+Dion7 No,my friend,It is not.Try doing research for D&D.The tannery was at the very end of town because the stench was so vile.Many places soaked their furs in amnonia from human and horse urine.And they did not have gloves.There was no good jobs in that era
Once you spend a lot of time in a smelly place, you stop noticing the smell. You'll notice it again after you have been away for a while. I have a small printer and I noticed the toner smell after being out of here for a while (something like a day and a half). It was even bothering me, but only a little. I tried to air the room out and clean any toner residue (there wasn't much and the printer is very small). Most of the time, I simply don't notice it. The funny thing is that if I'm out but not much, such as overnight, I may still not notice the smell a few hours later. I guess it's the same at the tannery.
That smell, which so many are dismissing, isn't just smell. It's irritating and even toxic gases like ammonia fumes. And add to that the chance of cuts in such a dirty environment. Don't forget slippery floors and the chance to wrench your back lifting those wet filthy hides.
My grandfather Archie Ault did that job before he took part in WW1, where he was wounded & honourably discharged. He left his marriage soon after when my father was a baby, & never saw him again. My dad ended up working on the railway & eventually became Station Master at Tilbury Riverside. It was only in later years after obtaining his military record from the Grenadier Guards that we found out they both had links to the railway.
Work houses were so bad people would have rather begged on the streets than go to them, It was slightly better than starvation. Maybe try Googling Victorian workhouses instead of making presumptions?
which is still crime today ! the vegrancy act 1823 summary / midermeaour crimes of begging or being a vegrant . or being a vegrant with intent to commit an arrestable / indictable / felony offence all still in force today and used by the police to remove or arrest vegrants
They used to get kids to work in the fields. I have copies of school records from the 1880's, from my local school. That record pupils being absent from school at harvest time due to "Working in the fields"It was not until the 1890's that school attendance was compulsory to the age of 12.
***** Summer vacation from school as they call it now has it's roots in farming as well for that was the busiest time for farm children. Everything from snapping beans and canning to hoeing crops to cutting, raking and baling hay. And having grown up farming I can attest to all this myself. Not counting all the regular chores from fence mending to feeding the livestock or cutting up and splitting wood for the stove for Winter.
Any child able to even go to school was doing well back then, they'd inherit the farm anyway and they'd make good money so school wasn't as important, just like for farm kids today.
Rebel9668 in the U.S., we have spring break as well, which is a week off school in March. historically this was for planting time. Do you not have this in the U.K.? Also, splitting wood would have been an unlikely job. Victorians wouldn't have had the concept of firewood we have today. Today we think of logs or wedges as firewood, But Agro forestry was completely different then, the majority of green space would have been coppice. Hazel or willow. With very few mature trees. So much of the country was being used for coppice, that the railways pushed to have a law passed sometime in the 1830s~ which mandated that landowners had to keep a minimum of one standard tree per acre to sell to the railways who needed dense log fuel. Home fire heating would have come from sticks, branches, coppice faggots, hedge row pruning, etc. Everything bigger was too valuable, sold to either railways or bodgers. Also comfort heating would have been a luxury only for the super rich, the poor or middle class could only justify that fuel for cooking. It was only after the rails were interlinked at the turn of the century that it became economical to start shipping coal. With cheap coal being dumped on the market depressing the cost of wood, the poor could begin to burn it purely for comfort.
Poor Baldrick, still gets all the filthy jobs ! Just shows you how bad things were before the present. Still, I'd love to see the idle chavs of today breaking stones, etc, LOL !
+River Huntingdon Actually that`s one of the jobs I have loved the most. We were diggin a cable ditch on Snøhetta, one of norways tallest mountains. Breaking stones, digging, and when we had a break enjoying the view, because it was just beautiful. And it`s good work! Nothing is worse than sitting in some office on the phone looking out the window wondering what the view smells like. I love manual labor, it`s REAL work, the kind of works that matters to people. Tearing down old houses, building new ones, or just restoring and reparing old buildings. Laying bricks, painting and so on. I also enjoy carpentry, it`s very fullfilling work :) Well that and the military, that`s also a good life when you get used to it ;) Or I was just born 100 years too late lol :p
+jan christian Frodahl Same here. I've never done an office job, and spent my working life repairing old electric trains on British Railways as it was. Couldn't sit in an office all day. I'm still at it in a way, repairing old electrical things, record players, stereos, vacuum cleaners, all sorts. I certainly couldn't just retire, I'd feel useless, and I think you would be the same :-) Speaking of Norway, I was looking earlier at the Thamshaven Electric Railway, some nice old machines there, they make all the right noises. :-) Think I was born 100 years too late too lol.
Again, I can't reply to comments here (wtf?) ... This new system sucks. Anyway, does "dibbing" (or "dibbling") have any ties to the phrase "got dibs!" or "call(ing) dibs"? As for comments re: workhouses not being so bad, my impression of the workhouses is that they were a total nightmare, particularly for kids. There's another series on RU-vid, "Cold Case History" (BBC, "Mummified Child" episode) that speaks of the workhouses. As I understand it, it was NOT AT ALL pleasant or safe.
"I remember the day that Bear O'Shea fell into a concrete stairs. What Horse Face said when he saw him dead it wasn't what the rich called prayers. 'I'm a navvy short' was the one retort that reached unto my ears When the going's rough then you must be tough with McAlpine's Fusiliers" McApline Fusiliers is a song about the navvies, written by Dominic Behan and sang by The Dubliners.
