History isn't just something that happened to the great and the good.
Much of who we are and where we come from
is down to a whole host of ordinary people
getting their hands dirty doing a lot of really terrible jobs.
In this programme,
the cleaning job that kept Britain on the rails.
(COUGHING)
Why you need dog poo to make a saddle.
I don't think I would like to do this every day.
And what was I thinking of when I said "yes" to this?
Welcome to the worst jobs in the Victorian period.
Queen Victoria died over a hundred years ago.
But it doesn't seem that long.
And that's partly because the Victorian workers
laid the groundwork for a lot of the things we take for granted.
Many of us still live in their houses
and use the schools and hospitals
and other public buildings that they put up.
And they built the railways.
The Victorian era was the Golden Age of Steam
powered by a lot of really terrible tasks.
In Queen Victoria's lifetime,
the railways grew from 100 miles of track
to 22,000 miles.
The railways that transformed the country and industry
were built by a massive army of workers.
Rail was cutting-edge and rail was romantic.
But that's only thanks to a labour force
willing to do the most unromantic jobs.
Every little boy wants to be an engine driver.
But on the footplate, there was a hierarchy.
The driver was top dog.
Beneath him was the back-breaking job of fireman,
feeding the fire for hours on end.
Not many kids wanted to do this.
And I can't imagine anyone
dreaming of the job below the fireman.
The very worst job on the railway was the engine cleaner.
But that didn't mean just a tiny bit of spit and polish.
This was a job for which you had to get
really kitted up.
This one's pretty cold, isn't it?
Yeah, well, I can only show you what on the cold one
because what you gonna have to do now, Tony,
- is get the firebox. - Get in that?
Get in there, yeah. Off you go!
- Right, hands on here? - Hands on there.
NORMAN: Feet in. TONY: Feet in here.
Yeah. Get your thighs in the hole.
And then turn yourself over in the hole.
Your hands are now touching the floor.
Ah! Yeah.
- Then ease yourself in. - I can't turn round!
- Yes, you can. (LAUGHS) - Ah! Ah!
- There we go. - You all right?
- Right in. - Oh!
Your foot should touch the firebars with your feet.
- Yeah, I can feel it. - OK, you're in.
I can't get 'em in ... (NORMAN LAUGHS)
- I'll pass in the shovel now. - Yeah.
- I can't see a thing. - You have to feel your way round.
- Yeah. - There's your shovel.
You know what I've realised,
if you were going from London to, I don't know, Glasgow,
you'd be shifting tons and tons of this stuff.
Oh, yeah. You shovel about 5 or 6 tons of coal.
You'd half have to be fit, you know.
You can't get all that much on it
cos otherwise it just all tips back on you.
No, that's right. It's very awkward.
You've got nice clean firebars now to light the fire on.
'After this hole, I was happy to get a breath of fresh air.'
'But not for long. I should have known better and stayed inside.'
So we going right under one of these locomotives?
We're going under to clean out the ash pan.
- It's pretty messy down here? - Yeah, yeah,
it's very wet and oily and nasty-dirty.
- The lads were down here all day? - Yeah,
there would've been people on a shift system in a big depot.
And that'll be your job all day, disposing the engines,
which would consist of digging out the fire, like we've just done
and doing the ash pan, like I'm gonna show you now.
You know, as rotten jobs go,
it must really qualify for one of the...
one of the worst, if not THE worst.
It could be pouring with rain
or it could be freezing cold,
very likely in the middle of the night.
And this is all you do all day.
And the tool I've got in my hand is the ash pan rake.
- Yeah. - What you have to do
is to put your ash pan rake right inside here.
and er...and pull.
NORMAN: It's very dusty.
TONY: No!
TONY: Whoa! (NORMAN COUGHS)
NORMAN: Very dusty, isn't it?
NORMAN: Oh, this is an empty one, by the way.
(LAUGHS) As far as...cleaning jobs go,
this really has got to be
just about the worst. (NORMAN LAUGHS)
Aw!
It's all in your mouth. (NORMAN LAUGHS)
(TONY COUGHS, NORMAN LAUGHS)
Long before all this lot, though,
long before anyone could even dream
of getting a good job like this,
someone had to lay THESE.
