A YELLOW pencil, knife sharpened to a point at one end and teeth marks chewed into the other, has recently been rediscovered in an old garage in Richmond.
It is not just any old pencil.
In black capitals on the side it says: “WILL HIRSTWOOD – EASTBOURNE JOINERY WORKS AND GARAGE – DARLINGTON 2498.”
It is a pencil that takes us to the heart of one of the greatest scandals to ever rock Darlington: the Coffin Lid Scandal. Indeed, it shook the whole nation.
As well as being a joiner, Hirstwood doubled as an undertaker, and over several years at the start of the 1940s, he colluded with a Darlington crematorium furnaceman in saving coffin lids from the oven and reusing them.
The first Darlington crematorium, which was the scene of the Great Coffin Lid Scandal of 1945. Darlington's crem opened in 1901, a year before cremation was legalised in Britain, and was the only crematorium between the Tweed and the Humber for 30 years
“It is the revolting horrible desecration and a ghoulish interference with what most people regard as the most sacred rites in the whole of the Christian faith,” said prosecutor JC Park, when the two men appeared before Darlington magistrates in February 1945.
He said that at the end of a funeral service, the coffin was placed on the catafalque and Bowman, waiting behind a screen, wound an endless belt which removed it from the sight of the mourners into an ante-chamber in front of the furnace. This, said Mr Park, was the “final journey” which the mourners had every reasonable expectation would come to its conclusion in the furnace.
But, no. As soon as the congregation had left the chapel, Bowman unscrewed the lid and the name plate from the coffin before sending it unlidded, with the body inside gazing skywards, into the gas jets.
Perhaps Bowman would then call the number on the pencil, Darlington 2498, and arrange for Hirstwood to call at the crem in his hearse and take the lids back to his yard. Who would suspect an undertaker in a hearse to be handling hot coffin lids?
At the Eastbourne Joinery Works, police found 31 coffin-shaped pieces of wood which they said were lids. Some still had white drapes for Anglicans and mauve drapes for Catholics attached to them, and all had screw holes on the top showing a nameplate had been removed and nail holes down the sides where the handles had once been.
The lids were found to have the name of undertakers on them from Barnard Castle, Staindrop, Middlesbrough, Whitby, Northallerton, Shildon and Ferryhill, and a couple had scorchmarks on them.
This had been a systematic theft over a number of years, said Mr Park.
Headlines from The Northern Echo and the Darlington & Stockton Times in 1945 as the scandal unfolded
“As long ago as October 1943, there was a pile of some 30 coffin lids in the back garage of Hirstwood’s premises and no matter how often or how many of them were used, the pile never got any less,” he said.
It was, he said, “a crime as despicable, as revolting and as repugnant to all feeling of human decency as one could imagine”.
His lurid language catapulted the catafalque crime into the national papers and Hirstwood and Bowman had infamy thrust upon them as if there were a pair of bodysnatchers.
Mr JE Brown-Hulmes said: “My friend Mr Park was not describing Burke and Hare of infamous memory. He was describing William Hirstwood and Paul Bowman, citizens of Darlington, men who until a week past Wednesday had never had the finger of scorn and shame directed towards them, who had never had one breath of suspicion raised against their character of ability.”
Solicitor Charles Hinks, whose practice still bears his name in Darlington, said: “The set purpose of the prosecution is to appeal to the sentimental prejudice and sanctimonious humbug of the very worst type in order to bolster up the case – a case against these men which is not there,” he said.
The defence claimed that no crime had been committed. Each lid was only worth 30 shillings, and there was no evidence that any money had ever changed hands and no evidence that Hirstwood had re-used any lids.
It was normal, it was claimed, for fittings to be removed prior to cremation so that the metal did not have to be raked from the ashes.
Indeed, when Memories first told this story about 20 years ago, an anonymous caller told us that people in the Eastbourne area still considered that it was all a fit-up.
The jury at Durham Assizes disagreed. Bowman, 59, of Bates Avenue, Cockerton, who had been employed as a furnaceman at the crem for 10 years, was found guilty of the theft of coffin lids and Hirstwood, 49, was found guilty of handling stolen coffin lids.
The judge, Mr Justice Sir Wintringham Stable, who was known as “Owlie” because of his beaky nose, said: “No doubt you thought it would be the last thing in the world if you were discovered. No one, except a person of morbid imagination, would have suspected you.”
He sentenced them to 18 months each in gaol.
We don’t know what became of them after serving their time, but we do know that Will Hirstwood’s pencil has been lying in a garage attached to a house in Maison Dieu in Richmond for about 80 years.
“We’re renovating the place,” says Jim Entwistle who has recently moved in with his wife, Sally, and children Willa and Jude. “To the side of our new home is a mouldering garage containing all kinds of odds and ends left by the tide of other lives that came before us - rusted tools, yellowed sheets of newspaper, jam jars filled with obsolete metal fittings.
“I was in there, desperately looking for something with which to write a note to the plumber. Among the cluttered shelves I spotted a yellow pencil with black writing on the side. I plucked it from the dust, wiped it on my grimy sweatshirt and wrote the message on the back of an old till receipt.
“Later, at lunchtime, I pulled it from my pocket and looked more closely at the writing on its side, and wondered who Will was…”
READ MORE: SAVING SIGNAL HOUSE, A CURIOUS-SHAPED RAILWAY BUILDING IN DARLINGTON
- If you can tell us anymore about the Coffin Lid Scandal and the people involved in it, we’d love to hear from you
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