Jobs Once Part of Everyday Life Quiz

Answer: Wiping the Monarch's bottom

The Groom of the Stool, you could say, had the pooiest royal job imaginable. His work was to help the ruling English king - and they were mostly kings back when this job existed - by wiping his regal bottom after His Majesty had just performed his royal excretions. This work also involved helping the king to bath and so on. Unpleasant as the job sounds, but because of the level of the intimacy involved in this work, the king usually placed a lot of confidence in his royal wiper. Over time of course, as is human nature at such close quarters, the groom was privy to many secrets of the king, and so, in fact, became a quite powerful figure at court. By the time of King Henry VII, his groom of the stool had become such a trusted official, that he helped the king decide on fiscal policies. This became known as the "chamber system".

The position of the royal wiper was more or less abandoned under Queen Victoria (the very idea!) even though her husband and eldest son - while still a prince - availed themselves of a form of it. However, when Edward took the throne (pardon the pun) as King Edward VII, the role of groom of the stool was scrapped altogether.

Answer: The River Thames

The position of herb strewer in London, particularly the royal courts, sprang into use some time in the late 17th century. This person's work involved sprinkling herbs and flowers throughout the rooms the monarchs used in their daily meanderings around their castles. Its purpose was to mask any unpleasant smells that might waft up to the royal noses, particularly those emanating from the river Thames. At that period in history, because of the raw sewage, dead animals, entrails, rubbish and any form of human waste making its way into its waters, the Thames was said to pong to high heaven.

The monarchs usually had their herb strewers sprinkling pleasant smelling plants on the red carpet used during royal coronations as well, but from the time of Queen Victoria, this position was also abolished. Herbs and others plants in this pleasant work, per Wikipedia, included "basil, lemon balm, chamomile, costmary (delicate mint scent), cowslips (beautiful perfume), daisies, fennel, germander, hyssop", various forms of lavender, "marjoram, sweet yarrow, penny royal, roses, mints, sage (minty aroma), tansy, violets, and winter savoury. What a delightful job that would be.

Answer: Railroad

Gandy dancers were workers who once laid down and maintained railroad tracks in the United States of America long before machines were invented to do the work. Also known as navvies, these men were also used in the building of canals. This hard, hot and heavy work usually drew its employees from immigrants and ethnic minorities who were desperate for any form of low paying income to feed their families either in the States, or to send back to families in their native countries.

Interestingly, lunging together as one in order to push heavy sleepers into place led to a sense of rhythm (oof, lunge, oof, etc) from which many early chants and songs were created, and it was this united form of physical movement with each lunge that also gave rise to the dancer form of the term "gandy dancer".

The "gandy" origin of this term though is unknown, although some suggest it may have come from Ireland.

Answer: Carrying lit torches for pedestrians on moonless evenings

A link boy was a child hired to carry lit torches along in front of night time pedestrians in London during the days before various forms of street lighting was installed. These burning torches were lit lumps of pitch or lumps of fibre (known as tow) and the small boys were paid a farthing at a time for their escort service. Their work also included running or walking along in front of sedan chairs - types of enclosed seats carried on the shoulders of workers - used in London up until the 19th century. The link boy often lit the way for a pedestrian to the nearest sedan chair available as well, and then ran along in front of it leading the way to its destination.

"Link" was the name given to the cotton wick on the tow part of a torch, should tow be the means by which the torches were illuminated. The little link boys were also sometimes known as "moon cursers", because their services were not required on moonlit nights, and left them out of pocket.

Answer: Scrofula

Toad doctors were specialists in traditional folk cures, and plied their trade up until the end of the 19th century, particularly so in western parts of England. The major part of their work was two-fold. The primary one was curing a disease known as Scrofula, also known as the King's Evil, where huge hideous sores associated with tuberculosis, formed in the lymph nodes of sufferers and then developed and emerged around their necks. It was once believed that only a king's touch could cure this disease, but Toad Doctors gave the king a run for his money in this regard. As tuberculosis began to wane in the 20th century, so did this disease in adults, but was still found to occur in children for some time. Alarmingly so with the advents of AIDS in the modern age, Scrofula is on the rise in some countries once again.

The second part of a Toad Doctor's worker was to cure various illnesses, believed in the minds of their victims, to have been placed on them by witchcraft. The Toad Doctor did a roaring trade in this regard, for his standard cure for these, and Scrofula, was to either place a live toad - or the leg of one - in a muslin bag, and hang it around the necks of his patients. Great placebo effect, but not so good for the unfortunate toads.

Answer: Waking people up in time to get to work

A knocker-up, also known as a knocker-upper, was a person employed in Britain to go around at specified times and bang heartily on the doors of various workers to wake them up in time to get to work. This job sprang into being during the early days of the Industrial Revolution (approximately 1760-1840) and lasted into the early 1920s.

The knocker-up either used a thick piece of wood to bang on front door, or a long lighter bamboo stick to tap discreetly on bedroom windows. The main reason for this essential job was that alarm clocks were notoriously unreliable during those days, and being late for work could mean either the sack or no pay at all. An important requirement of this job was that the knocker-upper had to stay at each place until the knocker-up-ee responded. Probably very grumpily.

