haven't just happened because of kings and queens,
but because of a lot of ordinary people at the bottom of the heap
getting their hands dirty.
This week, the human taxis who carried Charles I to his trial,
the women who had to prod and poke plague victims for a living,
and find out
what working up to your elbows in sheep entrails has to do with music.
These are just some of the worst jobs from the Stuart period.
Some of the most memorable events in our history books
took place during the Stuart period -
the Great Fire of London, the Great Plague, the Civil War,
and one of the most famous assassination attempts of all time,
the Gunpowder Plot.
Guy Fawkes and his mob tried to blow up King James I
and the Houses of Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder,
but he was foiled by a tip-off and executed.
So what's the connection with a milk float?
Well, my first worst job is the saltpetre man.
His task was to collect the basic ingredient for gunpowder,
which was saltpetre.
In the 17th century,
the most common way of getting saltpetre was by processing urine -
lots of it.
So, in 1625, in London,
they established this crazy kind of milk run.
But instead of leaving milk on people's doorsteps,
they went door to door collecting urine that people left out for them.
Back then, they would have had a horse and cart
with a barrel on the back.
They did their rounds every other day in the winter
and every day in the summer, when it was a hot, hard slog,
not to mention sticky and smelly.
Urine can be processed to produce potassium nitrate - saltpetre.
And every drop was crucial,
because the Gunpowder Plot kicked off a whole century of violence.
It was the saltpetre man who fuelled every musket and cannon.
But the insatiable demand was so high
that most of his work was much harder.
Britain's leading expert on the job took me trudging through the cold
to a happy but smelly hunting ground for a saltpetre man.
Why do they bother coming out to the country with their barrows?
Why didn't they just use the urine they got in the towns?
What they needed was the much higher levels of nitrates
that you get when it's all rotted down into manure like this.
How would they know where to look for it? It wasn't just dung heaps was it?
Dung heaps were a really good place,
but anywhere where you've got faeces, urine...basically...
- So outside people's houses? - Oh, and inside.
In fact, they dug absolutely everywhere.
If you came to my house looking for dung, I'd tell you to push off!
Well, you could try that, of course,
but the commissioners had the right - rather like the VAT man today -
to dig absolutely anywhere.
They were accused of digging in...people's chambers,
in bedrooms, even in the house of God.
So, not only were you breaking your back shovelling manure all day,
but people hated you for invading their privacy.
Contemporary reports indicate that, although they were state sanctioned,
saltpetre men were often bully boys
who had no qualms about bursting into people's homes.
Who are the blokes who did this work?
They were real rabble. Real nasty people, probably.
There's a lovely reference to "Rough Ralf" and "Welsh Will,"
they're often referred to in the papers as "the rabble".
So, did they make much money out of this?
Well, the people who did the shovelling didn't,
cos they were on the bottom of the heap.
But you can get some idea of how much money was in this,
when the guys that employed "the rabble" as it were
were paying something like 1,700
for the privilege of being able to go and get the saltpetre.
If that wasn't bad enough,
you still had to get the nitrate crystals out of the muck
by swilling it through with water and boiling it up,
making an even worse stench.
That'll do.
Once purified, saltpetre was combined with two other chemicals -
sulphur and charcoal - to make the black powder Guy Fawkes was after.
We did make an official request
but, unfortunately, the Government politely declined.
So we're not going to be able to blow up
even the smallest part of the Houses of Parliament,
but I don't want to disappoint you, there is going to be an explosion.
Underneath this car is... three kilograms of powder,
which is roughly one five-hundredth of the amount that Guy Fawkes used.
To demonstrate the efficacy of even a relatively small amount of gunpowder,
here we are.
Just to make sure I'm not completely deafened by the blast...
Two, one.
Look at that! It's amazing, that hole.
It really has actually just punched it through, hasn't it?
You wouldn't get much for that on the second-hand car market.
It's like a giant has just gone boof!
What it would have been like 500 times that much amount of explosives
inside the House of Commons...
In the bottom of the building that it was in,
it would've just taken the top of the building off.
How much dung would we need to get rid of the House of Commons?
Something like between 50 and 75 tons of it.
So, in saltpetre man terms,
that means that "Rough Ralf" and co
would have had to shift 1,500 wheelbarrows full.
Gunpowder was also used in one of the other big Stuart events,
which was the Civil War.
They had muskets and cannons and the much lesser known petard.
The guy who used the petard
got far closer to explosions than we just did.
