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once a year for Christmas, or when the clergyman came, or when you
had a wake or something like that. But the, I would say in the fifties,
middle of the fifties, the horse went out and the carriage, and the motor
carriage came in, bUI we had a job convincing people to use the motor
hearse; they didn't want to rush poor father off, you see, and Ihis was
the idea, bUI as time went on. and then in 1966 we were ready to have a
funeral home like this, and it went on from there. Now we might
have one wake in a home a year, that's about all, bUI still, the older
people; their husband was buried from the house, they want to be
buried from the house. but that happens only once or twice a year. If
we had to conduct funerals from people's homes. yOLl know, we'd
never be able to do it, the workload would be just too much. You
couldn't possibly do it. l
The shift from the private to the institutionalized parlour indeed appears 10 be a natural
if gradual development from the traditional pattern of the house-wake. The facilities at
Carnell Memorial Chapel are basically designed on a home-plan: visitors come in through a
foyer, from where they have free access to any of the six reposing rooms, the common
lounge area and adjoining kitchenette. The body, in the euphemistic idiom of "forbidden
death," "rests" in a "reposing room" for usually three days. Relatives take turns to
welcome visitors, who, after "viewing" the prepared body and usually leaving a mass or
sympathy card, may proceed to the lounge for an informal chat, drink and snacks
contributed by the family as well as themselves. Thus the "integration" of the material and
the religiolls aspects surrounding death carries on the juxtaposition of the profane and the
sacred, the kitchen and the parlour, as distinct but complementary and adjacent spaces of
the private dead house.
Whereas scholars mostly account for the emergence of the funeral parlour in terms of a
changing worldview and ethos, the local funeral people I had occasion to interview mostly
invoke pragmatic reasons. The former forcefully emphasize "rupture" with the past; the
latter analyze their market in tenns of "tradition," and take their cue from it:
GC: ... the way we promote the building is that it's a homelike atmosphere
and although it's commercial and has to be--'cause you get hundreds of
people through on any given time--so yOlI do have to design it to house
these numbers. But in the rooms the furnishings are such that yOll
would find them in your own home, and basically make it as
comfortable as possible for the family while they're there; they spend a
couple of days there.... 2
. Carnell's tried 10 change the fleet from black 10 grey, but the people
expressed concern, and the vehicles remain black.
lMUNFLA 87-159/CI2044.
2MUNFLA R7-159/CI2031.