UNDERTAKERS do not always take their pleasures sadly, and some of the best parties have been thrown in the workshop of one establishment where wooden overcoats are tailored to measure.
One night the drinks ran low, and as it was long after hours the problem of securing them engaged everybody’s attention.
The pet hotel which usually catered for their requirements was rung up, only to elicit, the fact that the police were on watch outside. Undeterred, one bright spirit unfolded his plan.
A coffin was put into the hearse and taken to the side door of the hotel, where the licensee’s husband was known to be very ill.
The police obligingly held the door open for them as it was carried in. Then the coffin was hurriedly filled with beer, carefully packed with a blanket to stop clinking, and solemnly brought forth again under the very nose of the police.
Indeed, they sympathised with the men, and said they thought that “after all, it was better to get it out of the hotel”. “Of course,” said one, “you never know what’ll happen in a pub”. He must have wondered, though, a few days later when he saw the licensee’s husband behind the bar again!
On another occasion there was a hurried warning of a raid, and all evidence of a party was hastily stowed away in coffins. Included in the evidence was a small jockey, who was too drunk to walk away, so they put him in a coffin, too.
In the resultant excitement and the happy reunion when all danger was passed, they forgot about the jockey, and when he suddenly started knocking on the walls of his coffin in a frantic struggle for air, some of them actually thought it was a ghost.
It was nearly a corpse which they dragged forth at last!
– Brisbane Truth May 22 1932
Categories: Australian Hotels
Reblogging this to my readers at sister site Timeless Wisdoms
Love it. Hubby’s ancestors ran a pub in Burra in the 1800’s and the parlour was used as a mortuary until the town could afford to build one.