Between 1642 and 1646,
the lives of workers all over England were thrown into bloody disarray
by the Civil War.
On one side, King Charles I and the Cavaliers,
on the other, Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads.
For the ordinary men who were pressed into joining up,
being maimed and killed became daily occupational hazards.
This is Tutbury Castle in Derbyshire
and it was one of the last Royalist strongholds.
The King himself took shelter here
and it only fell to the Roundheads after four years of guerrilla warfare
and a really long siege.
It's the technology of the siege
that gives us one of the riskiest jobs of the war.
The man who used a type of bomb called a petard
to blow the castle gates down.
A petard was the precursor of the modern hand grenade,
except you didn't chuck it, you picked it up,
ran along with it under your arm like a rugby ball,
and delivered it in person.
By exploding a device against the gates,
you aimed to punch a hole in the weakest link of the fort's defences
and gain entry for the rest of the troops.
- So you fix it onto your door. - That's it.
Then...how do we know it's going to go in that direction
and not that direction?
Forces are equal and opposite,
but there's a wooden backing board and it's open.
That means when the explosion goes off,
this nice iron container pushes all the explosion that way
and punches a hole through the door.
- And what's in here? - A fuse.
Made of wood, filled with a composition.
It just goes in there and that gives you some time to get away.
So what's this made of?
That one would originally be made of cast iron or bronze,
inside which, 10lbs or 12lbs of gunpowder.
- Who'd have made it? - Petardier.
He's employed purely to make these things to blow in walls.
And he'd run up, fix it to the wall and...?
No. Far too valuable. You're going to have an assistant for that job.
That's the dangerous part of the work.
Petardier makes this up on site, gives it to the assistant,
because he's disposable.
He's the one that has the job of getting up here,
putting it in place and setting it off.
One petardier's assistant was George Cranage.
He had to blow off the doors of Oswestry Castle.
And his preparation for the ordeal?
Getting completely drunk on sacke - a type of sherry.
Cranage was lucky. He survived.
But the job was virtual suicide,
so the assistants did all they could to improve their odds.
You'd try and do this early in the morning,
or in the dusk, so that you've got a bit of cover for that one.
Get the element of surprise,
so you're going to try and leg it wearing very little armour,
or put lots of armour on and walk slowly, but feeling better protected.
Then knowing they're going to try and shoot you, drop things on your head
and otherwise try and spoil your day,
and light the fuse and get away while they're still trying to kill you.
What would he be lighting it with? Would he be fumbling with matches?
He's going to have a piece of burning cord called slow match in his fingers
which really is cord soaked in saltpetre.
You dry it out and you light it.
Your return journey was just as dangerous.
Petards were so unpredictable
assistants were sometimes blown up as they tried to run away,
hoist by their own petards.
But what were the chances of getting hit by a musket or missile
while running from your own lines to a gate?
I wasn't prepared to die for the programme,
but I wanted to analyse just how risky it would be.
We're conducting a bit of an experiment.
I'm going to see whether I can get from here right to those gates there,
without being hit by musket fire.
We've got four musketeers up on the walls,
who've exchanged their muskets for paintball.
I'm going to be protected by two flankers -
this is Dave and Andrew from our production office.
Thanks, mate.
Cos in Stuart times,
the petardier would have had soldiers running alongside him.
But not only have I got to try and avoid being killed,
but I would have had to have placed my petard strategically
to ensure that I actually blasted the door off its hinges.
I don't want to create a little hole about 4' up
that would have been of no use to anybody.
Can you do my mask for me?
Okey-doke. Right.
- Ready, Andy. - Ready.
(Klaxon)
(Clicking of paintball fire)
Adrenaline carried me through to the gate
and, as there weren't going to be any real explosions,
I had a flare to show that I'd made it.
Done it! Done it!
Well done.
Well done, mate.
- Wahey! - You didn't do it.
- What do you mean? - Well, look down your leg.
Down your arm. You didn't make it.
They got you about half way in.
You're not dead, but you're bleeding to death out there.
Oh, but it felt so good.
You know what was extraordinary about it,
- I thought you'd be ducking around. - You can't.
When you're under fire like that, you get your head down and you go.
- Absolutely. - It does hurt like hell.
All the way down this side.
That's where they got you from that right-hand side as you came in.
Look at the petard as well. Look at that.
Would that have exploded if it had been hit by a musket?
No, it wouldn't do,
but they may well have gone straight through the board and into you.
And that was against your chest.
- I'd just be lying there bleeding. - I'm afraid so.
