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

Garden hermit

This has brought back a lot to me. I started work on a grad scheme in one of the big 4 firms in 1985 and was in the tax department working on family trusts and estates, most of which were also managed by the firm. When it was time for the trusts to send the annual payments to the beneficiaries you had to go to see 2 male clerks in their office, where they would hand write the cheques in beautiful copperplate handwriting. One beneficiary lived somewhere where the postman had a habit of opening people's post, so for that one you had to ask the clerks to seal the envelope with red sealing wax melted using one of their cigarette lighters.
There was so much checking and rechecking of additions and calculations by various people because Excel didn't exist, using special huge machines that spewed out a print of the sums like a till roll. Accounts were produced on A2 sheets which had to go to the word processing department in a different building, they would go back and forth numerous times because of typing and other errors.
In my first year I spent a huge amount of time handwriting hundreds and hundreds of sheets of dividend payments for individuals and trusts, to be attached to the tax returns, because stock brokers weren't computerised and didn't send out lists of them, we had to compile the dividends from the remittance advices and check they were all there by looking up each one in a special book. Then someone more senior would check each one again. I was chosen to write them out because I had lovely handwriting.
When I look back now it seems like something out of the dark ages. So many days and weeks spent doing things that these days take seconds.

I do a lot of family history and there are many reelers, rovers, little piecers, tenters, combers, carders, cloth dressers, overlookers, minders, framework knitters in my family, many of whom worked in the cotton and wool industries in the 19th century.

Every week a truck collecting scrap metal drives round the streets in my village with a bloke with a megaphone shouting "any old iron, boilers, washing machines.."

Dry stone wallers

Not many of those left

I live in Spain and the knife sharpener is still very much in action here! You know he’s coming because he has a little birdy whistle!

I think that they are quite sought after in some areas @coxesorangepippin. A friend moved to the countryside and her DH made her promise not to tell people that he could build a dry stone wall (he'd worked at it before for a few years and could actually do it properly) as he said he'd always have people asking him to do repairs for them.

Vagabonds/tramps. I don't mean like the street homeless or those in temporary accommodation but those who voluntarily used to live in caves/disused railway carriages/ air raid bunkers/biouvacs. We don't seem to hear about them anymore.

A friends son has lived 'off grid' in a tent in some woods on the Cotswold's/Midlands borders for several years whilst holding down a job.

His gf is pregnant now so they are moving into a rented property. Much to his parent's relief.

We met one when we were on holiday in Northumberland this year. He seemed very happy in his work.

I know there are still milkmen, though few and far between, but when I was growing up in the seventies, we had a bread man, an egg man and a lemonade man. The lemonade man sold bottles of fizzy drinks from the back of his lorry. You gave the glass bottles back every week, so all recycled. We call all fizzy drinks lemonade in NI😆 He was also referred to as the mineral man.

We lived in North Wales until 1965 and I have clear memories of the basket filled with onions and my mum buying long strings of onions - as a small child it felt very exotic and exciting.

... And the insurance man. Both called weekly.

My ex son in law worked as an insurance man, collecting weekly payments, for a short while in the late 90s.

When you went to insure your car pre internet there were whole shops dedicated to it.

My grandpa was a telephone operator. He worked at the telephone exchange, and people would dial 100 to get through to him and be connected to the number they needed.

There are still some gas street lamps

https://lookup.london/london-gas-lighting/

There was so much checking and rechecking of additions and calculations by various people because Excel didn't exist

I took A Level Computer Science in 1985. We used to write programs to create, "3 dimensional arrays", which morphed in to spreadsheets.

@squashyhat yes, my dad does. I can get it (but I'm lactose intolerant) and they also deliver bread, eggs and fruit juice.

They do.

Not sure if it’s specialist role these days but some airports/airfields have individuals who perform bird control (i.e.bird scaring) in addition to other duties.

Fortran is the language used by college for A-level computer science course - DS 17 is taking it.

I was a bit surprised (40s) as did Java and C++ - not surprised Fortran still exists but that it's best language to use for computer science courses.

falconers are used in many places to deter birds.

There still is one where I live and it does good business. Not a shop but NFU Mutual Insurance is still not online, you have to speak on the phone to a real person. I tried it this year for home and contents. It was a very convoluted business and not good value but I guess it might have been a better option if I had actually had a farm or agricultural business.

I remember them in London but the onions were fiercely expensive.

Fortran is the language used by college for A-level computer science course - DS 17 is taking it.

I was a bit surprised (40s) as did Java and C++ - not surprised Fortran still exists but that it's best language to use for computer science courses.

That's really quite odd, I doubt it is 'the best Language' for the purpose nowadays. Most youngsters learn python as standard at the moment I think. I suppose Fortran may have the virtue of simplicity for some purposes. To some extent they need to learn a language and then learning another is easier but it seems a bit odd not to use a modern object oriented one from the off.

I write scientific software - back in the 80s and into the 90s this was all in Fortran (first course while at uni during my chemistry undergrad degree was on cards!). Then newer code was in C++ , other languages as necessary for particular purposes. There are probably still some pieces of legacy code in fortran but not being sctivelyworked on. Our new hires all use Python - it's what's mainly needed for the machine learning applications they're developing.

Mind you in some fields old school still rules - my dd is an electronics engineer, they use C (yeah, gnarly old C) for embedded software- I suppose it doesn't have the bloat of newer languages and it wins on compactness and speed.

They still go out measuring some stuff, but most of the work is now computerised. I suspect the role of a modern carto is very different from what it was in his day - https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/what-is-cartography

And both jobs still exist - after a fashion.

We have a scrap man that comes round ringing a bell.

In London there are still newspaper stands, giving away the Evening Standard and there are people who man some of the stands.