Memories of an ex-Launton boy

This month the ex-Launton Boy has attended three funerals in the past three weeks. This time they were all of former comrades in the Maidstone area. The experience brings back memories of funerals in his early days in Launton. His first job was at Lewis Penn, the builders, who were also the village undertakers - so he had experience of making coffins and of attending funerals.

Three funerals in as many weeks, two cremations and one burial, the latter in the pouring rain!

It becomes increasingly disconcerting when you reach that age when others of approximately the same age as one’s self start dropping off the end of the perch in increasing numbers.

Never having been a lover of cremations, they are nonetheless not so affected by the weather, and nothing is more miserable than a burial in the pouring rain.

I have lost count of the many funerals I have helped to arrange and attended in my capacity as the Welfare Officer of the Medway Branch of the Royal Engineers Association, but it is a hell of a lot. My comrades now refer to me as “The Grim Reaper” as if I am responsible, all in good taste of course.

I have as a consequence, worked in conjunction with a large number of different undertakers within the Medway Towns and Maidstone, some very good and one or two others that are absolutely awful. One gets to know the modus operandi of the different undertakers and is thus able to be prepared for the least prepared of them to enable things to run as smoothly as possible.

I first became involved with funerals as a 15 year old apprenticed carpenter and joiner working for Lewis Penn & Co of Station Road, Launton, where Jewsons are now based, opposite where I was brought up as a lad. For those relatively new to the village, we were not only the local builders of high repute, but also the local undertakers. In those days we made the coffins of solid elm which polished up beautifully, none of this modern day MDF.We took a great deal of pride in the quality of the coffins we made back then.

For today’s funeral at the Garrison Church, we had the hearse and two limousines and a convoy of private vehicles crammed with mourners. We have no burial facilities at the Garrison Church, so the cortege moved on after the service to Rochester, then Strood where the good friend and comrade of mine was interred in the Strood cemetery, in the pouring rain.

Interestingly, most graves are excavated using a small mechanical digger these days. However, I can recall back during my apprenticeship, one of the labourers at Lewis Penn & Co, Toby Batts from Hethe, was our grave digger, using pick and shovel, and of course, muscle and sweat. With the heavy clay around Launton, whether at the Chapel or at St. Mary’s church, it produced a lot of sweat and needed a lot of muscle. Back then too, you rarely saw a hearse attending a Launton village funeral, nor a convoy of private cars following on, due to there not being many car owners in the village back then. Instead, the coffin would be placed on a bier on wagon-style wheels and pulled / pushed through the village by the pall-bearers, most of who were also employed in a construction capacity by Lewis Penn & Co. The metal-tyre wheels would make a distinctive crushing sound rolling over the road chippings, on to either the church or the chapel, with FrederickSharpe(proprietor of Lewis Penn & Co) leading on foot in his black garb and top hat. Households of those not attending would draw their curtains as the cortege passed by and people who happened to be in the street would stop, men removing their caps and bowing their heads as the coffin passed. The family would follow behind on foot with other mourners from the village.

Rather than having pubs, clubs or halls, more often than not the wake would be held at the house of the family of the deceased, with nothing too elaborate. This was partly to do with tradition and possibly to do with the hangover from the years of austerity since the end of WWII, for it did linger for some time, until the rebelliousness of youth against the institutions and traditions rose from the mid-sixties onwards.

I recall we had an old lady in the village whom I remember was always dressed in black, or so it seemed to me. She was a Mrs. Jones, but not of the Jones family of thirteen children who lived next door to us in Station Road, living somewhere down West End. Anyway, whenever someone in the village passed away, it was her job to go and lay them out, that is to say, she would wash the body and dress it in preparation for the funeral.

I will never forget one very hot summer day when, in order to place the body of someone whom I cannot recall, in the coffin, we had to remove the front bedroom window because there was no way on earth of getting a coffin up the stairs. This was in one of Sharpe’s cottages in Station Road before they were converted into fewer but larger dwellings. It wasn’t too difficult passing the empty coffin through the window from a pair of ladders, but by golly, it was a different story getting it through the window and safely to ground once it was occupied. And with it being such a hot summer day and the bedroom being very small, well, I will leave the stench to your imagination.

Once in a while, someone would pass away who was a member of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. This would mean the funeral service at Launton church being extended slightly, during which fellow members of the Order would gather around the coffin inside the church and go through a ritual of their own, the details of which I cannot clearly recall, but it was always quite fascinating to observe. I remember the late “Taffy” Bates being one of them as I believe so too was the late Alec Austin. I cannot recall all the others though as we are talking of about sixty years or so ago.

I remember so clearly though that years ago when I was very much younger in Launton, before the housing estates crept into the village, how the whole village would turn out for a funeral, because back then, everybody knew everybody and it was a very close-knit community. These days, I am still able to experience that closeness when it comes to the funeral of one of our local veterans, as within the Royal Engineers Association we too have a very close-knit community.

I was told a while ago that today’s70 is yesterday’s40 because we are tending to live that much longer these days, due to healthier living and medical advances. That said, however, I tend to look upon life as a toilet roll, (the closer you get to the end, the quicker it seems to go). So, make the very best of it and try to make sure that each week you are not in the obituaries columns of The Bicester Advertiser or The Oxford Mail.

Keep healthy and stay SAFE!

TonyJeacock, MInstRE | The ex-Launton Boy | November 2024