- Good attempt though. - Yeah.
I think we proved just how vulnerable the petardier's assistant was
in Stuart times, but then so was the King.
When the Parliamentarians broke the siege of Oxford in 1646,
Charles I was put on trial and eventually beheaded.
But he wouldn't even have got to the dock
if it hadn't been for the two nameless men who took him there.
Not in his usual regal carriage, but the Stuart equivalent of a black cab,
the Sedan chair.
Being a Sedan chair bearer was a really tough job.
They weren't just cabbies, they had to be the engine and the wheels, too.
For wealthy Stuarts,
Sedan chairs became the most fashionable way to get around town.
You could either hire them from set taxi ranks,
initially in London and then further afield.
There was one under or around the statue of Charles I
in Trafalgar Square today.
Or you could book one for going to a performance in the evening.
- Could you hail it like a cab? - You could,
but it would only be available if it was being carried the reverse way.
- Why? - You had to show that it was empty.
- I see. Like having the light on. - They carried it backwards.
Yes.
- They're pretty heavy, aren't they? - Well, this one is quite light.
In fact it's um...about 66lbs.
- That's quite a lot to carry. - Which, er...
What's this thing for?
These are the straps.
Couldn't you just carry them like that?
You could carry an empty one, but probably only about 200 metres,
then you start pulling your arms off. The straps take the weight.
And your arms, used for negotiation,
round the corners, hailing people...
Must've been difficult to manoeuvre this with poles this long.
In the next century, they got another foot longer.
- Why are they so long? - Well, really...
When they converted from the original portable chair and they enclosed it,
the person on the back couldn't see where they were going.
You needed to stand further back so that you could see,
for instance, if you're looking at a flight of steps or some obstacle,
where it actually is.
Sedan chairs were particularly popular during bad weather,
so the bearers had to trudge through the wet and the cold.
Slipping on ice was a real risk,
so householders used to chuck their ashes onto the cobbles
to provide a foothold - but there were worse dangers.
There was also aggro from the footpads of the day,
the street robbers - the carjackers of today.
They'd try and mug the chair man?
If it was a private one, you had to tackle the chair man first.
If it was just a taxi, we would stand back and almost open the door
and let them mug the person inside for their jewellery, their watches...
So these guys are trotting along, someone comes, opens the door,
- "Give us your..." - That's right.
There's one instance of someone being skewered with a sword
right through the leather here.
I've really got to have a go at this. Andrew? Tim?
From the Oxford Uni Rugby Club.
- How much do you weigh? - About 17.5 stone.
About 16.5.
I chose the right people. You can go in. You're the lighter one.
- Are you going to get on the back? - Certainly will.
Right.
So, presumably, I have to lock this bloke in.
Indeed.
Right. There you are, Tim.
Have you got your strap on, Andrew?
- I have, Tony. - Right.
- Is this the right way round? - Yeah. Just put that over.
Hang on, Andrew. Just getting my straps on.
OK.
- Are you ready? - Yeah.
One, two, three. Lift.
- It's not as bad as I thought. - Er...
Hang on. I'm having a talk.
You've got the weight on the shoulders, rather than the hands.
Right. It's a sort of trot, really, isn't it?
Right, we're just coming to a corner.
- Watch the bollard. - Right.
Did these things have lights on them for after dark?
Oh, yes. You used to carry them on the side of the pole.
If you were wealthy, you could employ a boy to carry them at the front.
He's going faster than me.
Slow down a little bit.
They always push hard from the back unless you ask them.
Not half. Was it the same fare,
whether someone was fat or thin?
Oh, yes. Yes, you had to pay the same fare.
And uphill or downhill?
They changed that in Bath.
Uphill was more expensive.
We're coming to a main road now. Hang on. Turning left.
It's a bit like...
having a ladder, isn't it?
With a swing. You've got to swing round.
I don't want to go out in the road. Ohh!
You're doing well. You're doing well.
I'm starting to flag now.
It's all right. London - London's 52 miles.
When they were introduced in 1625,
there were only 40 bearers in London.
Within a century, there were thousands.
It really is the most knackering work
and if you were wealthy and stupid enough,
you could even pay to have someone carry you from London to Bath.
That's like giving someone a piggyback for 120 miles.
Then we go down. One, two, three.
But however sore their backs and feet became,
at least the Sedan bearers didn't have to get their hands round these.
Huge wigs became emblems of the Stuart period.
Charles II's wigs were as famous as his affair with Nell Gwyn.