And that end of the business really was hard work.
Road-building is a huge, expensive
vastly complicated undertaking.
Nowadays, they've got machinery to do all the heavy lifting,
vans to sit in, if it tips down.
Even toilets, for God's sake!
In Victorian times, they had to do it all by hand.
These men did the hard work.
Navvies, so called because they built the navigation canals.
They were a wandering army of itinerant labourers.
A quarter of a million of them
built the backbone of Victorian Britain,
the roads, the canals, docks and sewers.
they built the railways.
They lived in shanty towns on the job,
on a ration of beer and meat
2lbs of meat and a gallon of beer a day.
After work, they drank some more.
And their job was to dig.
So you think digging's easy?
What about something like this?
It's the size of your average back garden,
and about 4m deep.
Imagine digging this by hand.
Where on earth would you start?
Actually, you start somewhere like this.
Originally, this land would have been flat,
right across the top, there, like that.
And this whole V-shape would have been filled up with earth,
covered in little bushes and trees,
rather like it is now.
And then the navvies would've arrived
and they'd have started digging down and down and down,
until, finally, they got to the level
where the track had been dug to further down the line.
And all they'd got to do that with
was a shovel and a pick and a wheelbarrow
and a couple of wooden planks.
And, if Rob's our 19th century navvy,
how would he get all this earth from here
right up to the top of the cart?
ANN: He would run it up the plank, do a barrow run.
You've got two ropes there. One will be attached to Rob,
the other would be attached to the barrow.
And at the top there, you'd have a horse, in those days,
a well-trained horse for the job.
How much of this stuff would they have had to shift in a day?
Believe it or not, 20 tons.
Because they were being paid piecework,
I mean, that's how they knew that they were moving 20 tons.
20 tons. How much do you reckon you've got in there, Rob?
- One and a half hundredweight. - Can you get that to the top?
- Yeah, probably. - Go on, then.
ANN: He wasn't actually pushing the barrow.
There was a horse at the top taking the strain. He was steering it.
But you've got to think about the slipperiness of the wet plank
and all that sort of business.
TONY: Must have been dangerous. ANN: Very dangerous, indeed.
ANN: Very dangerous. If the horse took fright
or suddenly refused to do what it was supposed to do,
then the barrow would lose momentum.
Suddenly, probably the barrow would go one side, the man the other.
That was one of the many dangers
attached to making a cutting.
It was said that every mile of track
claimed a life. - That was the price that was paid.
ANN: That was the price that was paid. Life was cheap. Yeah.
- Shall I have a go? - Yeah.
- Can you bring it down? - Yeah.
Can you hold my coat?
The irony was that because the barrow run was so dangerous,
the bosses put in new machines to do the same job.
But the guys hated them because they were on piece-rate
and so they could earn much more - Cheers, Rob -
from doing it with the barrow. So they smashed the machines up
and reverted to doing it this way.
You've got to fill it yourself.
- I've got to fill it first? - Yeah.
I thought you were gonna do that.
That'll do me.
- All right? - Yeah. Right, go on, then.
Have to lean right back presumably otherwise my feet'll slip
when I get to the tack board.
- Am I lined up all right? - Yeah.
(NERVOUS SHOUT)
It feels as though it's all going to tip back onto me.
The extraordinary thing is, if I'd been doing this in Victorian times,
I'd have been been full of beer and meat.
Oh, my legs, come off the duck board! Oops!
Keep going, keep going.
Keep going. YES!
Done it! Done it.
It's really satisfying.
Satisfying, yes. But also terrifying.
I thought the barrow was just going to collapse on top of me.
It was pretty heavy going.
If I was a Victorian navvy, I'd have had to have done about
200 of these every day...
..pissed!
OK. So the tracks are down, the job's done.
Well, no, actually. Navvies cued up for the barrow run.
No one wanted to pack the ballast.
What's the ballast actually for?
You use your ballast to get good drainage on your track.
So your sleepers don't fill up with water.
And obviously, the more ballast you got,
the more stable the track is.
Obviously, when you drive a train over it,
the track tends to move around.
And if you've not got much ballast,
then you end up with an uneven track.
