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

A witch finder

This has now got me thinking about the Provi Woman. Does she still exist? You borrowed money from a company called Provident. You then got a Provident cheque ( the loan essentially). Then the Provi Woman came round weekly to collect the repayments for the loan.

Ooh. Dark.

Still plenty of those about.
They are usually disguised as Guardian reading left wokebros these days though.
Same shit different hats

A cooper who makes barrels. The Guinness factory tour shows video footage of how they used to be made. I went on the tour back in the 80’s and a real cooper showed us how he made the barrels. It was much more interesting than a film.

My mum was a Contomoter operator for Greenall's Brewery back in the 70's. Basically a big manual calculator before computers.

Floor walker in department stores.

I guess department manager is fairly similar. The local department store to my grandparents still had a floor walker dressed in morning dress who just wandered around keeping an eye on floor staff when I was a child. Just like Captain Peacock in Are You Being Served 😂 Actually, TBF, the writers of the sitcom were local so maybe he was their inspiration 😂

Corona Man

Person that pulls the rope on the guillotine in France. I know that there's still people who work in death penalty related professions around the world but I don't think death by guillotine exists anymore, anywhere.

Something that amazes me is that the last time the guillotine was used in France was in 1981.

In a similar vein, wax death mask créateur/trice. Even Madame Tussard had to diversify two centuries ago.

You beat me to it, my cousin was a comptometer operator as well. Kind of a cross between a massive calculator and computer.

My Mum too, she worked in a University and wore a white coat to put cards into mainframe computers. 1969-1973 ish. She never passed a single exam in her life, left school at 15.I don’t think she ever got involved in thinking about what the comptometers were actually working out, or why.

Yes. Dh's nan had the Corona man.

Docker

Indeed they are, so is much classical literature. It's very educational.

Wow. Haven’t thought about this for years. My favourites were green cream soda and raspberryade. Money back on the bottles was a great concept.

I trained as a journalist in the 90s. We learned shorthand,

One of my first jobs was writing the news for Ceefax. No longer a job!

Coal miners still exist my DILs father is a miner

She did, well, that is up until 2021 when they stopped doing doorstep credit and collections.

There are still similar businesses that operate in eastern Europe, eg Poland, Hungary etc

Radio Rentals - does this shop still exist?

Has anyone posted the Saggar Makers Bottom Knocker yet?
https://www.thepotteries.org/bottle_kiln/saggar.htm

My late dad who retired in 1992 was an Insurance Agent. He had a list of clients and had to go door to door collecting their Insurance premiums every month.

In the 70’s when televisions were rented the TV repairman came to your house.

In the 50s my MIL worked for GPO (that went on to become BT)
She used to plug in and unplug the phone lines by hand to connect calls .That’s madness to me.

My colleagues who have been there years fondly reminisce about this. Apparently you bought strips of raffle type tickets and could get toast in morning or cake in afternoon too.

Back when I was a student in the early 00s there were SMS/text message question and answer services, I applied to work at one but didn't get the job. This was before internet on your phone. Anyone could text in a question and you had to try to answer it. "Any Question Answered" was one of them. It was sort of directory enquiries meets local information service, like someone might want a number for a local taxi firm or where does the best pizza in Bradford, but equally they could ask how many eggs do salmon lay on average or what is the Russian for 'can I have two beers please".

These days everyone would just google it themselves!