Big wigs made from real hair often contained unwelcome sitting tenants.
Evicting them was the task of my next worst job -
the nitpicker.
If I call someone a nitpicker, I mean someone who's fairly pedantic,
but in Stuart times, it was a real profession wasn't it?
It was and it was an important job.
People had nits and lice on the body
and nits in the hair and we had to get rid of them.
There's lots of evidence of people who worked in families,
or would go from house to house
with the specific job of getting nits out of people's hair.
Right. I'm a Stuart noble.
How do you get the nits out of my hair?
What's difficult about it is there's curls here.
And these curls will hold the little tiny eggs that nits make
and we've got to get them out.
- Here we've got a lovely... - It's a nit comb, isn't it?
It's like the ones we used to use when my kids were at primary school.
This early style is the same exactly as now.
This one's made of bone, however.
The little, tiny teeth work exactly the same way, because, guess what?
They're the same nits, laying the same size eggs
and we've got to draw them out.
You get all the eggs all the way along there.
And we also used lavender oil in the hair and that also is still used.
Oh, it is a beautiful smell.
That's part of the job of the nitpicker -
getting out the nits, rubbing the hair afterwards -
or the shaved scalp - with lavender oil in an attempt to deter it.
Of course, it leapt from wig to wig and wigmaker to wigmaker.
- What's this disgusting stuff? - This is as disgusting as it gets.
What is it?
Eugh! It's lard or something, isn't it?
It's pig fat. It's disgusting, isn't it?
The Stuart people would put a little blob of this - this was an idea -
and then put it round their neck in a silver filigree basket...
- They wore lard. - Yeah, attractive, isn't it (?)
The idea is although lice and nits are dependent on blood to live,
they also live on dead skin.
Sometimes wigs were treated with flour and baked,
or other treatments on the wigs
so they couldn't get into the scalp and take the blood to make them live.
So they'd climb down and get the lard.
We tried to draw them -
the Stuart people put this thing here with the idea
that this would go into the basket.
But, despite the lavender oil and the lard necklace,
surely your wig would get jam-packed full of nits and things, wouldn't it?
Samuel Pepys writes at one point in one of his diaries how furious he was
that his barber had sent him a wig that was absolutely thick with nits.
It vexed me, he said, that it would be sent in this condition.
It had to be sent back to be cleaned.
Very poor people - wigs were very fashionable, remember -
couldn't necessarily afford a wig.
To walk round with a shaved head, which in itself was cleansing,
was still a bad thing to be seen on the streets.
So people went along to the barber shop
and there would be a box and you'd put your hand inside the box.
Thruppence. You knew it was wigs, but you didn't know what they looked like
and you took your lucky dip - we think that's where it came from.
You'd pull out a wig and if it was disgusting and covered in nits,
then you could, for a penny ha'penny, have another go.
Nitpicking was disgusting, but it didn't damage your health.
There was another, more dangerous pest control job.
Fumigators had the choking task of purging houses by burning sulphur.
The fumes were supposed to prevent infestations
and infections such as the plague - they didn't.
In fact, they just ruined the fumigator's lungs.
Sulphur could also be mixed up into a disgusting emulsion for the walls.
So we've got lime in here and the sulphur and an egg.
That's right.
- Anything else? - We're going to put urine in.
Of course we are. If it's a worst job, it's got to be urine.
- Then we...tosh it onto the walls. - That's right.
- And what does it do? - This acts as a protection
against burrowing insects particularly and was painted on walls
in an attempt to prevent these insects coming in here
that we know obviously bring great disease with them.
This is a form of pest control.
Professional builders would put this on walls.
We know how sulphur was used to disinfect houses in another way.
There was a man called James Angier who brought over a recipe with him
for something he believed was very important
in disinfecting against plague.
And that was amber, saltpetre and sulphur.
And he toted this recipe all over Europe
before bringing it before the Privy Council of Charles II in this country
who granted him licence to use it for the purpose of fumigation.
Fumigation, of course, is a dangerous business.
Now, here's the powdered sulphur.
I'm going to ask you to vaporise some of this into the flame
to give us the proper feeling and smell of what this would've been like
when we were fumigating a house.
And that's why you've put us in a different room
because it does smell so much.
And also because it's dangerous to fabrics, furniture and to us.
We need to be very careful with this.
- I just put it in here like this? - That's right.
It's very toxic. Sulphur dioxide.
- See the fumes going now. - Can you see it going? Yeah.
(Coughs) I'm getting fumes down my throat. Quite tight.