I'm reluctant to call workhouse work a "job," even though technically (and to the state), it was. Even prisoners saw an end to (most of ) their sentences. People in the workhouses often couldn't get back out once they were there. So many folks died there, and the Anatomy Act of 1832 made it legal for the medical profession to claim their bodies for dissection. It was a bad deal, all around. I saw a version of A Christmas Carol where Scrooge is approached for charity by two men who are telling him that it's at Xmas time that it's needed most. Scrooge tells them that he'd rather (continue to) support the workhouses than give charity (charity that could prevent someone from having to go there). Now that we know a little more about the workhouses, a comment like that from Scrooge is even more revealing! Anyway, speaking of stuff like that, it's Dec. 14 - Happy Holidays to you!)
Maybe you could knit or do something something else not requiring you to constantly look while doing it, and then sell your handiwork, making a double profit
alleycatalog could have been planted. I have a feeling what they did is give him a rat to hold, then he stuck his hands in there and pretended to catch it 😂
I don’t think they’d risk him Getting bit by an actual random rat… Even when they’re showing dangerous jobs in the show they do take certain precautions.
Bet T.R wanted to punch the laughing bloke on the steam engine, he was so infuriating. There was poor Tony, who had been upto his neck in soot from within the firebox, then upon trying to get out of it, that jerk just stood there doing a bellowing laugh. GRR
It was a nervous tick kind of defense-mechanism laugh dissociated from any context. My apt building repair man has the same oddity, which is why I recognized it as such.
I don't know, after Blackadder Tony wrote and stared in an award winning kids comedy show before 20 years of presenting Time Team and it's spin offs still finding time to do other history shows like this and write books.
Derrick B. Meaning what?? ?? Yeah, the canary died, along with thousands of miners, and anyone who knows even a little about mining (during the gold rush, for example) knows that "black lung" was as common a cause of death as tunnel collapses. Actually, mining would have been a good addition to this episode. Surely the railways used coal!
Mining would have been perfect here - the "golden age of steam," after all, would have been nothing without coal fires. (Just as a side note, I'm a few hours away from Calico Ghost Town, where one of the original mine shafts has been made into a walk-through tourist attraction. I've walked it many times - I love it! And the openings of mine shafts are visible all over the hills. It was a booming silver mine, in its day.) :))
My family on my farther's side were miners. My great,great grandfather went down the pit aged 14. He was so scared of the dark at first, he thought that there might be a boogie man there.
Dibbing (or dibbling) - I find it hard to believe that ANYONE would EVER deem that a job that required a SECOND PERSON to drop the seeds!! On the other hand - was it like that just to put a second person to work?
Probably for efficiency sake. Considering the size of that grid, every second longer it takes to place the seeds multiplies out to a lot of wasted time. Having two people was likely more than twice as efficient as having one person do both jobs.
manictiger Well, perhaps so...but wouldn't a hollow dibbing pole eliminate the need for a seed dropper? Seeds could be put down the pole directly into the little dent. No? Oh well...it was a system that worked, and it put two people to work instead of just one, so believe me...I'm not complaining about it! :))
***** You're thinking of a seed drill: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_drill It's an ancient invention. The guy who pioneered the idea in England was a fellow named Jethro Tull.
WalterReimer I knew Jethro Tull was the name of a historic figure (obscure history, sure, but still historic), but I didn't know he invented the seed drill. In fact, I didn't even know what a seed drill was until you told me. this is my "learn something new" item for the day, and i thank you! :)) cheers, my friend. :))
***** I'd never even heard of doing it that way. We always just hoed open a furrow in a straight line, dropped the seeds in and hoed the soil back over them. We used kite string and wood stakes to mark out the rows so it was easier to hoe out a straight furrow by just following beside the taut string lines. Had we been commercial farmers with much larger fields then I'm sure we would have planted with an old two row (or more) seed drill, but I'd simply never heard of that dibbling.
I'm american, for one, and my comment was from two years ago. I don't really see how such an outdated comment is really worth anyone's time and attention.
Still no mention of the job: "Groom of the Stool", the Royal servant who wiped Royal arses, carried out Royal poop, and emptied and cleaned Royal chamber pots for next use. I believe the Brits are singularly embarrassed by this job title.
The Groom of The Stool position was evaluated in the 'Tudor' episode. This episode focuses on the grim jobs during the Victorian era.....only a meer 300 years later 😂. Chris (UK).
Was tanner's job the same in medieval times? If it was I'm not supprised that William the Conquerer, originally William the Bastard got so angry when anyone reminded him of his origins.
one thing i learned from this series is how awfully long it took europeans to develop indoor plumping and or sanitization. i don't know about the rest of the world, but throwing your shit and piss into the river/streets is just a bad idea. Also, why did it take them long to develop safety gear for cleaning ash out of places? Why didn't someone go, hmmm maybe breathing in ash into our lugs is bad and we should put a mask over our mouth? God, everything just felt so unsanitary in Europe. no wonder Native Americans died when they came over.
I have to collect dog poop but only once a year. We had three dogs and I had to go out and collect it every spring. Bad enough to do it once a year god knows everyday would be horrible.
i've just started watching this show and i really like it (BBC is always superior to American crap)...did they ever do an American version? i ask because in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", he describes working conditions in a fertilizer plant...to me, THAT'S the absolute worst job in the history of humanity O.o
Someone apparently wiped Henry VIII`s ass and those of other monarchs during the Tudor period, but I don`t know if that job still existed during Tudor times. If Queen Victoria looked as good as Emily Blunt in her younger days, maybe it`d be worth doing? Ha.
