In the 1950s, panellists on the television programme What’s My Line?, asked to unpick the meaning of esoteric-sounding jobs, were bamboozled by the ‘saggar maker’s bottom knocker’. It turned out to be an operative in the earthenware-pot industry and is one of the UK’s many obsolete occupations.
Some of these professional callings were undesirable in the extreme. The between maid or ‘tweeny’ was a young domestic servant, kitchen and household maid at once, earning £13 a year and working seven days a week, dawn ’til dusk. The raison d’être of the gong farmer or nightman was digging out excrement from privies and cesspits, a task that dated back to Tudor times; Elizabeth I’s farmers were compensated for their time — and presumably the stench — with the princely sum of 6d per day.
Filth also coated mudlarks, who scavenged riverbanks for valuable items. The preserve of the poverty stricken, it was still claimed as a job in the early 20th century, but has been resurrected as a hobby. A more specific form of mudlark was the tosher or sewer hunter, who scavenged drains during Victorian times.
Certain jobs of yore would raise modern eyebrows — take the dog whipper, responsible for evicting unruly mutts from churches during services, a role recorded by Edward Peacock in Notes & Queries (1897). Reuben Bussey painted An Olden Time Dog Whipper and Sluggard Wakener in 1882; the latter is a reference to the job of tapping on the head anyone snoozing during a sermon. Another church-going role was that of a mute, paid to attend funerals. Being required to stay quiet, dress sombrely and look sad might sound like easy money — Charles Dickens mentions juvenile mutes in Oliver Twist and Martin Chuzzlewit —but perhaps it took a little Dutch courage: adult mutes are recorded becoming intoxicated at the funerals they had been paid to frequent.
Getting leggy with it: before engines, boats had to be laboriously walked through tunnels.
A potentially more useful occupation was knocker-up, rousing the snoring masses to get them to work. A Dictionary of Old Trades, Titles and Occupations includes an example who was still annoying folk as recently as the 1970s. Meanwhile, before street lights, the link-boy guided pedestrians with a flaming torch at night, as illustrated by Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Cupid as a Link Boy (about 1774).
Arguably pursuing a life of heinous crime, not a career, the body snatcher or resurrectionist was notorious for digging up human remains and selling them to anatomy schools. Conversely, a thief-taker could be hired by victims to pursue justice. Their loyalties, however, were questionable: enter ‘Thief-Taker General’ Jonathan Wild, put on trial at the Old Bailey in 1725, for organising crimes to benefit from the later return of the stolen goods.
Happily, some antiquated jobs were a little more fun. Take the pinboy, a youngster who reset pins at bowling alleys and returned balls to players. The first mechanical pinsetter was patented during the Second World War, making this one of many jobs that fell victim to automation — exactly the kind of thing that sent Luddites on the rampage.