Oh, yeah. Yes, I just get - yeah.
- Whoa! Oh, it's going. (Coughs)
Drop it in there quick. Come on. Let's get out.
I think we ought to get out actually, cos it's really stinky, isn't it?
- Are you all right? (Coughs)
(Splutters)
(Splutters) It rather took everybody by surprise, I think,
certainly the crew. (Coughs)
I think you'll understand why they took such extraordinary precautions
when you see the kind of diseases that they could contract.
Are you all right?
(Coughs)
Only just.
In the Stuart period, there was an enemy far more terrifying
than an army or household vermin -
the deadly Yersinia pestis, otherwise known as the plague.
Epidemics had come and gone over the centuries,
but in 1665 there was a double whammy -
extra virulent forms of bubonic plague carried by rats
and the airborne pneumonic plague.
The symptoms were horrific.
The glands swell up to form the characteristic bubos
in the armpits and groin, which later burst and ooze fetid pus.
The blood vessels rupture and leak under the skin, causing dark bruises.
When the infection enters the lungs, the victim coughs up a bloody froth,
spreading the disease through the air.
The only compensation is that you could be dead within hours.
The plague was so infectious
that a third of the population of London died.
A whole army of people were employed to try and contain the disease.
My first job is the seekers of the dead.
Despite the title, finding the dead wasn't the point.
The seekers or searchers role
was to examine the corpses and decide how they'd died -
like a form of untrained coroner.
Who were these women who were searching for the dead?
Ordinary old women like you and me!
Ordinary old women in the village or the town.
Probably pensioners. People dependent on charity.
And to be the searcher of the dead - which is what the title is -
would mean that they got extra money.
So, would we say, "Right, this is a plague victim"?
I think we'd be very tempted to say so.
She's got typical blackish purplish blotches
on her face and further down.
But what's most characteristic, diagnostic of plague
is that she's clearly had some kind of abscess under her jaw,
probably in the lymph glands - that's the plague bubo.
But we'd have to spend time talking to other people in the household.
You find out what the person went through, what form the illness took.
They wouldn't just look at the bodies and say this is this or that.
They would take the time to ask around
and see what other evidence there was of why the person had died.
How would these people have been regarded in the village?
With a mixture of sort of respect and perhaps fear also
because they have quite a lot of power.
They can come into your house
and pronounce on what the person has died of.
I think anybody's cautious about making a plague diagnosis
because it has implications for the family.
It means shutting the house up and preventing other people from leaving.
Might we have been tempted to take a few bob
just to say they've got the plague?
Given that it would have such consequences for the household,
we might just be a bit fuddled
or a bit careless about how we noted it down.
The seekers of the dead gathered information for bills of mortality,
the lists of weekly deaths and their supposed causes.
From them, parishes could spot new outbreaks
and try and prevent them spreading.
But it was a pretty imprecise science.
VANESSA: The bills of mortality is not modern diagnostic medicine.
A lot of it is simply describing the symptoms.
So somebody might be said to have died of a cough
or of rising of the lights, which means a kind of suffocation,
or of dropsy or timpany - swelling of the abdomen -
or of a thought or a stroke or planet struck.
A whole range of things that tell you what happened
but don't, to us, explain why it happened.
Why would they do it? Why would you be poking around
with people who could give you diseases that could kill you?
If you're paid fourpence for viewing a corpse, that's worth having.
And sometimes you don't have any choice.
If you're an old, poor person, then you don't have much option.
But far worse than examining corpses
would have been actually having to pick them up
and carry them off to be buried.
Imagine handling rotting bodies
and trying to avoid the pus oozing from the burst bubos.
At the very least, it was tough physical work.
Inside the city of London, they used to have guys with carts
who'd fill them up with the dead bodies
and then ride with them through London at night
so that they could avoid contact with the rest of the population.
Where they didn't have carts, they might use a canvas holdall like that.
Or, particularly when there slopes,
they'd use a hay sledge like this one,
which they would...pull by hand.
Initially, everybody got a proper burial.
But after a while, when there were so many dead bodies,
they just used to dig a big pit
and then they'd throw the bodies in and cover them with lime...
..and chuck earth on top of that.
It was a nightmare of a job being one of these buriers for two reasons:
firstly, because you were forced to live inside the cemetery,
and secondly, you could only work when it was dark,
so it must have been impossible for them to see what they were doing.
But I could probably just about handle being a plague burier,
and a seeker of the dead I could possibly do.
