The first night Jack Cooke slept in his hearse – stretched out on the wooden bench where a coffin would normally lie – he dreamed of his own funeral.
The 35-year-old had bought the second-hand body-carrier – all 18 foot and three tonnes of it – from an undertaker in Bristol. It was the ideal way, he believed, to embark on a road trip to discover Britain’s most unusual and forgotten tombs. “A hearse seemed like the perfect way to chase ghosts,” says Cooke.
Cooke himself had grown up next to a church and confesses he always had something of a morbid curiosity about the dead. But it was only recently, thinking about his childhood, that he wondered how many people had actually been buried there.
“I realised I’d been living surrounded by thousands of dead people, and I got quite intrigued by that.”
So he started exploring their stories, and others he discovered on cycle rides with his son around churchyards in Suffolk, where he now lives. It was then he decided to take a hearse on the road in search for more.
“They’re not the celebrity dead. It was a sort of tribute to unsung men and women,” he says.
Those ghosts, as Cooke calls them, now form the heart of a new travelogue, The End of the Road, which was published on Thursday, offering a unique insight into Britain’s landscape through the stories of its departed, from giants to lion-tamers, shepherds to kings. It’s a journey that took Cooke thousands of miles, from the Sussex Downs, where a little-known “umbrella” monument guards the memory of Indian soldiers killed in the first world war, to the Isle of Hoy in Scotland, where a fibreglass headstone commemorates an 18th-century suicide – a young woman buried without ceremony in a peat bog, only to be dug up 150 years later perfectly mummified.
Cooke discovered that the dead lay everywhere – in graveyards, of course, but also fields, roadsides, mountains, lakes, islands, forests, even people’s back gardens.
“Britain is a land of memorials, yet we skirt around them,” he says. In part, he believes, because we’re loath to accept our own mortality.
But Cooke encourages us to stop and look – as he did with his previous book, The Tree Climber’s Guide, where he scaled trees to gain a different perspective on the city below.
Cooke’s aim is to encourage us to connect with the past through our memorials – like the boulder protruding through the spiky undergrowth in the wilds of Dartmoor, etched with lead lettering in memory of: William Donaghy of Liverpool.
Donaghy – dressed immaculately in a suit and tie – was found lying dead beside the stone in February 1914, and a great mystery grew up around him because he was a teacher from Liverpool but was travelling under a false name, explains Cooke.
He’d left some strange items in a nearby railway station locker – a pocket watch, a knife, a revolver, and a mourning ring – and he’d then hiked into Dartmoor, carrying a guidebook, a shaving kit and the equivalent of £2,000 in cash. He was in the prime of life when he died.
The memorial is overgrown with gorse now, says Cooke: “There’s no path to reach it, so it’s a bit of a scramble. But it’s such a beautiful scenic spot it’s worth the exertion,” he says. You lean on the boulder and you look at the last thing he would have seen. I can think of worse places to die.” Unlike the ignominy of Charles Byrne, a genetic giant, almost 8 feet tall, with the growth disorder now known as acromegaly. Byrne’s dying wish had been a burial at sea after a lifetime exhibiting himself to a gawking Victorian public – but his body was snatched on the way to Margate and his skeleton hung on display in a museum’s cabinet (the Hunterian Museum in London).
We should attempt to commune more with the dead, Cooke says. “Not in a Victorian seance, candle-lit in the back of a mausoleum way. But in the way of a conversation – if only with ourselves – about the past, and all the people buried around us”.
