This October we celebrate a more recent anniversary. It’s definitely within living memory.
On the 8th October 1946 the Cemetery Company decided to terminate the employment of a grave digger called Borrillwould have . It just hadn’t worked out, Mr Borrill was simply too scared to work in a cemetery on his own. Why he accepted the post of gravedigger is beyond me.
Also on the above date they decided to give a chap called Frank Coulson a start. The wage was £4 8 shillings for a 44 hour week. He would begin work on the 19th. If Frank Coulson proved O.K. the plan was to dispense with Charles Collinson too. A Grave Digger
As it proved Frank was a good worker and the plan went ahead.
However on the 14th December 1948 the Board decided that Frank had to go. Not because of his work but simply because the Cemetery’s finances were so bad they could not afford to employ staff any longer.
As you can see the Board decided to use ‘casual labour for grave digging’ from then on. From that point the dereliction of the Cemetery increased until, as we know, it became a wilderness.
What happened to him?
So what happened to Frank Coulson? Well I can fill in a part of his story.
Frank Coulson was born in 1920 in Shoreditch, London. Unlike today Shoreditch was a deprived area then. It was slum territory, soon to be the battleground between fascists and their opponents in the 1930s. His childhood probably could be described as ‘patchy’.
I have no knowledge of what he did in the war, if anything. He was a small man, probably no more than 5 foot 4 inches. His physique may have been a barrier to his enlistment. However, as we can see immediately after the war, he is employed by the Hull General Cemetery Company. After the termination of his contract there I’m certain he began to work for the Corporation in the same role.
By the time I met him, in August 1974, he was the chargehand of Northern Cemetery. He was known as ‘Cocker’ simply because he spoke with a cockney accent. However he had no friends. He sat in the middle of the messroom, on his own, at his table. The gravediggers sat at one end of the room and the gardening staff sat at the other end. He sat in the middle.
My first meeting
I first met him in this way.
I walked into the messroom and, like in all good westerns, the conversation stopped. It was 7.20 a.m. He had his back to me but when he noticed the conversation had stopped and everyone was staring past him he jumped up and turned around. He saw me and asked me what I wanted and I replied. I said I’d been sent as gravedigger and he motioned me to the gravedigger table.
There were probably a dozen people in there. Everyone was staring at me. Ken Wilde, a gravedigger, asked, ‘had I done gravedigging before’ and I said ‘no’ which caused a gust of laughter from all quarters of the room. The viewpoint of the room was obviously that this long haired gawky hippie won’t last long. And judging by their welcome I tended to agree with them.
I lasted 6 years 11 months and so many days before going to University. I outlasted all the gravediggers that were sat at the table that day.
His decline and death
Back to Frank.
Frank began to fail in 1976. He began to make mistakes. Often he’d misread where to set up the digs. Once he forgot all about a funeral and it had to be held back while we prepared it for burial. Management took notice. By the May he was gone. His wife had died the year before. His son lived in London and never visited. To some extent I think he lost interest in what he was doing.
As luck would have it I lived in the next terrace to him in Mayfield Street. I rarely saw him. But I heard him enough times. He had a penchant for playing Hawaiian music. Fine at first but after 3 or 4 hours of it, well I could have smashed his head in with a coconut.
In March 1985 he died. On his own and probably unloved. The neighbours alerted the police. They had seen many flies crawling on the inside of his front window. The police broke down the door and found his body. He’d been dead for a few weeks, sat next to his electric fire. The result was, as you can probably imagine, unpleasant.
A sad end. He was never a person you could like. Too bumptious, too assured of himself with nothing behind it to back it up.
But he was my first chargehand when I became a gravedigger. I know how difficult that job was. I did it for nearly 7 years. He did it for 30. I tip my hat to you, Frank. You earned my respect. I’m sorry I never told you.
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Pete Lowden is a member of the Friends of Hull General Cemetery committee which is committed to reclaiming the cemetery and returning it back to a community resource.