Buried alive: The fascinating tale of Mitchelstown's Mick Meaney and his Kilburn stunt

Born in Tipperary, and a resident of Co Cork, Mick Meaney set a world record in a stunt that sparked a rivalry with with a man from Cobh

Mick Meaney with his manager Butty Sugrue  after completing 61 days underground, a feat explored in a new TG4 documentary. 

Mick Meaney was an unlikely celebrity. He was born in 1934 on a farm, on the side of a mountain, outside Ballyporeen, Co Tipperary. He emigrated to London, working as navvy, and was sending remittances back to Mitchelstown, Co Cork, for his pregnant wife and three-year-old daughter when he captured the world’s attention in 1968 with an audacious stunt to bury himself alive in the heart of London in a world record attempt for the “longest time spent buried alive”.

Kerryman Michael “Butty” Sugrue, a kind of father figure to Meaney, was the impresario pulling the strings. Sugrue was a rogue, and a legendary figure amongst the Irish community in London in the 1960s. He had worked in the circus as a strongman, and owned a couple of London pubs, including The Admiral Nelson in Kilburn. “He would never be the one who went into the hole,” as a contributor says during Beo Faoin bhFód (Buried Alive), a TG4 documentary about Meaney’s story.

Sugrue was a master publicist. Before the cameras in The Admiral Nelson pub, with Meaney sitting on the coffin, Sugrue milked it for all he was worth. Resting his hands on Meaney’s shoulders, he played the patriot card: “You know, Mick, we’re not doing this for ourselves. We’re doing this to honour the great Irishmen who have gone before us, to bring a world record to Ireland. That is our aim. An endurance test – that no man ever in the history of the human race stayed longer under the earth than you did.” 

 Mary Meaney, daughter of Mick, with a picture of her father. 

After the mock wake, Meaney’s coffin was lifted out a second-floor window of the pub and brought around the streets of Kilburn before being buried in Mick Keane’s yard, a Cork building contractor. Meaney’s “supernatural power” was his ability to remain zen while buried underground. He was a good sleeper, which helped. He could “sleep on a clothesline,” his daughter, Mary Meaney, says in the documentary. He exercised in the coffin by doing sit-ups.

Two pipes were chiselled into the coffin, which created an airflow for him. A phone line enabled him to speak with people above ground, who paid for the pleasure. People also had to pay half a crown to go into the yard to see him. The boxer Henry Cooper, lured by Sugrue in a publicity stunt, popped in one day to say hello. The House of Commons debated whether his stunt was safe or not. 

“Mick was completely defenceless down there,” says O’Brien Moran. “I believe they had security there at certain points of the nighttime, but there were times when he was entirely unguarded at the end of a pipe. The coffin was made of plywood. There were tons of earth on top of it. If there was any health emergency, there was no way of him getting out in time to get to a hospital. It was treacherous.” 

But Meaney prevailed. After 61 days, he was exhumed. The endorsement deals and riches promised by Sugrue never materialised. Heaney’s dream of buying a house for his wife and two young children came to nothing. “Mick had such guilt because there was no money even being sent back to his wife while he was underground,” says O’Brien Moran. “His family were going hungry while the event was taking place.”

Mick Meaney in a coffin in the Admiral Nelson pub in Kilburn. 

 A rivalry broke out between Meaney and a fascinating character, Tim Hayes, who had originally been Meaney’s inspiration. Hayes was known locally around Cobh, Co Cork as “the coffin man”, often leaving a coffin on stilts out in the open during the summer, airing it. He got into the habit of sleeping in coffins in Japan in the 1950s, while stationed there as a merchant seaman.

On Christmas Day 1966, Hayes was buried alive in Cobh, going underground for a hundred hours, passing the time reading books like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He was interviewed by Bill O’Herlihy for RTÉ television. Meaney, who was back in Ireland convalescing from a work accident at the time, saw the press coverage about Hayes and it planted a seed.

“Tim was a fascinating character,” says O’Brien Moran. “He was different to Mick. Mick's event was, of all of the burials, the biggest spectacle. It was done under all this media attention in the middle of London. It was spectacular. He achieved what he set out to do in terms of making a name for himself. Whereas there's something iconoclastic about Tim. He enjoyed doing something unexpected. He seemed to enjoy riling people up. He liked even people saying, ‘You're mad.’ There was an artistry about Tim. He feels like he could have been a contemporary artist today.” 

Hayes dismissed Meaney’s 61-day feat, claiming Meaney’s oversized coffin – which was made by Rick Whooley from Cork – wasn’t regulation size, scoffing: “It wasn’t a coffin, it was a bungalow.” 

Mick Meaney raises his hand from his coffin as he is paraded through the streets of Kilburn in 1968.

A dispute between the pair, squabbling in the press as to who was the underground champion, rumbled on for years. Hayes branched out. In 1972, he set a world record by sleeping on a bed of nails for over 25 hours. Meaney had returned to Ireland penniless, settling down in Mitchelstown, raising his family, working in the county council. His moment in the sun passed.

“The fame Mick got was double-sided,” says O’Brien Moran. “Some people thought Mick was ridiculous and weren't afraid to say so. And there was a lot of jealousy, because Mick was in newspapers all over the world. His daughter Mary lived with the legacy of it for decades. It wasn't always positive. In some ways, Mick’s life froze in that moment of glory he had. He went on to live a good life, raised children and he loved his family, but it never developed in terms of the highs he got from that day when he was resurrected.”

•  Beo Faoin bhFód will be broadcast 9.30pm, Wednesday, November 26 on TG4

Burial Artists

 The craze for stunt artists burying themselves alive became popular in California in the 1920s. It grew out of carnival culture. Burial artists, or “living corpses”, drew thousands for their stunts. An American adventurer, Digger O’Dell, from Memphis, Tennessee, who had a background in the wonderful art of endurance poll sitting, was an early trendsetter, holing up in the “world’s smallest apartment” for days on end.

Cobh man Tim Hayes and broadcaster Bill O'Herlihy.  

“It’s surprising how widespread the phenomenon of endurance burial was,” says James O’Brien Moran, producer and editor of Beo Faoin bhFód. “During research, we kept coming across these new people who did it. It is entirely possible that some of the claims that people had were false. A lot of them were part of this carnival culture. Some ‘burial artists’ were essentially an attraction. People would pay in to see ‘the living corpse’ and there would just be someone lying in a box in the ground.” 

As the Second World War started, burial artists fell out of fashion. The Guinness Book of Records, which started in 1955, gave the practice a new lease of life, “a sudden resurrection for the living corpse”, as it were, which reached its peak in the late 1960s at the time of the Mick Meaney versus Tim Hayes battle. The last record was established in the 1990s. The Guinness Book of Records no longer endorses being buried alive, as it’s too dangerous.