Pall Bearer or Coffin Bearer?

When arranging a funeral, a family often has a choice of whether they wish to pay for coffin bearers or whether to provide them from family & friends.

The coffin bearers carry the coffin from the hearse to the catafalque in the chapel for the funeral service. But there are sometimes alternatives. 

The term “pall bearer” is often misused because the pall is the name given to the decorated cloth material or flag draped over a coffin, most recently observed at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. Most coffins these days do not get draped in a pall, but they are available from most funeral directors if families ask. Flags often get used with funerals of serving or retired members of the armed forces. 

During the strictest of rules & regulations during the pandemic, many funeral directors &/or crematoria insisted that only staff bear the coffin or even, that the coffin was wheeled in on a covered trolley to minimise the number of people touching the coffin.

Some coffins are still wheeled on a covered trolley because of the weight of the person and the casket. The trolley is simply a safer method of transporting the coffin to the catafalque. The trolley is like a hospital trolley and specially designed to carry a person. These days, you are more likely to see a traditional pall being used to cover this trolley. 

Most coffins chosen as the casket in the UK tend to be wood veneer & so the handles on the side of the coffin are decorative & not load bearing. As a result, the coffin is always carried on shoulders, unless a trolley is used.

In the USA, it is more common to see coffins carried by the side handles below waist height. This is only possible with solid wood caskets with load bearing handles.

Traditionally, men are chosen as the coffin bearers but there is nothing to stop families having women to bear the coffin, or a mix of gender. Unless the coffin requires a trolley, weight is rarely an issue. A heavy coffin might just need 6 bearers rather than 4. What is more important than gender is that ideally the bearers are of similar height so that when it rests on the bearers’ shoulders, the coffin is carried relatively horizontally.

More and more funeral directors now have mixed-gender staff and so can now provide a mix of male and female coffin bearers. Many smaller family-run Funeral Directors do not employ coffin bearers full-time, but instead, they will use a freelance team of coffin bearers who work for a range of firms. As a result, if families therefore request 6 female coffin bearers, they should be able to provide it. 

Why is this important for celebrants?

The arrangements for carrying the coffin is the responsibility of the Funeral Director and not with the celebrant. But it is important to know about these things because in time you will see all sorts of arrangements happening and it is important to not look surprised and its good to understand why.

A funeral celebrant is an important professional in the funeral industry and so to be informed on a wider level gives you credibility within your local area and it will help you help families if they ever ask you something related to carrying the coffin in your meeting. You should defer them to the FD, but you can always give them some objective information to consider. 

It is a great honour to see a coffin carried by family and friends. Not everyone can do it and they are still mainly men. I also have huge respect for those more forward-thinking Funeral Directors who actively promote and supply women as coffin bearers. Ultimately, however, it is for the next-of-kin to decide what they want. It is great when they are told about all the different options available. to them. As a fully informed and knowledgeable funeral celebrant, you will be able to add even more value to support the families of the bereaved. 



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