Victorian jobs • Page 3
Imagine those unfortunate upper-crust folk who have to spend their days gallivanting across the country hunting and shooting. When they get back to the manor, the last thing they want to do is clean their dirty boots. Well, you could be their saviour.
A young boy is needed to be the boot boy at a big country house. Your job will involve gathering up the discarded garb of the hunters in the evening and then spending the night scrubbing and cleaning their boots until you can see your face in them. The nobs then go and trash them the next day. Of course, when the lords have left the manor, you can't just put your feet up. You'll have a mass of shoes for evening and court wear that need to be sparkling by the time they get back.
If you don't mind the smell of feet, hardly any sleep and posh folk looking at you like you're something they picked up on their shoes, then apply straight away.
Along with the Industrial Revolution comes a scale of engineering that, in terms of anything that has gone before, really pushes the envelope. The construction of grand and gigantic works is underway and you can be a part of it.
If you have a head for heights, an understanding of the new vision in civil engineering and a huge spanner, get yourself down to the West Country where Isambard Kingdom Brunel is constructing the stupendous Clifton Suspension Bridge. By connecting twin towers with a series of cables, which will be embedded in the rock on either side, a marvellous bridge is to be suspended over the Avon Gorge.
You'll need to be surefooted as the bridge deck is susceptible to gusts of wind, and at 245 feet (75 metres) above the River Avon, you don't want to fall. You may not be as lucky as Sarah Ann Henley will be. In 1885, following an argument with her lover, she will throw herself off the bridge. However, her crinolines will act as a parachute, and landing on mud, she will survive the fall.
Now a total span of 702ft (214m) needs to be laid and bolted together by hand. If you fancy building the towers, or piers, you'll get to climb an extra 85ft (26m). Of course, if you love heights, this could be one of the best jobs, but no safety lines will be used, so hang on tight.
Join the hundreds of buffer lasses who work in the sweatshops of Sheffield. The cutlery industry is thriving there, but all that steel needs to be sharpened and polished so that you can see your face in it.
The lucky devils with the knack will be on the sharpening machines, spinning grindstones that put edges on the knives, but in your job, you'll get to handle the full array of cutlery types. From teaspoons and steak knives to dessertspoons and pastry forks, you will wear your fingers to the bone during all daylight hours as you sit at a small bench and endlessly polish.
A buffing wheel, regularly loaded with a waxy polishing paste, will be your master. Press the metal too hard and you'll burn your black-stained fingers, but get it just right and the warm steel will come to life as if it were shining silver.
This has to be one of the most grotesquely smelly jobs going, yet you'll be producing the sweetest-smelling soap.
For those not in the know, soap is made from lye water and old animal fats – mmmm lovely. First, you'll prepare the lye by filtering ordinary water through wood ash to make an alkaline 'potash' solution, or lye water. Then comes the nice bit. You'll need to render a whole load of animal carcases – that is, get all the fatty bits off the bones. Then these greasy scraps are boiled in water in a rendering kettle, which makes any meaty bits separate from the fat. Once removed from the heat, the stinking soup is left to cool, providing you with a nice thick layer of clean white fat floating on top of the water.
You need to scoop this up and add it to the lye water and boil the lot for an age. You'll end up with a thick gloopy soap ideal for washing. No swearing on the job or you know what'll happen ...
A length of pipe, a good pair of lungs, and a great deal of skill are what's needed for this job. Working in incredibly hazardous conditions, you'll be heating up glass to more than 2,000°F (1,400°C), until it reaches its liquid form. Then after rolling the end of your pipe to load it with molten glass, you start blowing and rolling a cylinder of glass.
The next step depends on what you plan to use the glass for. For instance, you could cut the ends, reheat the glass and then press the cylinder into the shape of a flat window pane. If you are working on the amazing Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851, you'll need to make nearly 300,000 of these.
By the time you're finished, you'll not only have cheeks like 20th-century trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, but you'll be top of everybody's list when it comes to blowing up balloons. A fair wage can be earned, but the glass factory, with its roaring furnaces and molten glass, is a dangerous place to work.
