Dieing trades and Traditions

[pienmash]

A spot of contemplation from Mash ... been thinking about all the various trades /occupations and traditions that are dieing out or have completely been lost except for in the history books ........

Things i used to do when i wor a lad to earn a few quid ,, Window cleaning , bush beating , tatty picking .... a paper round and grave digging .... specialist trades like stone masons and dare i say the good old fashioned shopkeeper ..

Just a bit of remminissing (hard to spell) and maybe some of our more "seasoned" members can add more ...

mash ....

[Zidane]

Hows about the milkman with a horse and cart....
Couldnt do it nowadays.....the horse would be stolen and end up in lasagne !

[Prenders88]

The Coal merchant
Hardware shops with a tin bath and yard brooms hanging up outside. Sold truckloads of Parafin to the first wave of West Indians who suffered from the cold damp climate of Britain.
The friendly Chemist where you got your IFORD film developed, and knew how to treat most common aliments.
The TV and radio repair and electrical appliance shop, in the days of valves and 405 line pictures.
Corset Shops, linen drapers.
Butcher Boys on the bike with a basket on the front
Saturday Evening Classified Newspapers, people would queue outside the newsagents for the "Final".
Pubs where kids were not allowed in.
Sweet shops, which sold sweets in jars, and jaw breaking toffee in trays with a little hammer.
The Prudential Man, still here in Thailand but its AIA.
Adverts for "French Polishing" in the newsagents window written on a postcard.
Transport cafes with a 1950's Jukebox, on the A23.

[Philrjones]

Cooper is another one.
Milkman?

For some reason, reading those above reminded me of funny, funny series such as Open all Hours, Steptoe & Son and others like that.

What about jobs that will probably disappear altogether in the near future?
Libraries and Librarians - more and more online availability.
Postmen - death of snail mail?
Travel agents - just book it yourself online
Fighter pilots? - replaced by drones.

Must be heaps more - back home, many check out operators are starting to be replaced by DIY checkouts, and there seems to be less bank tellers as we're able to do so much more online.

[trubrit]

As one of those "well seasoned " members let me comment. Remember the horse and cart deliveries very well as it was my job as a youngster to dash out after they have gone by and scoop up the droppings for my grandads allotment. We lived just down the road from the main post office who at that time used horses for delivery, so it was almost a full time occupation listening for them, made difficult by the fact they were the first to use rubber tyred wheels, which of course were almost silent on the cobbles, unlike the brewers drays with four mighty shire horses which you could hear a mile away .. The latter were highly prized for the sheer amount of nonsense they could generate in one drop . All steaming hot . Made the best toms around . On a more personal note at the age of 16 I served an apprenticeship as a clock maker before going to uni.I actually qualified as a CMBHI. To get this I had to construct entirely by hand a fully working 7 day clock. Yes it meant cutting all the gears on a lathe. I still have this and it still goes strong today .Of course these have all been replaced by digital throw away movements except at the very highest end so it wasn't very much use to me except for my own pride.

[pienmash]

nteresting post TB ,,, i assume clock making on the scale you mention is all but gone nowadays .... machines n robots are doing it all at the expense of manual labour and the pride in ones workmanship that goes with it .

To add to this topic .... its the school hols here in Thailand ,,, 10 plus weeks off and just how kids are to keep themselves occupied is a dillema ,,, summer school is nowt but a babysitting service for working parents and a money making scam for the schools IMO (others wont agree) ... leads me to the stuff i used to do in the hols ,, farm work , frog spawning , bush beating ,hare coursing , scrumping , eel netting ... i always found some thing ,, even these little things have all but gone ,, computers etc social media have taken over ,,i talk to my son about stuff i used to do and he thinks im joking ,, IS LIFE THAT DIFFERENT NOWADAYS ... or AM I AN OLD FART ???.

mash

[pienmash]

This is a follow on from a thread of the same title in the debate/disscusion section which doesnt seem to load on to the home page of UM ........ now in "" things to do ""

nteresting post TB ,,, i assume clock making on the scale you mention is all but gone nowadays .... machines n robots are doing it all at the expense of manual labour and the pride in ones workmanship that goes with it .