TONY: Not a very difficult job? ROB: By the time you're done,
you're gonna end up with it level between sleepers,
having shovelled a ton and a half of ballast.
- Right. - Off you go.
My little pile here is just a mingy half a ton.
This pile is 20 tons.
Each navvy would have had to shift this every day.
Digging it was a doddle, really. but packing it...
ROB: You've got to get it underneath the sleeper,
pack it in as hard as you can.
Once you've filled t'void that one's fairly stable.
That's really hard work, isn't it?
After only 10 minutes of this, I'd had enough.
I was going to say something like presenters are supposed to
but my mind's gone numb.
I've only done half a sleeper.
(STEAM WHISTLE)
But however much your muscles screamed,
the worst job of all on the railways
was the one that took the most lives.'
The worst job was having to dig out tunnels.
This tunnel is about half a mile long.'
It took hundreds of men to dig a tunnel like this.
They worked in candlelight. 12 hour days were the norm.
Accidents were common.
A combination of naked flames and dynamite
was often lethal.
ANN: There was one particular explosion
on Manchester to Sheffield stretch.
And 50 men were killed and 500 injured.
What happened if someone was injured?
What happened was, as like as not,
you'd be carted to the mouth of the tunnel
and put on an ordinary wagon...
..with straw, and just jolted along
for probably 3 miles to the nearest road
before ever you got anyway near a hospital,
such as they were in those days.
It was unimaginable torture for the injured man
just to be taken to the nearest hospital.
In 1840, in the Woodhead Tunnel in Cheshire,
32 men were killed, 140 seriously injured,
two had fractured skulls,
and 500 others suffered broken bones.
It's hard to imagine what an explosion would have been like
in a tunnel like this. - I don't think we can imagine it.
Well, we can't imagine it but we can recreate it.
We can't do the panic and the terror
and the feeling of isolation.
But we can recreate the explosion.
This being the 21st century,
we've got a special effects man way over there.
And we've got a second camera and loads of lighting.
We've got ear defenders,
fire extinguishers, electrician,
the police have been informed, we've got the man
from the parks authority keeping an eye on us all.
In fact, we've got all the paraphernalia of a 21st century
risk assessment form.
Go!
It is pretty terrifying, isn't it?
(LAUGHING) It's brilliant. I could feel it. I could feel it.
You actually get the shake as much as the noise, don't you?
That's what I meant, I felt it. Tremendous!
ANN: A jolly good bang, though, you've got to admit.
(BOTH LAUGH)
The railways built by the navvies transformed the country
and gave the Victorians a new freedom to travel.
For the first time, large numbers of people
were able to move around very easily.
In the 1870s, 92,000 farm workers
left the countryside and moved to towns in search of work.
Life out in the country was becoming more difficult
as agriculture staggered from one depression to another.
For those farmers left behind,
the work got tougher and money was tight.
Which meant that the worst jobs in the countryside
were left for those who came cheapest...
mostly kids.
Why were so many of the worst jobs done by children?
Quite frankly, there was a lot of them.
Large Victorian families and they were a readily available
cheap form of labour. - What kind of jobs
would they have done? - They would've done any job.
Any fetching, carrying, menial jobs.
Water for pigs, wood for the fire, anything like that.
- What are they doing? - Scaring crows.
"One for the rook, one for the crow, one to rot, and one to grow."
- What does that mean? - It means you sow enough seed
that you're gonna get a crop and the one that was growing,
you wanna do your best to keep the birds off that.
By having your kids running around and keeping the birds away,
you're hopefully gonna have enough to harvest.
They don't have to get rid of every one, as long as there are
seeds and seedlings available to let the field flourish.
That's right, keep the majority there, and keep the birds off.
This looks like a worst job for me. What's this?
Yes, this is dibbing or dibbling.
So we're going to take these dibbers, put them in the ground.
- Why? - Making little dents.
Then you can sow the seeds in the little basket. Put a few in each.
- Like, sort of, 9 or 10. - That'll do.
- Just keep going like that. - Yeah.
RICHARD: Till we've sown nice even rows.
Your back'd go quickly doing too much of this.
- It certainly would. - Who would've done it?
It would've been smallholders, small little family farms
cos this is a very cheap form of equipment
rather than the expensive horse-drawn machinery.