Answer: Digging up corpses for medical investigation and training

The job description of a resurrectionist was macabre, to say the least. Employed in Great Britain from the 1500s up until 1752, their work involved digging up bodies of recently buried deceased persons to take to anatomists for the purposes of medical investigation. During this period, as medical theory and knowledge began to expand, cadavers were desperately required in order for both anatomists and their students to gain a thorough working knowledge of the human body - but to rob the graves of the deceased was the ultimate desecration for grieving families. The horrible legal ruling at the time was that bodies no longer belonged to anyone, and so to protect the remains of loved ones, if one could afford it, stone slabs were placed on gravesites, stronger coffins were used, and guards were often employed to patrol graveyards. Resurrectionists, if caught, were often physically assaulted.

The Murder Act of 1752 eased the body demand somewhat when, instead of bodies of executed criminals being displayed publicly as a deterrent to crime, they were permitted to be dissected by anatomists instead. Peculiarly so, this was viewed with more horror by the public than the sight of a wicked corpse swinging in the breeze. This new law certainly didn't make the anatomists very popular at all and riots frequently took place at execution sites where they sat waiting for their next "customers". An Act of Parliament in the early 1830s finally put resurrectionists out of work when the government allowed medical personnel access to the bodies of the poor souls who had died in workhouses.

Answer: Remove impurities from coal

Breaker boys were young children employed in the United Kingdom and the United States, from the mid 1860s until the 1920s. Their work involved separating impurities from lumps of coal in the coal-breaking plants of the time. The use of coal for heating purposes became more and more in demand, particularly in the United Kingdom, from the 1590s, because the need for wood had seen forests virtually stripped of trees in many places. Charles I of England was so shocked at this loss that he banned all harvesting of wood - and coal filled the void.

Coal mining, until the 1900s, was very labour intensive. From 1866, beaker boys began to be used in this work. For ten hours a day, their work consisted of picking any rubbish and impurities at the piles of coal that endlessly passed before their eyes along conveyor belts. Forced to work without gloves so they could pick faster, these children often lost their fingers to those fast moving belts. Other children lost legs and arms if they were caught up in machinery, or, even worse, were smothered or crushed to death in machinery. The most terrible part of any death that occurred in this way was that their bodies weren't removed from where they had fallen until the end of each working day. It would take years before the outcry from the general public saw the outlawing of children under the age of twelve in this soul destroying work.

Answer: Sanguine

Leeches had been used by doctors for various medical treatments throughout England for centuries, but mainly for the purpose of bloodletting. This peculiar treatment had arisen over time from the belief that the body operated on the correct flow of four main humours throughout it, and that any imbalance of same had the result of causing its respective illnesses. Briefly, these humours were phlegmatic (phlegm), choleric (yellow bile), sanguine (blood) and melancholic (black bile). Leeches were accordingly used to drain the body of excess blood in any illness that doctors of the time believed were associated with a sanguine humour.

Collecting these medical leeches, however, was a challenge. Leech collectors, also known as leech gatherers or leech finders, were accordingly used for this purpose. Initially these ghouls used old worn out work horses for the job by standing them in leech infested areas, watching the leeches swarm to the poor old creatures, attaching themselves to them, and then harvesting the sated leeches as they dropped off. Eventually though (possibly because of the cost of hay), leech collectors used their own legs to gather the creatures. The penalties for that of course were illness related to blood loss or infections. Only one leech species was suitable for this work though (Hirudo medicinalis), and currently, these ghastly creatures are identified as near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. In recent times, and although blood-letting by leeches became an almost obsolete practice by the late 19th century, the use of leeches is now rearing its horrifying head once more - along with maggots to eat rotting flesh - by practitioners of modern medicine.

Answer: Town criers

Since most people could neither read nor write in earlier times, a town crier was employed for the purpose of disseminating information to the general public. Also known as bellmen, these fellows made public announcements in various areas of cities where the public could be found, by first ringing their hand-held bells loudly to draw everyone's attention, and then reading out any announcements. Sometimes, other instruments, such as drums, or gongs, or horns were also used prior to the news being given. The announcements themselves could consist of proclamations, new laws, important events, and even, in some cases, forms of early advertising.

A somewhat comical example of same was once the case in Goslar, Germany, where a town crier was used to inform people not to urinate or defecate near the river on any day before water was to be taken from the river to make fresh batches of beer. Nothing like getting one's priorities right. Interestingly, in many cases, women were also used for this work. My eldest daughter would be great for this work. She has a bellow like a sergeant major. You can read more about this interesting, and sometimes perilous work in Wikipedia if you wish. It's quite fascinating. Town criers, for example, could sometimes be attacked if the news they roared out displeased the public. Tax increases, for example, was a certainty in that regard. In England, because any news event was read out on behalf of the ruling monarch, attacking a town crier was considered an act of treason.