Hi my name is Kevin Hicks welcome to my YouTube channel the History Squad. Now today's video,
it's uh personal stories. I’ve been asked by many of my um subscribers could you give us some of
your personal stories. Well here's two, tales from the morgue, tales for the mortuary. You see as a
police officer anywhere in the world you have to deal with the horrible side of life and when
I was a British bobby one of my jobs was deputy coroner's officer, I used to deal with the dead
um sometimes just routine but other times terrible road traffic accidents fatalities or even worse
and on one of those occasions I had to attend a death I’m not going to go into details
but by the time we've recovered the body I was in a bit of a state. I needed to be cleaned up,
so the paramedics who are with me says hey let's go to the local mortuary you can clean up there
no problems at all so great, I radio in I’m going with the body down to the local mortuary and we
book in, and the mortuary attendant goes oh gosh PC hicks, yeah I said yeah can I go and use your
washroom yes please do when I finished I came out I was pretty decent I suppose and uh I then had to
wait for a lift and the mortuary attendant says instead of hanging around here because there was
bodies everywhere, why don't you go down into the old Victorian part of the mortuary have a mooch
around it's really interesting. So I, yeah all right I’ve never been to this particular mortuary
and with me was the paramedic who'd attended the scene of this terrible accident, and the two of us
go down this narrow passageway and it was like somewhat from Sherlock Holmes or Jack the Ripper,
cobbled stones on the road there and archways of brick and it's a little bit dark and I’m thinking
where are we going and believe it or not in the corner was the old Victorian body cart
yeah, with the big wagon wheels and I’m thinking wow I’m going back in time. Well we end up in I
think at the back of the mortuary where they've got these great big um fridges where they keep
the dead and being who we were we just had to have a look inside and there's like a bank of doors and
we open the one door and there's feet pointing out and tags on the end of the feet and so we
open another door and there's feet pointing out and tags on the feet and there's a big notice on
the door which says head in first feet pointing out. So we opened another door and there's
rows of feet of all these unfortunate souls and tags on each of them, and we get to the end door
and we open it and it's feet, feet, head, feet. Why has he been put in the wrong way around?
What's going on here? N ow there's not much gap in between the bodies because they don't need to
breathe they're dead but I want you to read the notice on the chest of this unfortunate person
so I lean in and then I notice that the paramedic is also
leaning in and we're getting very close to this dead body when all of sudden, Bang!
Unbeknown to me, right next to my head was a massive fan, a propeller. We'd gone through all
of the doors and we brought the temperature up and the thermostat cut in and the cooling fan the size
of an airplane exploded into action. Well what happened to me was quite funny because I leapt
so high into the air the paramedic actually caught me as he was running away we didn't stop until we
got back into the modern mortuary our hearts are pounding but then we had to go all the way back in
to shut the door. Lesson learned if you're going to be nosy and have a look in the cool storage
where the dead do lie, don't leave the doors open because you will be in for a surprise.
So another tale from the morgue, the mortuary if you like. To try and lighten our load we would
play up, we would I remember a lady saying to me look at that miserable policeman's face and
I says to her what's he just done? She said what do you mean? I said has he just dealt with a most
horrendous death and he's just coming back out on duty? In my day you didn't have um therapy
or anything like that you dealt with the blood on the road or the murder and you were back out
on the streets within an hour, so we used to you know, let some of the steam off by playing
each other up. I mean one incident just a simple thing as some policeman had found a mannequin,
just a shop mannequin and they floated it on the local lake the local village pond and uh radioed
'somebody floating face down in the lake' and a young WPC, a female police officer saw, it hitched
her skirt up straight away and she waded straight into the lake. Policemen don't run from danger,
not my kind of policeman, we run to it, and this young WPC was doing that and she waded
and she's almost swimming in the end and when she grabs the body and finds it's a mannequin
she's furious. Absolutely furious and one of the policemen who set it up made a mistake, he
hung around and he's laughing and she punched him right in the nose and it was a good punch because
it knocked him out. Well done young lass. This is the kind of things that policemen will get up to
if you leave us alone for too long. And my favorite story, now I was on the edge of this,
yeah is and it's been repeated many times by other police officers in other forces
and it's to do with the mortuary. Now our local mortuary it was uh it was old.
Now the fridges where you put the bodies in it was nothing like Hollywood. I love these
Hollywood ones where you open the door it's all this nice pristine clean and out comes this
drawer with a person in it and science no we weren't like that ours were a series of
doors that went all the way along and it's one big fridge behind it ,so if you've got 40 bodies in it
they're all in the same room, they're not separated so what we did was we persuaded
a new police officer, it's what you call a probationary officer to get in the fridge
and the way you do it is quite easily you persuade them that you're playing a joke on somebody else.
Get in the fridge cover you over with a sheet when we bring the drawer back out you simply rise up
and whoohoo, you will frighten the other probationer
yeah, okay. So we did, and we got a young chap and we lay him in and he's asking us all these
questions I’m not going to worry you are going to get me out aren't you yeah of course we are don't
be silly yeah and all these kind of things and uh covered him over with a sheet and we
closed the door and he expected us to open the door in a few minutes but we didn't,
we left him in there, not for too long but long enough. You see his nose he's
almost touching the metal stretcher above him and these fridges are open inside,
they are not actual just little cupboards and he's lying there waiting and wondering
when a hand from the body next to him came over and touched him and said
"Cold in here init? There he was another policeman, but the probationer unfortunately
was panicking and was headbutting, we had to open the door and drag him out
because the noise that he was making in there frightened everybody else. He never forgave us,
he never forgave us an inch but boy did we laugh, gallows humor.
Well I hope you enjoyed those stories from the morgue if you did like share and subscribe and
try to remember to turn on the notifications that way you know what's coming next now I’ve got some
more stories to tell you in the future but before I do a shout out to some of my Patreon members,
Jake Caen and Darryll and Erin Pratt and their children Ethan and CJ, hey guys thanks a bunch.