If you look around, you’ll find that some of the oldest jobs in the world still exist. You can still find blacksmiths, chimney-sweeps, potters, farriers and even lamplighters. But what are some of the more interesting jobs that have gone through the pages of history, which no-longer exist? Let’s find out together. These are not presented in any order or with any clear start or end…
Song-Plugger
Capable musician to work in music-shop in regular, 9-5 job. Must be able to play the piano and sight-read sheet-music. In an age before audio-recorded music, it is your job to play pieces of sheet-music selected by customers at your music-shop, so that they can hear what it sounds like before they purchase it. You must be able to sight-read sheet-music and play a piece of music set in front of you – ANY piece of music.
The job-title comes from the ability of the pianist to ‘plug’ (demonstrate, sell or push) a song to a customer, to convince them to buy it. Song-pluggers could be men, or women. They just had to be able to play the piano really well. Famous pluggers included George Gershwin and Lil Hardin Armstrong, the wife of jazz-trumpeter Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong.
The position as it originally was does not exist today, although songwriters who push their music onto singers and musicians are still called ‘song-pluggers’ today.
Iceman
Once upon a time, a lot of things were home-delivered. Milk, bread, meat, cheese…and ice.
In the 19th century, the icebox was the forerunner of the modern refrigerator. To keep food cold, huge blocks of ice weighing several pounds were loaded into the tops of ice-boxes. The cold air released by the ice as it melted chilled the storage-compartment underneath, keeping food inside the box cold and fresh.
Ice was delivered every three to four days in winter, and every second day in the summer, by your friendly neighbourhood iceman. This job required significant physical strength! We’re not talking about ice-cubes. We’re talking about ice BLOCKS. Huge rectangular chunks of ice that could weigh up to twenty or thirty pounds, possibly even more. They’re cold, wet and slippery. Drop one and shatter it and you’d have to go and get another one!
An iceman carried his precious cargo using razor-sharp ‘ice-tongs’ which hacked into the blocks of ice, biting into them and providing the friction to safely lift them out of his ice-wagon and carry them into a homeowner’s kitchen. If you had to visit an apartment-block, you also had to carry the ice all the way up flights of stairs! At least in winter-time you didn’t have to make deliveries so often. And if it snowed, not at all! The iceman would often wear an apron to protect his clothes from meltwater, and from cold-burns caused by handling his frigid cargo.
Rag-and-Bone Man
Just as how a lot of things were delivered to the house, a lot of things were also taken away. Dustmen collected dust and ash from your house, in dust-bins. We still have them today – except now they’re called garbage-men.
But one man who we don’t have visiting our houses every week any more is the Rag-and-Bone Man.
The Rag-and-Bone Man was a neighbourhood institution. He would show up to collect old rags and used bones from the kitchen. Rags were anything from old clothes, old linen, cloth-scraps from household sewing-projects and so-on. Bones were chicken bones, pork-bones, beef-bones, any bones that were leftover from cooking.
Rags were torn up, cut up or pulled apart. Cloth which was still in decent shape might be picked apart and the thread reused to weave new cloth. Cloth which was too small or poor-quality for this was mashed up and used in paper-making, producing what was called ‘rag paper’.
The bones collected were also crushed up and used in fertiliser. If the bones were large enough, or plentiful enough, they might be sold to a ceramics factory. Here, the bones were again crushed and ground up into a powder and used to produce Bone China. Bone China, a variation of porcelain, is about 50% clay, and 50% bone-powder.
Tosher
Existing in Victorian times, a ‘tosher’ was a sewer-worker…of sorts. He was a scavenger who hunted and raked and scoured down in the drains and tunnels underneath cities, digging out anything valuable that might’ve been washed down the drains. Coins, spectacles, watches, nicknacks…anything that might have a resale value. Their job gave rise to a popular expression still used by people today. Since the stuff they found was generally detritus, it was said to be a “load of old tosh!“.
Costermonger
Most people have never heard of a costermonger. First time I read this term was years ago in a book written back in the 1800s. A cross between a fast-food vendor and a fruit-shop owner, the costermonger was originally a seller (‘monger’, as in ‘fishmonger’, ‘ironmonger’, etc), of costers…or costards – a type of apple – known today by most people as…’custard’ apples. Although they were called costermongers or costard-mongers, as time passed, they realised they couldn’t make a living selling just costards. As a result, they branched out into other fruits and vegetables, or started selling snacks and fast-food in the streets. Stuff like oysters, baked potatoes, soup, pease pudding, sandwiches, and so on.