To add to this topic .... its the school hols here in Thailand ,,, 10 plus weeks off and just how kids are to keep themselves occupied is a dillema ,,, summer school is nowt but a babysitting service for working parents and a money making scam for the schools IMO (others wont agree) ... leads me to the stuff i used to do in the hols ,, farm work , frog spawning , bush beating ,hare coursing , scrumping eel netting etc i always found some thing ,, even these little things have all but gone ,, computers etc social media have taken over ,,i talk to my son about stuff i used to do and he thinks im joking ,, IS LIFE THAT DIFFERENT NOWADAYS ... or AM I AN OLD FART ???.

mash

[maaka]

even the old butcher is a dying breed..lucky if you can find a bloke that can skin, bone out, and cut up a full beast these days..its all supermarkets

[Zidane]

Going onto the mashmeisters second post on the school holidays,I remember we had nearly 8 weeks off from early July to September which was absolutely great.
Most days,except when it was raining,myself and two or three friends used to go and play pitch and putt on the 18 hole course in the South Park in Macclesfield.
After we would have an ice cream and watch the girls playing on the tennis courts nearby.
Looking back,it must have cost my Dad an absolute fortune but I reckon he thought it was money well spent just getting me out of the house !

If I was a teenager nowadays I suppose I would just be on the internet playing online games or useing Facebook,23 hours a day !

[Dublin Tony]

As a small boy in Ireland I remember my Mammy washing clothes by hand then putting them through a mangle to rinse away the water.
A good post by the elderley Brit,Prenders88,bringing back a lot of nostalgia for many.

[jimboLV]

Lamplighter, dying or already dead? I grew up in Philly, USA in the forties. Our street lighting was gas lamps. In fact, our house, built before electic lights had come on the scene, still had gas outlets in every room. Fortunately the pipes had been disabled. Anyways, as a small child I was always fascinated by the lamplighter. An older guy, always dressed in a suit, vest and necktie, and carrying a wooden stool, would always show up at dusk and light the lamps. Then he would appear again at dawn and turn them off. As I was five or six at the time, I remember thinking that this would be a good career and vowed that when I grew up I would be a lamplighter. Shows how good I was at career planning.

We had hucksters piloting a hose drawn cart selling fruit and vegetables. It was easy to sneak up behind and snare a few potatoes. We then would start a trash fire on the curb and "roast" the potatoes. They ended up burnt to a crisp, looking like charcoal, but tasted great, mainly because they were free.

One of the kids had a BB gun so we had great fun going to the nearby dump and shooting rats. If you hit them at the right spot, on the side of their abdomen, they would explode.

I made a lot of money with my little red wagon. Used to hang out the local grocery store and offer to carry home the groceries. The owner liked that, because people tended to buy more if they knew they wouldn't have to carry them. Few people had cars in those days. I would get a dime for each trip. I also used the wagon on trash day, picking through people's rubbish and salvaging newspapers, cardboard, etc. Then took them to the local junk dealer who would weigh them and pay up to a dollar a hundred pounds. Made some serious money that way, especially for a 10 or 12 year old kid.

Ah yes, memories. Especially for us really old timers. Great thread.

[Barney]

Grandfather 1 he was a railway fetler throughout country NSW Australia in his young days and a street sweeper when he returned to the suburbs. No machines to help those days.

Grandfather 2 was a dunny truck driver and had 2 offsiders replacing the dunny cans in the households outside toilet.

Mum was seamstress all her life making overcoats but hand made parachutes during the war.

Dad's first job was the young offsider delivering ice blocks with a man using a horse and drey around the street of Sydney, he then went on to be a bricksetter at the pits, hand stacking out of the brick press 2 x 11lb wet bricks at a time onto metal pallets for the kilns.