And, of course, the whole family could get involved,
children, wives, everyone helping out sowing this crop,
so it's an nice, even space apart.
You can get through when it grows, hoe it and keep weeds down.
- Which is the dibbler, you or me? - Me.
- Can I have a dibble? - I think so.
Thank you.
TONY: I like being the dibbler. RICHARD: You've got the easy job.
TONY: It's better than sticking the seed in.
There's definitely a hierarchy in this job.
RICHARD: Definitely. You are a top dibber.
TONY: Oh, I can go quicker now.
RICHARD: Getting a routine going now, rhythm going.
It's just a little bit monotonous, isn't it?
My arms starting to ache now.
RICHARD: My back is.
If you've ever complained about your job being boring, forget it.
You have no idea.
Try this one.
Actually, I am hard at work here.
I know it doesn't look like it, but I am a herring caller.
My job is to sit here and watch.
And when I see a flock of gulls flying low over the water,
I know that there's a shoal of herring out there.
So I shout out the word, "herring" to the villagers
and they rush out of their houses
and jump in their boats and go and catch them.
But it can take quite a while.
- What are they collecting? - They're collecting stones.
The crops have been sown, it's been two weeks,
and it stands about 2 or 3in above the actual stone now.
There's one thing about this land, it almost grows stone.
They're getting them up off the soil to improve the soil
and get the stones out of the way of the harvesting machines
with their moving blades, which are expensive machines.
So we're using a cheap form of labour
to actually get this potential hazard out of the way.
- What happens to the stones? - They'll go into the cart,
and we can utilise those for making trackways
and little pathways just round and about
and maybe even use them on the parish roads.
What was life like for these kids?
It wouldn't have been nice and sunny like today.
It would've been cold, hard, real drudgery.
They'd have been out all weathers, picking away.
I've got gloves and they didn't have the luxury.
Pretty grim conditions and, of course, at the end of the day,
after a long 10-12hrs work,
getting home to a small, damp, crowded little house,
large families, not much to eat,
probably a little bread and cheese, all in all, pretty grim.
Life was really very tough for Victorian children.
Victorian kids were skinny and undernourished.
Many were beaten and they were drugged to ease their pain
so that they could work even longer hours.
When Parliament outlawed the use of child labour in 1869,
no-one really seemed to take any notice.
Jobs like these may have been boring,
or messy or just plain hard
but they were nothing like facing one of mankind's creepiest
and oldest enemies. The rat.
Welcome to the grim world of the Victorian rat-catcher.
Rats were rampant in Victorian times.
In overcrowded towns, washing and toilet facilities were very poor.
Disease was rife, filth was commonplace.
In one single building in London,
a rat-catcher caught 700 rats.
Everyone needed a rat-catcher and this was the most famous of them,
Jack Black, rat-catcher to Queen Victoria.
Rat-catching was a big business.
There was money to be made.
Rats were very saleable.
He could catch rats
and sell them to publicans,
who were running rat pits in their pubs
a secret, illegal occupation.
- What was a rat pit? - A rat pit is where
they pitch the rats against dogs, probably terriers,
and they had a fight and people betted on them.
TONY: That can't have been much of a market!
Well, one publican in Enfield
was buying 500 rats a week.
That's 26,000 a year.
That's thruppence a head. Work it out for yourself.
Presumably, they had rat poison in those days, though.
Yes. Rat-catchers used to make their own poisons. Secret recipe.
Here's an example.
Now, a rat-catcher would go to a marketplace
with his poison to sell to the general public
because rats were a problem then as they are now.
And he might have a cage with many, many rats in.
And to demonstrate the efficacy of his poison,
he'd take a live rat out of his cage,
give it the poison and fssst! There you go!
Killing rats using poison was easy.
What made this one of the worst jobs of the age
was when they had to catch them live.
They did it by hand.
Rat-catchers attracted the rats
by rubbing a mixture of sweet- smelling oils on their hands.
This worked. But rats bite, a lot.
Rat-catchers often caught terrible infections.
You'd need to be an idiot to put your hand blindly
in a hole after a rat. Wouldn't you?
I smell like an old-fashioned boiled sweet.
