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Chapter 11
Social Denial and Family Love:
The Funeral Home Context,
Cemetery Customs, and the Death Press
11.1. From "home parlour" to "funeral parlour" or "funeral home"
In partial verification of the" ewfie joke" that "the world ends at 4.00 today, 4.30 in
ewfoundland," the modern way of death, along with all the olher "benefits" of
Confederation, finally made its way into the province... Carnell's. at present one of Ihe
three funeral companies in St. John's. was the first integrated funeral home on the island
when it appeared in 1966. Its undertaking services, however, go back to 1804, al which
time the business operated as Carnell's Carriage Factory Ltd. With no access to ready
timber in town, people called upon the faclory, which was using carpenters and
upholsterers, 10 make a coffin, no different then to the plain-cloth covered one made in Ihe
outports. When over the years Carnell's got a horse and waggon 10 carry their business,
these were requested for transporting the coffin from the house to the church and from
there to the cemetery. Besides making its own coffins, the company eventually imported a
few polished oncs, ;:Illd set up a little showroom. Thus the first funeral home was born.
Evoking his start in the business as a wheelwright apprentice forty-seven years ago, R.B.
remcmbers that the modern institutionalization of death rites met popular reluctance at first,
and it was practical necessity, circumstance more than choice, which finally led 10 its
adoption:
RB: ... as the years wCnt on we got into Confederation and people travclled
more, and we, sort of, started copying from the mainland funeral
homes. I remember the first funeral home we had which was Geoff
Carnell's father's grandfalher's house ... thai would have been in the
early fifties, and that's where the idea of the funeral home caught on,
bUI it took a long while for to catch on; people still wanted, at Ihat time
we were still burying eighty percent of the people from their homcs, but
as Ihe years went on, gradually they went on 10 the funeral home and
then, of course, these days, the homes were more suilable for having
wakes; there were bigger homes, and the homes today, you know, you
walk in now in a house today. you walk in and you're all over the
place, son of thing. One time, you had a parlour, you opened it up