But there's one plague job I couldn't touch with a bargepole.
(MEWS) Yes. Aren't they gorgeous?
There's nothing like that little mewing noise
and the warm, soft fur of the nation's favourite pets, is there?
But during the plague they were thought to carry disease.
Which brings us to our next worst job.
The parishes of London hired dog and cat killers. And they had a cull.
40,000 dogs and 80,000 cats and kittens were put to their death.
At rates of pay between one- and twopence a carcass,
the killers were on their way
to earning the national average wage of a shilling a day.
Mind you, they didn't use humane methods.
They used anything they could get their hands on.
Knives, logs of wood, clubs, mallets.
But it was all a tragic waste because we now know
that these are exactly the kinds of animals
that could've kept the rat population down.
And plague is carried by the fleas on rats.
(MEWS)
So poor little Bobo and little Truffles lost their lives in vain.
They say never work with animals,
but it was a tip completely ignored
by the people who did my next worst job.
They were in the business of advertising quack medicines.
The gimmicks they used were as dodgy as the products.
This is a toad.
He's quite harmless unless you try to eat him,
in which case he exudes this foul-tasting liquid
which makes you feel pretty ill.
And yet in Stuart times there was actually a job
which involved putting one of these little things into your mouth.
Welcome to the weird world of the toadeater.
Popping down the market was the nearest thing ordinary folk had
to nipping down the doctor's for antibiotics.
For stallholders in search of a quick sale,
it was a matter of putting your money where your mouth is.
Why on earth did people eat toads?
It's money. I think it comes down to money in the first place.
These are people who are the sidekicks of a quack doctor,
someone who's trying to sell their medicines.
And he's employing someone to either swallow or pretend to swallow a toad
as a means of demonstrating the powers of the medicine
that the quack doctor wants to sell to his public.
If you see someone swallowing a toad which is meant to be poisonous,
and seem to be recovering,
then, wow, that's quite sensational.
TONY: Toadeater, or toady,
became the nickname for any kind of servile creep or crawler.
In return for a few pennies,
people were even prepared to eat tapeworms
or dangle snakes round their necks.
What kind of lives do you think these toadies would have lived?
Along with the doctor who employed them, I'd think they were itinerant.
A lot of quack doctors moved around.
One, to get away from the scene of the crime - dissatisfied clients.
The other thing is you moved from fair to market around the region
because that's where all the custom is.
It's starting to get a bit frisky.
Do you think they really did swallow them?
This is the question. In all the information we have, it's unclear.
You get doubting comments in diaries in the 17th century saying,
"Do you know someone who's eaten one of these toads?"
"Well, so-and-so told me he'd eaten it."
So there's various options.
One is they ate the toad and suffered an upset stomach - which you would.
You're not going to die from eating a toad,
but certainly the toxins in the skin would make you upset.
Perhaps they'd regurgitate it, that's another option.
My own feeling is it was a con trick, sleight of hand.
- It's got to be, hasn't it? - I think so.
It's just not worth the pain...for the toadeater indulging in this,
when, perhaps, you know,
practice and a bit of sleight of hand will do the trick just as well.
TONY: But modern science knows what the Stuarts didn't -
that maybe a toad slipping down your throat
wasn't as dangerous as the toadeaters made out.
It wouldn't kill you, so the trick was safer than you might think.
Right, I'm surrounded by curious onlookers.
They all want this little thing to disappear inside me.
Do I swallow it and throw it up afterwards
or do I just palm it?
This is not a very nice idea but...
In 1666, following the great plague,
London was wiped out by another natural disaster.
The great fire swept away huge swathes of the city
and left the old St Paul's Cathedral in ruins.
In its place they commissioned Sir Christopher Wren
to design a magnificent new cathedral.
It was to be his masterpiece
and a bold new statement to hail in a new London and a new century.
It's impossible to imagine London
without St Paul's Cathedral, isn't it?
It's a defining landmark
and the climax of the career of Sir Christopher Wren.
In fact, on his tombstone it says,
"If you want to see my momument, look around you."
Although, of course, it wasn't just Wren who built this place.
It was built by thousands of people whose names we don't know.
For instance, have you ever heard of James Thornhill?
Probably not, although he was one of the most famous artists of his day.
Famous and yet unfortunate
because his worst job was to paint the inside of that entire dome.
But this worst job is a complete one-off.
And Thornhill's tragic story
shows that you don't have to be knee-deep in muck
to have a terrible time.
The cathedral took 35 years to build
and originally a French artist
was commissioned to paint the murals inside the dome.