I think those rats are gonna love that.
The problem is, half the time you don't know
whether you can hear something rustling
or whether it's just you leaning on the... (RAT SQUEAKS)
D'you hear that? That is...that is definitely something live.
Seemed like a good idea at the time
but, quite honestly, when you just stick your defenceless hand...
..in here and you've no idea - there isn't anything here -
what's going to be...on the other end,
it is a little bit scary.
There's been no noise in here at all for the last 2 or 3 minutes.
That's my hand, not...not a rat.
Oh, I've got something! I've got something furry, definitely.
And it's wiggling, it's horrible!
I don't...I just don't wanna hurt it,
but, I suppose, that wasn't really the issue for...
Oh, there it is! There it is.
Ow! Thought it was gonna bite me there.
- So what do you think now? - It's kind of cute.
But it's also fairly disgusting.
I don't think I would like to do this every day.
- Shall I take it? - Yeah.
Herring!
I think they're all asleep.
An anchovy.
Top of virtually everyone's list of worst jobs of the Victorian era
has gotta be child chimney sweep.
But according to Dick Van Dyke,
"a sweep is as lucky as lucky can be".
Was it really such a bad job?
Sending little boys up chimneys
was actually made illegal in 1840.
24 years later, the act had to be strengthened
because people just ignored it.
Lesley, did they really put little children as young as Daniel
up the chimney? - I am afraid they did,
children even younger than Daniel.
Daniel's eight and children of six and seven were sent up chimneys.
Why didn't they just shove big brushes up?
There were lots of very poor children around
who'd got stunted growth from bad nutrition.
And they were very, very slim, and they were very, very agile
and could handle a little brush like that superbly
for sweeping down the soot. - Right, you scruffy little urchin,
get up that chimney (!)
Lesley, how much did they pay these kids?
Well, they didn't pay them anything at all, actually.
Kids of about six and seven, often orphans,
or kids looked after by the parish,
they'd apprentice them to a master sweep.
And the idea was the master sweep would care for them,
feed them, clothe them, give them a living,
until such time as they were too big to go up the chimney.
Then the problem is, of course,
the master sweeps were out to make as much money as they could.
So the kids didn't get paid. They'd get very meagre food.
Often that meant they got stunted growth, they were very slim.
TONY: Daniel! - Yeah.
You all right in there? You're not stuck, are you?
- Just a little bit. - What you doing?
I'm cleaning.
TONY: What was it like up in the chimney?
Very tight-fitting. I mean, often, on a chimney like this,
you'd have your main chimney
but you'd have flues going off from the main chimney.
So very, very narrow areas that they had to climb in.
TONY: Suppose you were in there for about 3 hours
and there was loads of chimney soot and stuff.
DANIEL: I would cough a lot and...
..get squashed by the space
because you're in this tight space.
LESLEY: Kids did get stuck. Kids died of respiratory problems.
Sometimes, they got stuck in there and nobody could get them out.
So it was a very tragic life.
TONY: You wanna come out? - Yeah!
All right, finish your cleaning, then you can come.
OK.
As industry grew in the Victorian period,
mass production broke jobs down into individual tasks
that were unbelievably repetitive and dull.
Label sticking was the Mount Everest of dull.
This was as good as it got for a lot of people.
There was nowhere else to go.
But, ironically, one of the great men of the age
started off here.
This is a very boring job.
Charles Dickens was a label sticker as a lad
before going on to write the novels
which give us our clearest pictures of the age.
We know a lot about the Victorians
because in their curiosity to explore life,
they documented almost everything.
Even something like this.
I am a cigar-end collector. And why?
Because I can sell them back to the cigar manufacturers
or on to people who want to smoke
but can't afford to buy full cigars.
We know of people who did jobs like this from Henry Mayhew,
who documented the poor of London.
And some of the worst jobs he found
were jobs involving scavenging.
Why was there so much scavenging in Victorian times?
There'd always been people scavenging on the streets.
But during the Victorian period,
England was becoming more and more urbanised.
More people were moving into the towns and the cities.
And they were producing a lot more rubbish and refuse.
Plus, there were just more and more people
who needed to find employment
and some way to feed themselves.