Tinker
Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy…If, like me, you grew up with your grandmother singing this nursery rhyme to you, then you probably had a pretty decent idea what the second, third and fourth persons in this sequence of occupations were, but were also pretty ignorant about what the first one was! After all, who’s heard of a tinker, in the 21st century!?
A tinker was someone who worked with, and who repaired, tinware, or items which contained tin. In centuries past, tin was an important metal – used to make pewter, used to make cheap, serviceable metalware, and used for lining (‘tinning’) the insides of cookware, such as pots, kettles, frying-pans, etc (if they were made of copper, instead of cast-iron). Tinning the insides of copper cookware was (and still is) a necessary part of manufacturing copper cookware because of the coppery taste that would be imparted to the food if it wasn’t…eugh!
A tinker used to go from door to door with his cart, his soldering irons, his tin, his tools, and a swinging basket of charcoal to heat up the irons and do the necessary repairs to pots, pans, kettles and buckets. My grandmother used to say that tinkers (still a thing when she was a girl in Singapore in the 1910s), were nothing but ripoff-artists who would deliberately do a poor job on their repairs so that you’d have no choice but to pay for them to fix your broken pots and pans AGAIN when they came around next time.
Link Boy
A link-boy was a youth (usually a small boy) who guided people through dark city streets late at night, lighting their way home with a flambeau (flaming torch) or a candle or lantern, for a small fee of a few pence. In the days before regular streetlighting, link-boys were an important if humble service-provider in crowded cities where people would stay out late eating, drinking, whoring, or visiting the the local theatre or dance-halls.
Link-boys were often the children of the poor, who took up link-carrying as a way to earn a few extra coppers for the family income. Because the money they earned, while pitiful, was so important to their survival, they also earned the nickname ‘moon-cursers’, because a full moon would light up the sky so much in the middle of the night, so as to render their services unnecessary.
The link-boy was such a fixture that even today, the idiom survives of ‘not being able to hold a candle to someone‘. Since being a link-boy required no special skills, if you were not worthy or capable enough to hold a candle to light someone’s way home, you were considered lower than trash!
Lamplighter
To be fair, the job of lamplighter hasn’t been entirely consigned to history – there are a few who still ply this trade, and they still carry out the same duties done by their forebears over a hundred years ago.
With the advent of reliable streetlighting in the 1700s and 1800s, someone was needed to walk around and light all these streetlamps every afternoon, and extinguish them every morning. Lighting lamps was done with the aid of a lamplighter’s staff, which was capable of both turning the gas-nozzles on and off, as well as lighting the wicks of lamps or igniting the gas-mantles at the tops of the lamps.
Lamplighters sometimes took advantage of their unusual working hours to find extra ways to bolster their wages. Some of them would earn a bit of extra coin by doubling as human alarm-clocks. Since they had to stay up all night, or had to wake up very early to douse the lights at sunrise, some lamplighters would walk the streets rapping their lighting staffs on people’s doors and windows to wake them up in the morning. In an age before mass-produced, reliable alarm-clocks, the payment of a few cents or pennies was a small fee to be assured of an early wake-up call, and it was one way for the enterprising lamplighter to make more money.
Powder Monkey
The job of ‘powder monkey’ sounds almost cute, doesn’t it? Well, what it sounds, and what it is, are two totally different things.
This job was prevalent during the 1700s and 1800s, primarily in the British Royal Navy. A powder-monkey was the nickname given to small boys (typically anywhere between seven and twelve years old) whose job it was to relay charges of gunpowder from the ship’s powder-magazine (at the bottom of the ship) up to the ship’s gun-decks, where they would be loaded into the cannons along with the shot and wadding, to fire off the ship’s guns during time of battle. Powder monkeys had to be agile, fast and sure-footed. Jumping, climbing and running up and down ladders and staircases while carrying explosives goes some way to explaining why they were called powder-monkeys.
