Death Becomes Her: Class, Gender, and Labor in the English Coffin Furniture Industry

Graham Titus, WPAMC ’25

Most people don’t like to think about death, but death was an important part of everyday life for the workers at Newman Brothers’ Coffin Furniture Manufactory. Located in the heart of Birmingham, UK’s historical Jewellery Quarter, the Coffin Works occupies the former Newman Brothers’ factory, built in 1894. The company supplied coffin furniture (handles, breastplates, crucifixes, and other ornaments) to undertakers and funeral homes for more than one hundred years. During this time, the company also expanded its offerings to include other funerary supplies like coffin linings, robes, shrouds, and embalming fluid.

Cornelius, our guide at the museum, demonstrated many of the steps required to manufacture high-end coffin furniture, including die sinking to create the design, drop stamping to press the design into sheet metal, fly pressing to cut away excess material, and smoothing and polishing the finished pieces. Seeing and hearing these machines in action helped capture a small part of the sensory environment of a nineteenth-century factory floor. As Cornelius described, naked gas flames illuminated the cramped and crowded spaces, filled with loud machinery and noxious chemicals.

In contrast to the harsh working conditions for laborers at the factory, Newman’s customers were elite, aristocratic members of society, and these customers expected exclusivity. Cornelius explained that workers typically weren’t buried with Newman Brothers’ furniture to avoid associating the product with poor or unfashionable customers. For elite customers, coffin furniture and other lavish funeral trappings reinforced a lifetime of status, wealth, style, and respectability on their final voyage. In the Victorian period, it was common to display the coffin for days before burial, allowing close scrutiny of the quality and expense of the deceased’s burial trappings. Newman Brothers reinforced its own associations with the wealthy elite, highlighting how they provided the coffin furniture for Winston Churchill, Princess Diana, the Queen Mother, and Wallis Simpson.

Much like class, ideas of gender propriety persisted in burial preparation. We saw examples of both ring-style handles, meant for women’s coffins, and bar-shaped swing handles, intended for men’s. Burial shrouds and robes showed only one minor difference: a bow at the neck indicated a men’s shroud.

Cremation was not legalized in England until 1884, and it would have contravened popular religious belief of the time that resurrection after death required the preservation of one’s mortal remains.¹ However, it became popular after World War II, as available land was prioritized for new construction rather than cemeteries. By 1965, 50% of all deaths in England were followed by cremation, signaling the start of a gradual decline for Newman Brothers, even after they adapted to producing the plastic furniture permitted in cremation ovens.² Joyce Green, who started at Newman Brothers as a secretary in 1949, became the final owner of the company in 1989 and shepherded the conversion of the building into a museum.³

Our tour also emphasized the community and social lives of the people who worked at Newman Brothers. The museum collected many oral histories from former employees, allowing exploration of their labor and social history. We heard tales of work stoppages to protest shortened tea breaks, theft of offcuts to create an employee’s wedding dress, workplace parties, and the lasting community forged among coworkers. These stories helped enliven a place that could have been a bit grim, reminding us that funerals (and elaborate coffin furniture) really are for the living.

1. Margaret Cox, Life and Death in Spitalfields, 1700-1850 (York: Council for British Archaeology, 1996), 98-111. ↩︎
2. Museum label, “Starting Over,” The Coffin Works, Birmingham, UK, seen on January 23, 2024. ↩︎
3. “1894 – 1999: Fleet Street Works,” The Coffin Works, accessed February 12, 2024, https://www.coffinworks.org/collection/newman-brothers-museum/history-1894-1999/. ↩︎