased. There was no evidence of any form of mortuary register to show who was even there’. Articles that had clearly been intended for inclusion in a loved one’s coffin were scattered on the floor.
It is known that at least 46 families were given the wrong ashes. Some of the offences involved the remains of still-born babies: in the case of one baby, ‘the police found the remains in a paper bag on the floor of the premises’. It had been in Legacy for almost 2 years.
Alongside the simple callous disregard for his customers, there was evidence of more simple larceny: Bush kept money collected for charity at funeral services. He took funeral plan money, and held it in his own accounts: in other words, he was trading fraudulently for the whole of the twelve years.
As the judge noted:
‘It is worthy of note that in the same period as he was stealing the charity money from collection plates, just over £3 million was received in Legacy bank accounts and the defendant’s personal accounts between March 2017 and April 2024. In the same period, £369,000 was transferred from those accounts to the defendant’s wife’s accounts’.
Quite what money went where will be hard to trace, since Bush neglected to actually keep any proper accounts.
The overall sense is that Bush simply just did not care (in some ways, it is bewildering that he even got into such a profession in the first case). The judge rejected out of hand that his criminal practices stemmed from initial cash flow issues, but it is easy to imagine the first time that Bush found it more convenient to defer a cremation to a later date in order to save money he wanted to spend on something else.
This story is not about capitalism, there was no exploitation of workers, but it is a story of commercial society. Bush cared more about money than he cared about his clients (living and dead); indeed, he cared more about his motorcycling hobby than he cared about his day job. Clearly, to himself, he was not really a funeral director; it was an irritation, a nuisance that he had to get out of the way with the minimum of effort. He seemingly did not have the imagination to consider the sheer and widespread anguish his slapdash and thieving ways would cause.
The judge gave him a prison sentence of 20 years. The bulk being from multiple counts of the common law crime of preventing a proper burial. He will probably serve ten of those years in prison. It is not clear what purpose placing him in jail for so long has: the possibility of punishment didn’t deter him (or probably even occur to him). His harms cannot be undone, and he will never be able to do them again. At best, public punishment will prevent private vengeance being carried out on him by one of those he wronged at their most vulnerable time.
The likelihood is that state-backed regulation of the funeral industry will follow. Clearly, the case stands as rebuttal to the idea that the free market can provide the best regulation: we can each only ever get one funeral. It will either be done right or it won’t, and misrepresentation and fraud will always be a possibility. That such regulation as already exists was not followed shows how difficult it is to stop bad behaviour when it is sufficiently remunerative.
Watching daytime telly these days gives the idea of how big the funeral industry is: continual adverts calling on people to give peace of mind to their relatives. We would hope that in a society that puts human relations first, only people who care about people as an end in themselves rather than a means to an end would organise funerals, and instead of minimal cost ‘direct to cremation’ funerals, we could be coming together to remember the whole person.
PIK SMEET