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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 30th April 2008

When the corridors of power echo to the strains of ‘Nil nisi bunkum’

When did the newfangled service for a dead nob first come in — the one that says it is a ‘celebration’ of the life, rather than a lament for the death? I would like to read a learned survey of the subject. When I was a boy in the Thirties, all centred on the funeral, which was a solemn, often grand affair. People counted the number of cars, or carriages, which followed the hearse, and spoke of ‘a forty-carriage do’. Everyone wore mourning black suits, black ankle-length dresses, hats and veils. Sometimes as many as a thousand mourners trudged behind the coffin to the cemetery. As the cortège approached, everyone on the pavements stood still. Men took off their hats (everyone wore hats or caps then), and women bent their heads, or even curtsied. In those times, fashionable TV dons did not preach the scientific-atheist doctrine that a human life has no more significance than a chunk of rock, or a puddle of water. Nearly all of us saw death as a dread, mysterious adventure into the unknown, an ‘undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns’. I saw it as the misty region on the far side of Biddulph Moor, which not even our longest walks allowed us to penetrate, a region of hostile villages whose savage inhabitants came out to stone strangers.

The first of the modern-style commemorations, I think, was in honour of H.G. Wells, who died in 1946, and took place at Golders Green crematorium. It was well attended, not only by friends and followers but by critics and enemies, hoping that some incongruous note would be struck at the obsequies of a man who had preached limitless progress but had died in despair. They were well rewarded, for a clumsy person struggling for a seat in the crowded ‘Chapel of Repose’ — probably J.B.S. Haldane or J.D. Bernal — inadvertently touched the button which started the incineration machinery, and the coffin, with Wells inside it, slid remorselessly into the flames before the encomiums had been pronounced. There were, I was told, a few irreverent guffaws and Baroness Budberg, the last maîtresse en titre, burst into tears.

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Herbert Thornton

May 4th, 2008 4:03am

The account of somebody accidentally pressing the starter button to send H.G.Wells' to the incinerator before the due time reminds me of another story about it. Some woman - I forget who it was, but she apparently knew him well - is said to have remarked something like -

"Oh dear. He was always terrified of premature ejaculation."

Gesto Charles Ranald

May 5th, 2008 8:21pm

A pity you could not find it in your heart to acknowledge my comment to you last week when I pointed out that 'Twenty Years on' was the territory of
Harrow and not Eton as you wrongly pronounced.

A shame really that a journalist of your emminence finds it so difficult to admit to a mistake.