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

Where do you live?? 1965??

Still plenty of these about but some of the children are getting tooo big.

We have a scrap metal van that drives slowly past playing a loud recording of ‘Any Old Iron’

Is that the West Mids? They were on about this on Absolute Radio the other day and the DJs (not youngsters) had never heard the expression it seemed and thought it was specific to Brum.

Feels like it, this is the cinema.

The organ and the man rise up from under the stage via a trapdoor at interval time. It plays proper movies, currently showing Wicked on one screen and Gladiator 2 on the other.

In fact @Piggywaspushed ask your son about it, bet he's heard of it iirc. 😀 Not a stalker I promise, just remember you on some other threads.

"Sells double glazing door to door."

I'm sure that's a line from a John Betjeman poem?

Ha ! I knew it would be in that neck of the woods !!

I heard one like that round here a few years ago.

How about ticket sellers at railway stations. There used to be manned offices at each railway station where you went in and bought your ticket. Then they started phasing them out and put ticket machines in their place.
No idea what they have now.

There is still a ticket office in my nearest station. It is not huge, only two platforms, but quite busy.

We met someone at a national trust place who did similar. DH had a very long chat with him and they both moaned about how computers do it all now but it isn't as good.

My OH started with BT in 1988, digital exchanges both public and businesses systems were being introduced, he worked on these most of his working life or similar, then came IP and fibre, pretty much his job vanished, there are are still a few left who work on them but a dying breed.

In his last few years of work, management would describe technicians like him as "Grey tops" treated with utter derision.

How about 'Typing Pool' jobs, not sure if they exist anymore.

We still have some audio typists nowhere near the scale it used to be but AI voice recognition can't do it all yet and not everyone types quickly enough

I think we worked at the same company probably around the same time. It was my first job and I worked in the typing pool. We were not allowed to go in the main door but had to go round the side of the building.

DD came back from a day out in Derby the other week and said while she was there she heard like a loudspeaker thing with some weird chant. With Derby being more multi cultural than our home area I decided maybe it was a call to prayers for a mosque as I know some cities have these on a loudspeaker recording. DD agreed it could be that.

Then she sowed me a tiktok video today and it was a scrap man playing "any old iron" recording as he drove about slowly and she said it was that, not a call to prayer! 😆

Fireman on a steam engine.

Yes they still exist on preserved steam railways but they are museums, and the workers are unpaid volunteers.

Ha!

My g-granfather was a walking stick dresser.

Whaling ship work like in Moby Dick.

Council rent collector, he came round every Monday morning for the rent money.
Insurance man, came round Thursday evening, once a month.

Remember the Royal Observer Corps? From 1955-1995 they functioned (on a volunteer basis!) as the UK's nuclear warfare analysis and fallout warning service.

To this day I reckon I could still plot the fallout plume of a nuclear strike using chinagraph pencil to write back-to-front on the reverse side of a big glass map of southern England.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Observer_Corps

There are still ticket offices open for at least part of the day all round us in SE London. However, their duties will be very different from ye olden days. I know from Golden Age whodunnits published between the wars that it used to be expected that every single railway ticket issued would be punched by the conductor on the train and then handed in at the end of the journey to a ticket collector. All tickets were then checked back to the issuing station's records. The fictional police seemed to find this useful. No idea how useful it was to real police or to British Rail and its predecessors.

My husband put in a brief stint as a ticket office clerk in the mid 1970s. It involved a lot of training in how to read the huge timetable books kept in every ticket office so that anyone coming in and asking for a return ticket from (say) Penzance to Auchtermuchty via Glasgow would get the right answer.

Thought of another one. Motorail doesn't exist now, I believe. There used to be a service where motorists could have their car loaded onto a railway carriage so they could sleep or rest instead of driving hundreds of miles. It must have been a specialist job loading and unloading the cars.

An ice cream van with a jingle used to stop in our village street in summer but I haven’t seen it for years.
‘Do they still exist?

My mum was the nit nurse for our school and used to check me just as all the other kids even though she was very thorough at home anyway!