But the colourful designs were too flamboyant and Roman Catholic
for the new Church of England cathedral.
So the commissioners appointed James Thornhill instead.
He painted in a style called grisaille,
which used muted greys and browns
to depict a much more restrained, Protestant series of scenes
from St Paul's life.
There's loads of reasons why this is a worst job,
but one of the most obvious is the walk to work.
If you work in one of those office blocks, even at the very top,
then you have the luxury of a lift.
But Thornhill would have had a three-quarter-of-an-hour trudge
before he even got to here.
Now, normally...if I went through this window,
I'd end up as a rather nasty splodge on the floor below.
But not today because St Paul's is undergoing
a unique restoration project,
so we've got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the inside...
..just as Thornhill would have seen it.
The restoration team have suspended a huge scaffold
from the lantern at the top of the dome,
which virtually fills a quarter of the space.
Thornhill wouldn't have had the benefit of such a stable structure,
which is mind-blowing when you think of the scale of the building.
We're really starting to get a sense of height now.
We certainly are. Time to see the first of the Thornhill schemes here.
- This is Thornhill? - It's all original Thornhill.
So what are these rings?
We think they relate to a mid-19th century restoration that occurred.
But it reflects very much
what we think may have been the means of access for Thornhill.
These were for the scaff?
Wooden poles would have butted to the wall and be located to these rings.
with a 10 or 20ft extension.
The end of the pole being picked up by a cable running down.
And then boards linking between the poles.
We don't know much about this scaffolding that he may have used,
but we think probably it was a fairly opened scale system.
There is this wonderful story of Thornhill almost falling to his death
that was only avoided by his loyal manservant, Bentley French,
who threw a bucket of paint at the wall to attract his attention
and duly saved his life.
TONY: It's easy to see how you could topple over backwards
as the walls lean right out above you,
pushing you towards the drop below.
Thornhill would have had to overcome stomach-churning pangs of vertigo
just to get the job done.
It's an extraordinarily bizarre sense of scale that you get up here.
If you look down there to that goldy thing, that's the Whispering Gallery.
And then you've got the same distance below that to the floor
and you've got all the tiny, tiny little people like ants.
Whereas up here, you've got this bloke
who's got a head three times as big as ours.
How on earth did Thornhill manage to get the scale right
- on this curving shape? - That's a good question.
We think he may have used a technique involving a grid
and transferring from an original master drawing that was gridded up,
a grid applied to the wall.
By that means you can actually transfer quite accurately
the layout of your figures, correctly proportioned and in scale.
How much wall did he have to cover?
About 140,000 square feet.
So it's a vast space.
TONY: Just imagine how many cans of paint they'd have needed.
Thornhill would have had to haul them up, ready mixed, from ground level.
There's almost no natural light up here,
so he'd have been working by candlelight.
It's incredibly claustrophobic at the very top
as the murals seem to press heavily down on you.
To paint this bit, Thornhill would have been precariously dangling
75 metres above the marble floor below.
It must have been so difficult working up here.
Incredibly difficult.
It is an enormous acreage of painted surface,
working under some very difficult circumstances.
Teetering on the edge of some rickety scaffolding,
very low light levels, having to work with finely detailed gilding -
an immense achievement.
How many of them were there?
Records have it that, in addition to himself, he had only two assistants,
which seems extraordinary.
- How long did it take? - Two years.
I'm sure Thornhill was working flat out for that entire period.
But Thornhill must have been quite prepared to risk
plummeting to his death every day for his magnificent painting.
Indeed, he was so proud of it,
he incorporated his very own portrait into one of the murals.
But there's a sting in the tail.
Thornhill worked up there hour after hour, month after month, for his art.
But he was comforted by the thought that when he'd finished,
that place would be regarded as the British version of the Sistine Chapel
and it would be as much a monument to him as to Sir Christopher Wren.
But, ironically, by the time it was completed,
the new, frivolous rococo fashion was all the rage,
and suddenly Thornhill's work looked really drab and old-fashioned.
So he did all that hard graft and he never got any of the glory.
That's what, for me, makes it a worst job.
Although not quite the very worst.
I'm putting myself through some of the worst jobs in history.
So what job's on the very lowest rung of the Stuart period?
Sedan-chair bearing may have been physically demanding,
but at least you ran your own business.
Swallowing toads wouldn't have been as unpleasant as it sounds
if you'd mastered the techniques of sleight of hand.