This guy with the tall hat over here, what's he scavenging?
Are these ham bones, chicken bones?
KAREN: These're all sorts of bones this bone grubber has picked up
outside houses and just in the streets of London.
And they were a very valuable commodity
because he could sell them on to bone mills.
And they would be ground up and used for manure,
and to produce soap and other products.
Phwoar! Those don't smell very fresh, do they?
What about this burly-looking guy?
Looks like the coal man we had when I was a kid.
Well, he's actually a dustman.
So he's going around households emptying dustbins
and collecting the dust and cinders there.
- That's what we've got. Dust. - That's right.
Most of the rubbish Victorian households were producing
was the dust and cinder from fires.
And this dust would be taken by pony and cart
to some of the enormous dust-yards around the city.
And the dust there would be sifted and sorted.
Some of it would go for manure,
some of it for making bricks.
There'd be a lot of other useful and valuable things mixed in.
KAREN: So, there will be things like old boots and shoes
and jewellery and rags and bones.
All kinds of things that had a sell-on value.
This is a rather sinister looking guy.
What about this? What's that for?
Well, this man is a tosher or a sewer-hunter.
So he made his living going down London's ramshackle sewers,
finding coins, jewellery, silver-plated cutlery.
And he would use this hoe to poke around in the old brickwork.
Also, if he fell into difficulty, if he got stuck in a quagmire,
he could use this hoe to try and lift himself out
before he...he sunk without a trace.
Are these the premier league of scavengers?
These are the elite of scavengers
because they could make as much as 2 a week
from the items that they found down in the sewers.
And they had to be very fit, very strong, very healthy
because they faced a lot of dangers down in the sewers,
from attacks from rats,
from the poisonous fumes that were down in the sewers.
Rummaging around in bins like these guys,
collecting dust and even bits of bone were pretty horrible jobs.
But they weren't the worst.
The worst scavenging job was down here on the shore.
This place had 50 people a day working here.
The name sounds charming but the job of mudlark certainly wasn't.
In Victorian times, this was a grim place to be.
It would have been incredibly smelly.
The River Thames was basically like an open sewer.
The majority of London's population,
their sewage just went straight into the river, untreated.
There were other things that were going into the river as well.
Things like offal from the city's slaughterhouses,
vegetable waste from the wholesale markets,
even things like dead dogs, dead cats,
even bodies from murdered people who had been tossed into the river.
Who were the people poking around here looking for stuff?
These were the mudlarks.
They were really the most wretched of people.
They were very young children who were perhaps orphans,
old women who were either widowed
or perhaps their husbands had turned to drink and couldn't work.
They were the people who were on the verge of destitution.
They had no choice. They were forced to come onto the foreshore
to try and find any tiny scrap that they could sell on.
Is this the kind of thing people would've been looking for?
That's exactly the sort of thing.
And any old bits of coal, bits of wood,
bits of metal, particularly copper.
Copper was a particularly prized metal.
And things like rags and bones and old bits of rope.
- They can't have made much money. - They certainly didn't.
They would be lucky if they made
maybe a penny or two pennies a day from what they could pick up.
So, these were people who were pretty much destitute.
- They worked long hours? - They'd only work at low tides,
so that was only for about an hour and a half every day.
So, not only were they working in the most stinking place
and making no money,
but they didn't have decent hours to try and make a bit more.
That's right.
You may think that these scavenging jobs,
cigar-end collecting, mudlarking, bone-picking,
were the worst, and sure they were terrible.
But, they weren't the poorest.
Below them were the very worst jobs.
Because the really destitute ended up here
in the workhouse.
There were workhouses before the Victorian period
but the Victorians took them a stage further.
The new Poor Laws of 1834
made them even nastier than they had been.
The whole point about the workhouse was that the jobs you did
had to be worse than anything outside.
Even so, in the 1850s,
there were 200,000 people in workhouses all over the country.
For these people, this was about as low as you could go.
Once in, it was very difficult to get out.
Men were separated from women,
the able-bodied from those less fit.
And all the jobs were intended to punish you for being poor.
- So the first job is what? - First job is stone breaking.
- Pretty nasty. - The archetypal punishment job.
It really is, yes.
