Occupations that no longer exist.

[Eyresandgraces]

I was changing the bed and remembered that in the 1970’s, so not that long ago, dh’s aunt was a tick turner for Fogarty’s.
She spent her whole working day turning pillowcases the correct way round and pointing the corners with her thumbs.
i can’t imagine such a monotonous job.

I found a list of old occupations but Tick turner is not listed.

A Tosher made a living by scavenging the Victorian sewers. Grim.

Please feel free to add any you can think of.

https://rmhh.co.uk/occup/a.html

CaptainMyCaptain · Today 12:24
Knife sharpener. I had my knives sharpened by a man who came door to door in the late 80s
We used to have those but I haven’t seen them for about 20 years.

China chamber pot manufacturers.

I remember the ‘pension’ man coming to pick up my parents money.

When they went to get their pension they’d found out he’d not paid any in and had run off with the lot along with many of my parents friends money too. Nb this is not a reflection on your dad obviously, just a massively sad tail as it left my parents with no savings or pension above the state one. Wish I’d been older I’d have taken the little shit to court for them. My parents didn’t, I don’t think they really understood what was going on and were embarrassed they’d been taken for a ride.
apologies for the derail OP

One of my relatives use to bundle up the newspapers with the string in Fleet Street. You are right that the industry was a big one for working class men and, if I recall correctly, it was quite a good career to be ‘on the print’.

Leech collector and
Toad doctor

Ah, my mum really wanted to do that but they would only take her as a secretary.

DD1 is doing landscape architecture. A lot of is digital but they still do some drawing.

I had a holiday job when I was 16 which consisted of putting a4 invoices in numerical order and filing them. All the invoices had a 9 digit number in the top corner and there were piles and piles of them. The whole room was full of unsorted invoices, thousands and thousands of them. Two women did it as a full time permanent job and I helped in the holidays. No radio and no talking allowed, would sit for 8 hours in silence sorting them!

As an architect our offices didn’t look that different in the late 80s / early 90s Although you could lift the desks up to an angle to draw on.

We have a knife sharpener locally, he advertises on Facebook.

I still have a coal man. Well he sells fake coal now unfortunately.

No.. it did exist.
You find the job mentioned in accounts of Victorian food fraud (usually in relation to raspberries rather than strawberries). But the practice re-emerged after the second world war with cheap jam made from beet sugar with added colourants and flavourings. I can just about remember how awful shop bought jam could be in the early-80s. Particularly the stuff one of my grans used to buy.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/focus/story/0,,956600,00.html

Match girl

Time sellers

Fluffer.

Replaced by Viagra.

Which books please, I’d like to read something similar?

Depending on the age of the applicant, perhaps not. I have't heard of it in connection with strawberries, but commercial raspberry jam used to have wooden pips added to it. I've read that the practice continued up until the 1940s.

Cross post!

Apparently the whipping boy things is a bit of a myth - sorry 😞

I was a copytaker for around 12 years, probably my favourite job. :-)

They still had door to door knife sharpeners in Spain five years ago.
on a moped! Possibly using the engine to run the sharpener ??

My grandad started work on the railways as a fireman then got promoted to train driver. I don't think firemen exist anymore.

Court stenographers still exist but they are being eroded for live -note services and often are no longer actually in court but working remotely and listening in.
If you finish at 4.30 after a days argument often you have the transcript fully indexed an hour later.

I don’t doubt that it did, but there is no way on earth that someone’s entire job would have been “strawberry pipper”.

My grandad worked on the docks at East India dock It was a different world in the East End then x

Where I live we have a knife sharpener who parks at various locations (pub car park,feed merchants car park) & you take your knives to him for sharpening.

Cinema usherette with her tray of ice creams.