Some Related-ish Q's

[3a-berkeley.livejournal.com]

Hi, sorry if this is not allowed, but I am writing a story inspired by Jeeves and Bertie and I'm having trouble finding some information I could really use, and I thought maybe people here might know or know in which direction to point me. I was wondering about laundry-presumably that was part of Jeeves' job or did he send it out anywhere to be cleaned? Also, what were funeral practices like in 1930s Britain? Thanks so much!

Comments

[derien.livejournal.com]

I don't think that would have been the usual way to do it. We think nothing these days of embalming and sticking people in a cooler and all that, but keeping someone on ice costs a lot - even these days in most places there are not the resources for that. (My Mom died in Korea last March and they were charging me $67 every day her body was in the freezer drawer.)

Now, they did reinvent embalming during the American Civil War so they could ship bodies home, so it's not impossible. A very rich family who had very good reason to want a particular person at the funeral might wait, but I think most people just emotionally don't like to wait to get a funeral out of the way.

Far as I know there was a usual laying out of three days to give them a little time to wake up if they were just in a coma, but if it were cold and everyone was pressed for time I suppose they might leave it until the weekend.

In New England a century ago when the ground was frozen in midwinter they would stack the coffins in a crypt to inter when the ground thawed, but the services and gathering were held early on and the interment was only attended by the gravedigger and maybe a few other interested parties, not an event.

[3a-berkeley.livejournal.com]

Okay, yeah, this guy was definitely dead. He was pretty much gutted in his bedroom. The family is extremely wealthy-some extended members are titled and his only other sibling is a sister who lives in Australia.

[derien.livejournal.com]

I would imagine there would be a little delay for the police, then. They might desire the body to remain in the morgue while they investigate. Then you get into procedurals of the time, which I don't really know about. It could be possible that the body might not be released until they felt they had gathered all the information they could from it, but at that time I'm not sure how much they would assume they could get. I really don't know. I would imagine that a week or so might be sufficient. I haven't even read a lot of Agatha Cristie.

[3a-berkeley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the police are investigating. They're the ones who told the valet about the crime. I imagine a week at most, the flat would be an active crime scene. I've read about Victorian era crime solving from Patricia Cornwall, and I think the newest bit of forensics in the interwar period (nibeteen teens-50s-roughly between WWI&WWII), was fingerprinting, which was all done manually, of course.