I can't imagine that they would have had these
in the workhouse. - They never had those.
So what do I've to do? Just hit the stone?
You've got to hit that and break it into really small pieces
because the stone would have been used for mending roads.
- Didn't do anything. Just smoked. - No, no.
- Keep going. - Everybody had to do this job?
No, not everybody. It was such an awful job.
- Hey! Yes! - Well done!
Only the casuals and the tramps were...were given that.
I can understand that. They wouldn't have wanted to stay long.
- No. - Aw!
They would've done this for a day.
- A day? - Just for one day's work.
What would they get for having done it?
They'd get a bed for the night and a meal.
- They small enough? - You need to get them all
about this size. - Why is that?
You got to pass them through a mesh in the wall,
a metal mesh in the wall of the stone-breaking cell.
They've got to be small enough to be used in road building.
If you couldn't get them through the mesh, you had to break it again.
So, I've got to get all this lot that size.
Yeah.
Oooh!
I think I've got the hang of this thing now.
- What's next? - Next is oakum picking.
- Where's that? - Over here.
What's oakum, Des? And how do you pick it?
Well, to start with, you've got a bit of rope or cable
that you then have to break up right the way down.
This is a piece of rope and you're breaking it down
into the strands. - Yeah.
And then having got a strand,
you break it right down into the yarn.
And then you got to break that yarn
down into the actual fibres of the hemp.
So what's the oakum?
The oakum is the raw fibre.
It's, sort of, the unmaking of the old rope.
What's the point? What happens to this?
Because then it goes back to the shipyards and to the vessels,
where it's rolled together
to...form...a thin...sausage
that is then banged into the...the joints
in the...in the planking to stop it leaking.
Who are the people who did this?
FRANCES: Able-bodied inmates in the workhouse.
But their fingers used to bleed at the end of a couple of hours.
TONY: When you start doing this, it seems easy.
It's money for old rope.
But...the more that you have to get your fingers
into these tiny clagged-up little threads, the harder it gets.
And it just...get...cuts in
to your fingers and your thumbs.
A bit like that, which looks like you could do in no time at all.
By the time you've pulled it out into its constituent parts,
there's just loads and loads and loads of it.
And if you'd have been having to produce
POUNDS of this stuff a day,
you'd have had to be going for hour after hour.
I suppose the thing about this job
is that if you were in a workhouse, you had to do it.
Yes, you had to do whatever jobs they gave you.
You had no choice in the matter. - So in a way,
however awful the other jobs were, at least it was your choice.
Here they took away your dignity.
They did, indeed. And some of the jobs were so bad.
Like, this was given to workhouse inmates
but they didn't give it to prisoners in jails to do.
DES: You're not picking very fast. - I was thinking.
(LAUGHTER) DES: No room for thinking.
You don't come to the workhouse to think. You come to...
TONY: ..work. DES: Yeah.
Horses were a key part of Victorian life.
For carriages, for heavy lifting,
for travelling, for work, for pleasure, you name it.
But wherever you've got horses,
you've got lots of bits and pieces.
Bags, saddles, stirrups.
And they've all got one thing in common -
leather.
The problem with leather is that it took a long time to make
and was a messy process.
Beautiful polished leather like this used on these horses
took 15 months' work by a whole factory worth of people
working in pretty grim conditions.
So far, I've tried cleaning out steam engines.
That was pretty disgusting.
The job of the navvy was hard, dangerous work.
Oh, my legs, come off the duck board. Urgh!
And the scavenging jobs really were horrible,
though at least they kept you out of the workhouse.
But there's one worst job
that's head and shoulders worse than any job in Victorian times.
A job so bad that if you wanted to do it,
you had to live and work apart from everyone else in the village.
The job of being a tanner.
And I don't mean working in a beauty salon.
If scraping the raw flesh off dead animals,
then soaking them in pools of water and dog faeces, appeals,
then this is the job for you.
Every little town in Victorian Britain had its own tannery.
Leather was an enormously important part
of everyday life.
This tannery is the last in the country
to make leather in the same way as the Victorians.
First you need a dead cow.
To turn it into tooled leather,
the work is heavy and smelly.
Really smelly.
- What do we call this place? - This is the lime yard.
