I’m a funeral director but when my son, 3, died I couldn’t cry for a year

If a friend or relative died in the Eighties, the chances are they were buried or cremated by Howard Hodgson’s funeral firm. Such was his ubiquity he was known as Mr Death, but with his mop of blond hair, ageing rock star looks and penchant for flash cars and fast women, he made an unlikely funeral director.

Now the man who has met nine Prime Ministers and is on familiar terms with King Charles, of whom he wrote an unauthorised biography 20 years ago, has penned his own life story revealing how he revolutionised the British funeral business.

From the back streets of Birmingham, this fourth-generation funeral director has made £70million from the fate that awaits us all: enough to live in Monaco and buy a super yacht.

But it was a different story back in 1975 when Hodgson, who was married to first wife Marianne and had a baby son to support, was forced to borrow £14,000 to buy his family’s ailing funeral firm. The Midland Bank wanted to foreclose on the business he had just saved and the firm had so little credit it had to buy coffins with cash only.

Howard, now 74, says: “In the post war period, British funerals were all very much the same and people generally died at home. When a person died, the undertaker would come round to the house, put a couple of pennies on the eyes, bandage the jaw to keep it shut.

“The body would be measured up for a coffin and then when that was made and delivered to the house, the body would be brought down to the front parlour and placed in the coffin.

“People would come round to pay their respects, the drinking would start and carry on after the funeral.

“Funerals were generally religious, impersonal and the same.”

But a trip to America by his funeral director father, Paul, changed all that.

“They had proper chapels of rest, refrigeration and were offering people a proper service,” Howard continues. “It was a sophisticated operation giving people real choice with a quote at the end so there would be no dispute.”

Importing these ideas back to the UK, Hodgson & Sons, now under Howard’s watchful eye, grew to become Britain’s biggest independent funeral firm, buying up other firms, improving premises and modernising and personalising the entire industry.

In 1975, they conducted 400 funerals, by 1986 it was 23,000 and, by the end of the decade, it was a staggering 60,000. The company was floated on the stock exchange, shares rocketed by 400%, and then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made Howard Entrepreneur of the Year in 1987.

But he admits today: “I never actually wanted to be a funeral director. I was a rebel at school. I wanted to be a Beatle or a footballer but I guess it was my destiny.”

Howard’s autobiography – part one is out now with part two to follow later this year – charts his rollercoaster ride to success but it is the small stories behind the tens of thousands of funerals he has conducted that are perhaps the most poignant… and darkly funny.

“I remember one evening as I was about to lock up the shop in Birmingham, an elderly lady approached me and asked if she could come in to say goodbye to a deceased man in our Chapel of Rest,” he recalls.

“She was all alone and confessed she would be unable to attend the funeral as she had been this man’s secret lover for the past 30 years. She asked me to accompany her as she had never seen a dead body before.

“She touched his hand and said, ‘That week we had in Blackpool together must have done him some good. He looks so well’. ‘Well? He’s dead!’ That isn’t what I said of course but she was a lovely lady and it was clear she had loved him very much.

“The strangest request I had was from a Hindu gentleman who asked me if I would take him down to the fridges, open the one where his father was stored and touch his head to bring him back to life. I thought to myself, ‘If I genuinely had that power do you think I would be working as a funeral director in Birmingham?’”

Howard also recalls conducting a service for one of the siblings of the late, great comedy actress Thora Hird, who starred in Last of the Summer Wine and In Loving Memory.

“It was cold in the chapel and I remember Thora lifting up her skirt at the back to warm herself on this little gas fire,” he smiles.

Howard, who lives in Monaco these days, believes one of the biggest mistakes people make now in planning their own funeral is to opt for a quick cremation without a proper service, thinking they are sparing their loved ones the stress and expense of a proper funeral.

“There is a reason we’ve had traditional funerals forever,” he tells me. “It’s part of saying goodbye and the grieving process.

“People say, ‘Oh I don’t care what you do with me, put me in a bin liner, whatever’. But I think in trying to make things easier for their children, they make it worse.

“The biggest mistake people make is denying their loved ones this opportunity to properly say goodbye. Imagine how it would have been for the nation to not have had the late Queen’s coffin at her funeral or the same with Princess Diana.

“It was important for the nation to say goodbye properly and it is even more important for people to say goodbye to their old mum properly.

“There is a place for these cremation-only arrangements but I do think people need to think very carefully about the importance of a proper respectful goodbye rather than sending someone off for cremation a few hundred miles away while you go down the pub for a couple of sausage rolls. Is that really what we want for our loved ones?”

Howard is no stranger to grief in his personal life as well as his professional one.

The twice married father-of-six lost his second son, Charles, who drowned in a hotel swimming pool in Thailand in 1982, aged three.

“I didn’t cry for over a year,” he recalls sadly. “It was too serious. You’d think as someone who conducted funerals for a living, I’d be better equipped to handle the grief, but my son’s death was sudden and devastating and it doesn’t get much worse than that.

“When my father died I couldn’t stop crying, wishing I had told him I loved him more but with Charles, it was like an out-of-body experience, watching it from above.

“Everyone was so kind, and then after the funeral, nothing.

“The invitations to dinner dry up in case you want to talk about it. I understand, but it is an incredibly lonely thing.”

Having experienced bereavement at its most brutal, Howard’s business mantra of doing unto others as you would have done to yourself became even more important.

“We had gone from doing two or three funerals a week to five a day, but I never forgot that for the bereaved families their funeral was the only one and it had to be perfect. I had to be kind and caring and above all efficient and on time.”

Howard, currently married to businesswoman Christine, had his own brush with death last year, prompting his retirement from the funeral business. He had sold his company, Memoria, to Darwin Bereavement Services Fund in 2021, but had stayed on as CEO to manage the business.

He was watching his beloved Aston Villa beat Arsenal 2-0 in the Premier League when he felt a searing pain in his arm and across his chest.

“I missed the [Ollie] Watkins goal because I had to go and lie down,” he admits. “Afterwards, I was told I’d had a heart attack. I’m fine now but it was enough of a warning at the time to finally retire properly.”

For a man who has spent his life conducting other people’s funerals, Howard doesn’t seem particularly organised for his own send-off just yet.

“It’s not planned yet, no. I do know I want to be cremated rather than buried. I will have some religious content, just to back my horses both ways, but I want it to be a celebration, too.

“There will be Beatles music. Get Back, which is my phone ring tone, Hey Jude and possibly A Day in the Life.”

Claret and blue flowers maybe?

“Oh yes!” he smiles. “There will be something about Aston Villa there. That, like death, is certain.”

This Life In Death, Volume One: The Struggle, by Howard Hodgson (Chipmunka Publishing) is out now. Visit chipmunkapublishing.com