Legitimate First

Legitimate "Leggy" First is the resident gravedigger/sexton/charnel house manager and general jobbing hand at the Cemetery of Small Gods in Ankh-Morpork.

He is generally happy in his work, which largely consists of recycling thirty-year old bones from grave to crypt so that the plot, in a cemetery serving a million people living in a city which is chronically short of space, may be recycled so as to ease the housing shortage that prevails even in death.

However, there are three little irritations, which may be summarised thus:

• A succession of short-lived deacons who arrive full of great plans and ambitions and who think they know best;
• Nobody will ever let him do the Comic Gravedigger skit which he knows would be a huge hit, if only he could get a chance;
• Bloody bloody Gods-damn Zombies, who muck up the whole bloody system which Leggy has spent forty years perfecting. It really mucks up the paperwork when you allocates somebody a plot, you clears the previous occupant out of the grave and into the crypt, you logs it all neat and tidy in the ledgers, and the bloody buggering corpse only goes and digs itself out as if nothing ever happened. If they KNOW they're going to live again, it's a waste of everyone's time and effort, is that. Especially that bugger Reg Shoe who comes here once a year on the anniversary of his flaming funeral and re-inters himself for twenty-four hours to make some sort of point...

Fred Colon provides the explanation for his given name. "Can't blame a mother for being proud..."

Leggy is encountered in Night Watch, where his latest over-zealous Deacon (who is anxious to move the remains of the heroes of the Glorious Revolution) is given an amicable afternoon tea with the Patrician in order to clear up a few little points, and as a result resigns the post to spread the good word in darkest Ting Ling, both he and Vetinari taking the view that the good word couldn't be spread too far.