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‘Touting the Dead’ brought back childhood memories

May 28, 2012 Letters

Dear Editor,
Your recent News item headed “Touting the Dead” took me back to my childhood in the early 1940s, when I had to remain in the public hospital with a fractured arm.
I was placed in a fee-paying (50cents-a-day) ward for female adult patients.  The bed next to mine was occupied by an elderly woman with a broken leg in a sling.  Two touts – always men in those days – from different funeral parlours would visit the ward during the day, to check on patients. One of them, always in a black tunic, kept a close eye on my neighbour, who was mostly asleep, and would take her pulse.  One day, as he entered the ward, the sleeping woman suddenly gave a prolonged sigh.
He took her pulse, called the nurse, who pronounced her dead, and he then scurried away, presumably to transact business.
I remember this incident clearly, not only because of the ‘last breath’ factor, but because as the porters carried the corpse that night down the stairs on a stretcher, the head bumped a few treaders, which caused them to laugh.
A few years previously I had seen touting from a different angle, when an elderly relative who lived with us died.  We learnt of her death through two touts – ‘crows’ we called them –  when they came at the same time, one behind the other, to tell us the news and ‘arrange business’.
Things have not changed that much in 70 years, the difference being that ‘touting’ is now aggressive, and done on hospital premises – by both men and women.
Geralda Dennison

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