No TV in those days I think as both sets of grandparents had 11 kids.
Oh yeah! cloth nappies and their manufacture have disappeared. Actually all the old cotton mills have gone, growing up mum would always talk about cotton cloth for the coats coming from Bradford England to Australia.

[trubrit]

Yes street gas lights. They used to have an arm out one side to enable the gas lighter to rest his ladder to clean them. Us kids found this ideal for tying a rope to to make a swing.

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Now for you football fans. A football in those days was made from leather that laced up over a rubber bladder inside. It was very hard and if you happened to head on the laces it could split your head open. Likewise the boots. Very stiff leather that had to be dubbined every week to keep them flexible, complete with a very hard toe cap similar to the steel capped working boots of today.

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Of course you could do a lot of damage to your opponent with them so we had shin guards made with strips of bamboo inside.

shin guards.jpg (2.97 KiB) Viewed 2732 times

How different from the pampered stars of today.

[harmonyudon]

I remember making reasonable money by developing financial software in c++ and/or Clipper and distributed this software by sending diskettes also by major publishers like Kluwer, between 1995-2000 .

I even found an article about this in Dutch by a community for professionals in finance.

So for those Dutch people who think its all bla bla bla please read this Dutch article.
http://www.bankingreview.nl/?portlet=ba ... el&id=2737


Who use diskette nowadays????

[pienmash]

Real funny tv ...... this maybe should of gone on the Udon cable thread but i truly dieing trade is the garbage wots on the telly nowadays ... ive just laffed mi tits off at On the Buses , and steptoe n son is on later ... superb find streamed UK telly loads of great stuff from the past inc ol westerns and stuff like ive mentioned ,,, plus of course Coronation street and all the red hot flange in Emmerdale ... thanks to the man that set it up for me you know who you are ... i may give you a sloppy wet kiss in appreciation .....

mash

[Astana]

The irony of this maybe appealing to some... Saudi Arabia may stop public beheadings... due to a shortage of swordsmen

Saudi Arabia is considering dropping public beheadings as a method of execution because of a shortage of government swordsmen in the oil-rich kingdom. A joint Saudi committee composed of representatives of the ministries of interior, justice and health has instead proposed firing squads for capital sentences. The committee argued that the measure, if adopted, would not violate Islamic law, allowing heads - or emirs - of the country's 13 local administrative regions to begin using the new method when needed.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z2NFiWzxCV

[Barney]

Wow Astana for those of us who have spent time in the Saudi kingdom that comes as bad news.
With the Saudia-isation of the work force I thought this would have been top prioroty to get training schemes in place for the young islamic radical to follow and be passed down from generation to generation.
I suppose thay could keep one Arab tradition going and have the Bedouin's ride in from the desert while in formation shooting at the poor chap tied to a post in chop chop square in downtown Riyadh.
Next you will tell me that amputation of hands of thieves will die out?

[Astana]

Wow Astana for those of us who have spent time in the Saudi kingdom that comes as bad news.
With the Saudia-isation of the work force I thought this would have been top prioroty to get training schemes in place for the young islamic radical to follow and be passed down from generation to generation.
I suppose thay could keep one Arab tradition going and have the Bedouin's ride in from the desert while in formation shooting at the poor chap tied to a post in chop chop square in downtown Riyadh.
Next you will tell me that amputation of hands of thieves will die out?

Saudi Arabia executes seven men for armed robbery

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-21767667

It seems that the backlog of those on death row has started to be cleared with the demise of the traditional chop chop square format.

Witnesses said they were shot by a firing squad in the southern city of Abha - not beheaded as is customary.
The men were sentenced to death in 2009 after being found guilty of organising a criminal group, armed robbery and breaking into jewellery shops.

[harmonyudon]

What would they do if they catch the bank robbers of bkk bank today in bic-c?
Is in th the feath sentence??

Its already posted on facebook by Udon thais about the robbery. Seems that facebook is also good for spreading news.