Here at Tester & Jones, we pride ourselves on helping our families to create funeral services which truly reflect their loved one. This isn’t just in the type of service itself but in the way they are transported there.
Some of our families opt for a horse drawn hearse. While we don’t have our own horses, we use a local firm to provide them, along with the hearse. Because the roads are busy travelling to our local crematoria, we’ll transport the coffin in our own hearse fairly near to the crematorium and transfer it safely at that point.
Over the years, we’ve had farming families use their own vehicles – such as a steamroller or tractor to transport a coffin, while families have also used VW camper van (we know company which hires those), lorries and a motorbike with side car. Our hearses have also been joined by police outriders, for a former member of the police and by motorcycle outriders, if the deceased was into their motorbikes. As ever, we’ll support families to make it work.
In years gone by, mourners would simply carry the body themselves to the burial ground. Then, when the wheel was invented, a body would be carried on a ‘bier’, a sort of flat wooden frame set on wheels. The word ‘hearse’ comes from the Anglo-Norman French word ‘herce’ from a harrow. Often the structure would include spikes to hold burning candles.
Later, dedicated roads, known as ‘corpse roads’ or sometimes ‘bier roads’, ‘coffin roads’ or ‘lynch ways’ were created to transport bodies. Most of these don’t exist as roads anymore but some survive as footpaths and still feature coffin stones – where people could lay a coffin down and rest for a while.
As folk began to decorate the hand-drawn hearses, they became heavier, so horses were then more often used to pull them along. In the 19th century, funeral carriages became more ornate, with mahogany carriages featuring intricate carvings and black velvet drapes. In Victorian times, glass-side hearses became a feature so people could see the coffin and this is still a feature in modern hearses.
The water has also been used to transport coffins. In 1806, Lord Nelson’s body was carried on The River Thames from Greenwich to Whitehall Stairs on a black-canopied funeral barge, which was accompanied by more than 60 boats. In 1965, after Churchill’s funeral service in London, his body was also transported down the Thames and then taken from Waterloo Station to Oxfordshire on a specially prepared train.
Interestingly, a regular funeral train ran seven days a week from 1854 to 1900 from the Necropolis Railway Station in London (near to today’s Waterloo) to Brookwood Cemetery near Woking. It was built to deal with the capital’s growing population and lack of space. When it opened, Brookwood Cemetery was the largest cemetery in the world (and is still the biggest in the UK).
With the introduction of motorised vehicles in the early 1900s, we began to see the first motorised hearses. These tended to be built around larger, more powerful, chassis and, more than 100 years later, hearses used by funeral directors are often based on cars including Daimler, Volvo, Rolls-Royce and Mercedes-Benz. Here at Tester & Jones, our latest hearse is a Jaguar.
If you’d like to know more about your funeral options, call our team on 01892 611811.
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