WITH his rock star good looks, lust for women, fast cars and champagne, Howard Hodgson is not your average funeral director.
Now the man who made millions from funerals and became one of Maggie Thatcher’s favourite entrepreneurs has revealed his wild life in the death business.
This fourth-generation funeral director has written a book telling the incredible story of how he went from riches to rags and back to being loaded again.
Nicknamed Mr Death, and with a personal fortune of nearly £70million, he has joined the growing number of wealthy Brits who live in Monaco as tax exiles.
He recently spent £5.5million on an 80ft yacht, named King Charles III, which is docked in the French Mediterranean port of Antibes, and owns two Jaguars.
Howard — dubbed the David Beckham of death for his looks, style and aura of celebrity — has also fathered six children, including two 18-year-old sons, George and Horatio.
When I ask if they are twins, he reveals they have different mothers.
His second wife Christine is mum to George, while actress Natalie Roles — DS Debbie McAllister in ITV cop soap The Bill — gave birth to Horatio.
At his posh apartment in London’s Belgravia, surrounded by framed photos of his large family, Howard admits cheating is in his genes.
He says: “My great-grandfather George Hodgson had an amazing way with women. He expanded his funeral business in Birmingham by opening new branch offices and installing an unpaid mistress in each of them.
“They took care of his sexual needs. He let the women run the business for him and live rent-free. His son — my grandfather — was known as the Stallion of Handsworth.”
When Howard was a boy, his father Paul ran Hodgson & Sons as a very successful business.
But he had affairs and a drink problem which ended his marriage and plunged the firm into crisis.
Howard, who was educated at private school in Switzerland, started work at 18 as an undertaker’s apprentice with a funeral director in Cardiff where he learnt his trade, literally from under the ground up.
He returned to Birmingham to work with his dad but they fell out.
So, Aston Villa fan Howard worked at a travel agency chain owned by the club’s millionaire owner, Doug Ellis, and at night he sold funeral plans.
Two neighbours in an apartment block, Kako and Anna, each wanted to take out £25-a-month plans — a fortune in the 1970s — but insisted their salesman was naked.
Howard says: “Amazingly, neither plan lapsed. I declined Kako’s invitation to present to a group of her friends as I feared I might die on the job at the tender age of 21.”
Four years later, in 1975, Howard was married to first wife Marianne and had a baby son to support when he borrowed money to pay £14,000 to buy his family’s ailing funeral firm.
Howard did not realise that Midland Bank wanted to foreclose on the business he had just bought and that the firm had so little credit that they had to buy coffins in cash only.
One bloke took a swing at the chief mourner, missed him completely and hit me straight on the jaw. The room was so full I couldn’t go down — I just rocked
Howard
But he persuaded the bank manager to extend the firm’s overdraft, and Hodgson & Sons gave families a top-class funeral, whatever their budget.
There were times, though, when even his best-laid plans went wrong.
Before the funeral of a West Indian man, there was a huge family gathering at his home where a fight broke out around the coffin.
Howard remembers: “One bloke took a swing at the chief mourner, missed him completely and hit me straight on the jaw. The room was so full I couldn’t go down — I just rocked.
“I said, ‘Ladies, and gentlemen, if we don’t have some decorum I shall take everything away and we’ll come back and have another go tomorrow’. Thankfully they started behaving.”
On another occasion a large “Peaky Blinders” family had a huge funeral for an 18-year-old girl who took her own life.
Howard led the cortege of a hearse and eight limousines through a huge council estate.
He says: “I suddenly heard a noise behind me. A limousine’s doors opened and five young men were running across to the home of the dead girl’s husband.
“They’d decided her death was his fault and they were going to lynch him. I went up and said, ‘Please, gentlemen, get back in the car’, to which I got a hail of abuse.
“Then I heard the deep voice of the family matriarch behind me say, ‘Get back in those cars, now’, and they were gone.”
Tragedy struck in 1982 when Howard and Marianne’s three-year-old son Charles drowned in a hotel pool while they were on holiday in Thailand with friends.
Howard’s pal, the firm’s solicitor Philip Dunn, had allowed the little boy to walk back to his parents on his own. Charles was later found dead in four feet of water.
Howard says: “When Charles died, we never thought to say, ‘Wait a minute, why did you just let him run off?’.
“Later Philip would embezzle a million pounds from me and Hodgson Holdings. He went to jail.”
By day, Howard hid his grief and carried on running the business — but at night he went home and spent hours staring at a wall.
He says: “I was slowly going mad.”
But he was saved by Michael Sullivan, a young organist who “hymned up” tunes such as Light My Fire or It’s All Over Now and played them at cremation services without loved ones ever knowing.
He saved my life and I will love him forever. I just poured all that grief, all that anger, everything, into the lyrics
Howard
Howard says: “I told him one day he’d get caught. He was obviously a talented musician who would make more money from his own songs.
“But he said he couldn’t write lyrics, so I offered to do the words if he wrote the tunes.
“One night I looked out the window and up the drive came a horrible battered old lime-green Vauxhall Viva.
“Michael rang the doorbell, gave me a tape and said, ‘I wrote the music, you write the lyrics’.
“He saved my life and I will love him forever. I just poured all that grief, all that anger, everything, into the lyrics.”
Within five years, Howard had built Hodgson & Son into Britain’s biggest independent funeral firm, with over 550 branches, and floated it on the stock exchange.
He says: “Once we’d floated, I caught the imagination. A funeral director who looked a bit like a rock star, had long hair, a fedora and a white overcoat. Wow! I was often compared to Robert Redford and I played up to that.
“Other people said I looked like a third-division footballer or an ageing rock star. I was only 37!”
Howard’s shares rocketed by 400 per cent in one year.
Amid the media attention, he cheated on his wife with PR worker Caroline Ashe, which caused a sensation, but he managed to sell the company in 1991 for more than £7million.
Howard’s life story is being published in two parts — the first is subtitled The Struggle.
He says: “£7million was a lot of money in those days and it made the front page of The Times.
“Volume two is called The Madness because anything I’d ever done I completely exceeded, in a bad way.
“I didn’t have to go to work. I spent most of my days in bed. I thought I was invincible.
“I set up businesses without taking any care or attention to them. I had to look in the mirror and give myself a good b****cking.”
Eventually he and his son Jamieson, 41, set up Memoria, a network of 14 crematoriums where families could personalise funeral services for their loved ones.
Howard says: “I made a conscious decision. No more Mr Death. We’re not going to be distracted by an even older ageing rock star or a seventh-division footballer so I never did any interviews.”
The company sold for £200million in 2020 and Howard’s share was well over £60million.
Later, over lunch at a swanky Italian restaurant which is a favourite with Chelsea’s players, I ask Howard how he would feel to be described as the David Beckham of the funeral trade.
He smiles: “That’s a compliment. People think David Beckham is vaguely silly. I’ve met him, he’s not.
“He’s an awfully nice guy and a very bright man.”
HOWARD HODGSON personally conducted more than 10,000 funerals – each one meticulously planned for the grieving family.
Today’s low-cost cremations, as advertised on TV, make him angry.
He says: “I don’t see why you should send your mother 500 miles away to be cremated while you go down the pub.
“Since the world began, mankind has always gone to a funeral and the body has always been there. It’s part of the healing process. Can you imagine the Queen’s funeral without a coffin? No.”
Has the man who turns 75 this month planned his own funeral?
Mr Death wants to be cremated – like 80 per cent of Brits.
But when it comes to the music, he says: “I wouldn’t have the 23rd Psalm or Abide With Me. I’ve heard them both far too many times.
“It’s Elgar’s Nimrod for me.”
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