When a ship was not engaged in battle, powder-monkeys filled in the posts of servant-boys to the ship’s officers. If your vessel and the crew on board it were successful and captured an enemy ship, then the powder-monkeys (along with everybody else on the ship) would get a share in the prize-money! Granted this might only be a few pounds, but in the 1800s, a few pounds would’ve constituted several months’ wages. The work was hard and dangerous, but if successful – very rewarding!
The Washman
Ever done a whole heap of cooking? Maybe you tried making spaghetti sauce from scratch, or you made a pie, or tried to do beef stroganoff or something like that? Ever noticed how there’s always a huge pile of food-scraps leftover afterwards? Stalks, stubs, skins, peelings, leaves, stems, apple cores, seeds, pulp…god knows what else, right? You scrape it all together and dump it in a bag and you chuck it out into the bin under the kitchen window.
At least, that’s what you’d do today, right?
Back in Victorian times, things were done a little differently. Instead of just throwing it out, you’d save all your vegetable and food-scraps and peelings and fruit leftovers, and toss them into a bucket under the kitchen table. This composting cauldron of collected cast-offs would mature under the table, in its own little bucket, until once a week, someone knocked at the back door.
The local washman.
The washman was the person who bought your kitchen-scraps. For a nominal fee, he’d pay for the privilege of your leftovers. He’d dump the contents of your wash-bucket into his cart and then drive off with it.
What for? Because if he collects enough food-scraps, he can use it to feed his pigs! He can fatten them up, then slaughter them, then sell the meat at a profit! That’s why today, anything cast off, discarded or rubbish is called…
…’hogwash’.
The Shoddy Man
Along with the washman, another person who might visit your house on occasion was the shoddy man. He was the person who bought or collected, all your fabric scraps, or old, worn out, useless clothing. This function might have also been done by the rag-and-bone man (see above), but if it wasn’t, then the shoddy man cometh!
The shoddy man collected your fabric scraps and then sent it off to factories where the fibres were torn apart, shredded up, and then respun and rewoven into a new, cheap, recycled fabric called ‘shoddy’. Its poor quality meant that it was really only used for making clothes for the poor. It’s also why anything cheap, nasty and of poor quality today, is called ‘shoddy’.
The Hall Boy
Along with the link-boy and the powder-monkey and the chimney-sweep’s climbing-boy, another dead occupation from the 1800s is that of the hall boy. The hall boy was the lowest of the lowest male servants in a grand, servantholding household. As hall-boy, the youth (typically a preteen or teenaged boy) was tasked with doing all the heavy grunt-work below stairs. This included everything from moving furniture, carrying coal and rubbish, carrying firewood and moving tools around.
Footmen, who were originally employed as coaching-attendants, generally carried out duties akin to being waiters – serving the family, their house-guests, and visitors. To prevent them from damaging their expensive liveries (uniforms), they weren’t allowed to do any of the heavy, dirty, exhausting manual labour in the house (beyond carrying luggage), as this was considered below their station. For everything that the footmen would not, or could not do – there was the hall boy.
The hall boy got his name from the fact that he typically worked (and even slept) in the Servants’ Hall, the big communal room used by the servants downstairs. This was their break-room and lounge; in smaller households, the servants’ hall might also double as their dining room. If they applied themselves, hall boys might become footmen, valets or butlers.
The Funeral Mute
This is a job so obscure that you’ve probably never heard of it before. To say that the Victorians had an obsession with death and morality is putting it mildly. With warfare, cholera pandemics, and grinding poverty, death was ever-present in the Victorian world. Up to one in four children died in infancy during the 1800s, and death from industrial accidents, misadventure, or crime were common.
Because of this, the Victorian-era funerary industry was booming. The manufacturers of caskets, coffins, and hearses, as well as undertakers and florists were making a killing during this era – almost literally!
One of the jobs associated with funeral directors in the 1800s was that the funeral mute. And the job title directly reflects its duties. The mute was a person employed by a funeral home to accompany the casket, with the body inside it, to the gravesite during the funerary procession. In an age when most people were buried rather than cremated, funeral processions could sometimes be very long.
It was not the job of the mute to say anything – all he or she did was follow the coffin, as a silent witness to the burial, to give the occasion the required solemnity. In arguably Charles Dickens’ most famous novel – young Oliver Twist is employed as a funerary mute by Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, to accompany childrens’ funerals.