- What happens here? - The first process.
Once the hides have come to us, we are de-hairing the hides here.
So what we've done is, we've mixed up water and hydrated lime
and that lime is gonna loosen the hair by the roots.
And also, it'll swell the fat on the inside
so that it's easy to cut off.
When they've been in there a fortnight, we pull them out
and they are ready for de-hairing and fleshing.
- How do I get it out? - Pick up the crook there.
And if you put it right into the far...
into the belly part of the hide...as far as you can go.
- That's about right. - Yeah.
It's a bit of a smell, isn't it? Cor!
It's like gone-off gravy? ANDREW: Possibly.
You'll get used to it. - Cor!
It's heavy too, isn't it? ANDREW: It is heavy.
- So what do we do now, Andrew? - This has to go up over the beam.
- We've got to get this onto that. - That's right.
ANDREW: It's a nice, big, heavy hide.
TONY: It's pretty heavy. How much does it weigh?
- 100kg. - You've got plastic gloves on.
- And tights! - I haven't.
ANDREW: That's all right, it won't do you any harm.
Oh, it's all skidding under my fingers.
WORKER: Here, you get that corner there. We'll pull it up.
Look, bits of hair coming away on your hands all the time.
-Now we get the hair off? - You have to work it down
with the de-hairing tool. It's all yours!
Oh, it comes away lovely, doesn't it?
WORKER: Not too bad at all, is it?
TONY: I think I'm even getting used to the smell.
- You will get used to it. - Do you even notice it?
I don't, but my wife do when I gets home night times.
I'm not surprised. I'm surprised she's still there!
How many of these would they do in a day?
ANDREW: Well, it depends. A good man would do 15-20.
This was pretty heavy work, wasn't it?
ANDREW: This is the heaviest work there was in the lime yard.
It was always the least popular job, lime yard work.
Funny that (!) How's that looking, Andrew?
Now, let's have a look, see how you're getting on.
You're leaving a few short hairs, you've got to get all these out.
Cos once it goes into the tan yard, the hair won't come out.
This was a bit gross but the swollen, fatty bit on the inside
took us into a whole new league,
and I'm talking Premier, not Nationwide Conference.
ANDREW: You want to keep the blade flat...
..to the hide cos it's on an angle anyway.
The blade gets clogged up with the fat, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Have to keep clearing it off all the time.
WORKER: It's very sharp, so watch your fingers.
- Right. Let's have... - You're welcome.
It's hard to keep the blade in your hands
because it's so wet and sticky. ANDREW: Hmm.
It keeps trying to run away from you, doesn't it?
The old smell's coming up again. Dear, oh dear!
This is fatty but not so horrible.
WORKER: Your hands will stink after this. (LAUGHS)
OH, GOD!
(COUGHS)
Phwoar! Take over for a bit while I go and die in a corner.
But so far, we haven't seen any dog poo, have we?
You haven't. What happens is when the hide's being cleaned,
so it's been fleshed and de-haired.
It's then ready for de-liming or bating,
as they used to say in the old days.
The bating was a mixture
of dog dung and chicken dung
in a pit with water, and then warmed up.
And they used the bacteria from the dung.
It used to work on the hide or the fibres of the hide and soften it.
The idea was...you only had to put it in for a short time.
But the old boys used to keep it for weeks
because the older it was, the more bacteria there was in there.
So you'd get this smell,
which is pretty difficult to work in,
and then, in addition to that,
there'd be this kinda chicken and dog poo gravy
that they heated up. - Yes.
Particularly in thundery weather, it used to work on its own.
If you kept it here for any length of time,
then the whole village used to smell it.
She's a long-suffering woman, your wife.
WORKER: She must be, that's right.
'I've done some foul jobs in this series
but being a tanner, has a claim to being the worst job of all.'
OH, GOD!
When we think of history, we tend to think of places like this,
and the kings and the queens
and the great discoveries and the big battles.
But without the tanner and the fuller,
the men who looked after knights and kept their armour shining,
and the loblolly boys and the saltpetre men,
and the grooms of the stool, none of this would have happened.
We owe them a lot.
The people who did some of the worst jobs in history
shaped the world in which we live.