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

Prompted me to think of entry level jobs that developed skills beyond customer service that have gone in my lifetime. Reminded by pp of telex operator one. Loved the clunk clunk of the keyboard as it punctured the tape. Me feels me age, even though me thinks like the teenager who telex operated.

That's quite sad - did he retrain as something else? There must be a lot of 'repair' professions like that that have just disappeared

Sorry but I thought this was hilarious 😆

One of my friends worked in local government at the county council's HQ and they had a tea trolley lady who came round twice a day. I was so jealous!

i was explaining the concept of internal post to our intern. that you'd put things in internal enveloped which were collected and redistributed by the post room person. i work in an office of >4000 people and i don't believe we even have a post room

I remember wheel tappers at Shrewsbury station when I was a child. It was an important interchange - still is - so a wheel tapper there could check a fair few trains in a day.

I wonder if the time is approaching when we'll no longer have and Christmas Card manufacturers?

They still exist but for restaurants. A van turns up at the pub near me but they won’t sharpen general public knives.

Stenographer?

Thanks, that makes sense. I was thinking about accountancy where we had to handwrite or dictate letters, memos and tax calculations and the WP operator typed it up. We got a flimsy back to proofread, handed that back with hand-marked corrections, and so on and so forth until it was finally right. Letters were then printed on headed paper to be signed and posted to the client, but with carbon and two or three flimsy sheets of paper interleaved underneath to be used as file copies. I'd be amazed if any of that happens nowadays.

I was a shop manager for blockbusters many moons ago 😀

Do court typists / Stenographers type in short hand to keep up with and accurately report proceedings ?

When my mum was in a hopsice a few years ago for palliative care there was a tea lady that used to come round with tea/coffee and biscuits- it was such a nice thing at a hard time. My son was just under 1 and she gave him a biscuit and after that he new there was biscuits coming so he'd be all smiles and charming her when she'd come around haha.

I'd say printing is a job that's almost gone- like proper traditional printing.

My Mum was a tracer.

Female tracers worked in the drawing offices and traced over the drawings made by draftsmen to make the final original design. The need for tracers was often put down to the increased demand for engineers, however it was mainly down to the fact that women were able to trace over these plans with care and precision, it took great skill to be able to become a tracer. To become a tracer, you would have to complete an apprenticeship in a tracing office. The length of these apprenticeships seems to vary between companies but range from nine months to five years. The tracing offices were made up of female employees who were very much kept separate from their male colleagues or draftsmen.

I think Mum worked in engineering. We found all her old tracing equipment the other day when we were sorting out her house, she still tells me stories of her time in the tracing department.

I was just going to post saggar maker's bottom knocker but you beat me to it!

Dirigible pilot and subcategories thereof, such as Goodyear Blimp and Zeppelin.

Must be heading that way. My Mum, an inveterate card writer and sender, reports not receiving any charity catalogues this summer/autumn. She used to order her cards at that point. I wonder if charities are finding they don't get the sales so it's no longer a good source of revenue.

These are what the offices looked like.

Scullery maid.
I met a lady at a bus stop whose mother started out as a scullery maid when she was 14. Ended up Housekeeper before she got married and had to leave. Very Downton Abbey, not so long ago!

They still use bamboo and rope in some countries.

They still exist, people in my town sometimes recommend them

I never realised that about the whipping boy! Thank you for that.

Gods yes, lollipop lades/men are all over the place at just about every school. Would be very dangerous for kids crossing the road otherwise.

Similar to night-soil man?

DH’s grandad had an everyday job (think he was a postman), but at the same time lots of men were allocated a stretch of rural road to maintain. They were called milesmen or linesmen, not sure, but each man would keep on top of the hedges or walls and any ditches and drains, so everything was in good repair and any downpours were safely contained as drains were always maintained (unlike now - any amount of rain means flooding round here as most of the Victorian drainage system has collapsed and not been looked at in decades!).