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.

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.