YOU name it and the Lamb family have probably shifted it for the good people of Worcester over the years. Heavy wardrobes, three-piece suites, beds and grand pianos they’ve done in their sleep.

But there have also been bee hives (with occupants still in residence), bodies of dead pets, plus a few lives ones, and even a back lawn. They winced when a lady asked whether it would be okay if her deceased husband travelled in their van – then breathed a sigh of relief when it turned out to be his ashes in an urn.

Lamb’s Removals has been an institution in the city for more than a century and the news this week that the firm is calling it a day after 105 years is quite sad.

Neither of the current owners, George Lamb and his sister Margaret Sayers, have any children interested in carrying on the business and so it’s up for sale.

It’s been one of the quirks of Lamb’s that a George has always been at the helm. It was set up in 1907 by George W Lamb, who worked as a blacksmith but had a sideline delivering furniture on his horse and dray.

He was known in the family as George I. Then there was George II, who went bankrupt, but paid off all his debts and began the removal company proper; the ebullient George III, military man Dunkirk veteran and general character who died in 1987, and his son and the current incumbent, George IV. It’s a dynasty of Worcester removal trade royalty.

“We’re probably the last of the city’s major removal firms,” said George IV.

“Battys, Pickfords, Winwoods, they’ve all gone. It’s a sign of the times. When Godfrey Davis started his van hire business in the 1970s it hit us hard.

“People began hiring a van for a day and moving themselves. A major part of our business was moving families in council houses, but that virtually disappeared overnight. Small firms started up, one man and a van, that sort of thing and it all affected us.”

The world was a different place when the business began. George II would relate tales of return trips by horse and cart to Birmingham or Rugby in a day, always recommending “a fast cob” for those jobs. The social scene was much different too and not only in terms of furniture.

Lamb’s stables were a collecting point for corpses. When a death occurred and the family didn’t want the expense of a funeral, they would take the body and dump it on Lamb’s doorstep at the dead of night.

“My father often used to say he’d go to the horses first thing in the morning and find a corpse propped up in the stable,” George III recalled.

It wasn’t only furniture deliveries in those days either. The firm did a regular round for a local grocery shop and gathered a laundry collection too.

Pianos were an item frequently moved because most homes had one. No TV, you see.

The removal men also had to take cabinet gramophones out to village halls for record recitals – although hanging around waiting until the recital had finished was not so tedious if there was a pub nearby.

For a while, Lamb’s even acted as the local Pony Express by delivering mail.

In 1928, the first whiff of exhaust fumes arrived with Lamb’s buying a Model T Ford which chugged along at 25mph. This changed the whole removals scene, but there were snags.

“The first vans weren’t too keen on some of the hills,” recalled George III.

“We sometimes had to set out and give them a rest before trying the steep slopes and not all the roads were tarmaced by any means. They didn’t take kindly to Fish Hill at Broadway at all.”

Although the new motor power was improving removals, the depression of the 1930s came as a terrible blow to the business.

People hadn’t got the money to buy things, let alone move house, and it was a familiar sight to see 20 or so vehicles lined up outside a sale room hoping to get the chance to carry the odd piece of furniture for a buyer.

Those were desperate days, but Lamb’s survived and the business grew rapidly after the Second World War.

By the heyday of the 60s and early 70s, it had a fleet of 10 vehicles with vast carrying capacity, needed because the size of a household of furniture had increased considerably.

A real Worcester character, George III developed an encylopedic knowledge of the city.

Give him an address and he could probably tell the type of house, number of bedrooms and the size of the garden. Since George IV and his sister Margaret took over the business in the 1980s, it has remained the go-to name for unusual and expert removal jobs.

Lamb’s ferried the convent of Benedictine nuns from Stanbrook Abbey, Callow End, near Malvern, to their new home in Yorkshire.

It gently lowered a family heirloom grand piano through a fourth floor window and down the side of a house in Upton-upon- Severn and transported 1,000 mediaeval skeletons of monks from Hartlebury Castle to Bradford University for analysis.

Now all those days are gone.

Lamb’s, with its 20,000 sq ft warehouse at Shrub Hill, is for sale and another famous Worcester name is likely to disappear as the removal firm moves on.