And a saltpetre man's lot may have been smelly and unpopular,
although you weren't likely to get blown up by your own explosives,
like the petardier's assistant.
But for me, the very worst job
comes from the underside of the world of culture.
The violin-string maker.
Now, you might be thinking, "Oh, violin-string maker. Very nice job."
Well, you'll understand why it isn't when you see what's involved.
The Stuart period was pivotal
to the development of the violin as we know it
because of technological advances in violin-string making.
It wasn't just virtuoso violinists that made Vivaldi famous.
Oh, no, it needed something just a little bit earthier.
The guts of a sheep.
The 17th century was the golden age of string making
because of the development of a string
short enough to fit a violin and play low notes -
giving us the four-stringed instrument we have today.
String makers were precision craftsmen,
often trained on the job in a family-run business.
Although known as catgut, strings are actually made from sheep intestines.
Unlike the modern string maker,
300 years ago they had to get hold of their own raw materials,
which meant a series of unimaginably gruesome tasks.
And that's where I start my apprenticeship.
- Morning. - What do I cut this open with?
You need a knife. Best to start off with a small one.
What I'm worried about is these sleeves are so long and droopy...
That's for keeping warm. Take the outer layer off and it'll be easier.
- Can you give us a hand? - Yep.
- How long has this one been dead? - Not long. He's still warm there.
- Right, where do I plunge? - Ah, now then.
You're trying to kill a man if you're doing that
and you finish up with bits everywhere.
You need a pinch and go through on the side.
- Just towards me? - Just so you've got an incision.
- That's him. - Yeah.
Now we can find that spot. You're going to cut down, like so...
- That's not the sharp side. - Bits of nipples in the way.
That's always... Don't go deep.
Because if you penetrate the guts
we're going to finish up with grass soup inside.
Ooh! Oh, God.
That's just blood that's pooled in the belly.
Now we're heading down.
You've got to find your way down to the anus and cut round there.
If you're taking the guts out, that's where it's anchored at one end.
(HISSING) That's the gas in the belly.
- Eurgh. - That's basically a fart coming out.
Ooh! I think that's sucking at the other end now.
That's deeply unpleasant. And it's smoking.
(TONY COUGHS) - Steam rather than smoke.
OK.
What you're doing is pulling his rectum back through his belly.
There we are.
Yuck.
That's going to take some sorting out down there.
We'd better go and get it all cleaned up.
The really unpleasant bit is getting the excrement out of the inside,
so that it's clean to work with afterwards.
- So we've done the pleasant bit. - This is the easy bit.
- Which bit are we after? - The smaller bit of the intestine.
So that's going to be this section.
It's all coiled up in itself. There's probably 30 yards of it in here.
We've got to first of all just strip it away from everything else
that the membranes attach it to.
Like that. Just keep pulling it.
If you rupture it, you'll get all the excrement from the inside
plastered all over yourself.
I can feel that with my fingers.
Not to mention that you won't get a decent tune out of it.
Let's break an end off for you.
The next thing you've got to do - here's a bowl -
just milk it down into there.
Milk it? Oh, look at that!
That is very, very, very unpleasant.
Eugh. Look at that stuff.
'Remember the fumigator?
String makers had to endure the stench of burning sulphur too,
while they fumigated racks of finished strings in a pit
to produce a whiter colour.'
Pop it on to there. And I'll just pour... Put that on the bench.
I'll start pouring the water. You can have the grotty job.
Thank you very much.
Ooh, look at that move.
I'm cold, I'm wet, I'm covered in gunk.
It stinks. There's nowhere to wash.
And presumably there'd be people doing this 12 hours a day.
At the time they need to get new supplies in,
string makers would be doing this pretty solidly.
It's all still twisted, isn't it?
- Keep an eye on that bowl. - Oh! It's falling out of the bowl.
- (LAUGHS) It's gone everywhere. - Yep.
- Oops. - Don't wave it at me.
I'm not, it's still wriggling. (LAUGHS)
There, that's the...first foot done, isn't it?
- Mm-hm. - Only another 29ft to go.
If it hadn't been for the man who was prepared to rip out a sheep's guts
and turn them into ultramodern violin strings,
the violin would have remained the humble viol
and the works of the great composers like Bach and Beethoven
would never have existed at all.
Join me next week as I swill out the underbelly of the Georgian period
to explore some more worst jobs in history.
I'll be finding out about baring your soul for other people's art,
the boy monkeys who helped beat Napoleon,
and literally going through the mill
to put shirts on the backs of the nation.
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