A graveyard shift with Britain’s Gen Z undertakers

Emily Fisher is not your average 20-year-old “Scouse prinny”. Yes, she likes Harry Styles, getting her nails done — long, pointed and pillarbox red when we meet — and pulling up to the function with her trademark bouncy blonde blow-dry. And yes, she likes sunbeds and goes pole dancing with her friends for fitness. But she also loves driving the company hearse.

This is because Emily is an undertaker.

More precisely, she is an apprentice funeral director at Gornall’s Funeral Services in Rainford, Merseyside, 15 miles outside Liverpool. The branch is owned by Dignity, which runs more than 500 funeral homes around Britain. It was Dignity that signed Emily up to her apprenticeship — still an unusual route into an industry where, traditionally, you learnt the trade by joining a family firm or simply getting your foot through the door.

For years, Britain has been worrying about what its young people are going to do with themselves. Almost a million 16 to 24-year-olds are now classed as “NEET” (not in education, employment or training), and the question of how to get them into work has become a political fixation. In July, less than 10 days into his new job, Andy Burnham put apprenticeships at the centre of his project. “From today Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap,” he proclaimed.

But what about the top hat and cane?

At a moment when politicians are desperately searching for jobs young people might actually want to do, Britain’s funeral homes offer an unlikely case study. Undertaking is old-fashioned, physical, stubbornly resistant to working from home, and requires an intimacy with death that most people spend their lives avoiding. And yet, a small cohort of twenty-somethings is choosing it anyway.

Emily is one of them.

“I was always better at English than maths at school,” Emily says as we drive towards Gornall’s. Her Pandora bracelet and Tiffany necklace glint in the sun. Her phone case is pink with yellow polka dots and bears the words: I’m a busy woman.

The only remotely gothic thing about her is the plush keyring dangling from her car keys: Thing, the severed hand from the Netflix series Wednesday, a modern retelling of The Addams Family. It swings cheerfully from side to side as Emily winds through the country lanes towards the funeral home, a small branch where she often mans the office alone, dealing with walk-ins and appointments.

Her inspiration to become an undertaker arrived, as many teenage epiphanies now do, via TikTok. Emily was 15 and had been considering becoming a teacher or journalist when she came across an American woman documenting life inside her own funeral home. “I’d never considered it as a career,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone who was an undertaker, but I just thought how interesting it was.”