Our country's history didn't just happen
because of the great figures of the time.
But because a lot of ordinary people got their hands dirty
doing a lot of terrible jobs.
'This time, being a badly-paid garden ornament,
the boy monkeys who helped beat Napoleon,
and literally going through the mill
to put shirts on the nation's back.'
Welcome to the worst jobs of the Georgian Age.
'The 18th century was an age of elegance
symbolised by genteel Bath.'
'The newly wealthy squirearchy
built the classical houses and gardens we still love to visit.'
'And it was also the Golden Age of English Art.'
'Gainsborough, Constable, Turner and Joshua Reynolds
painted portraits and landscapes for the new moneyed classes.'
'To get to top of the artistic tree with paintings like these,
meant a rigorous apprenticeship at the Royal Academy.'
'The training centered on drawing and painting the human form.'
'But the people who really suffered for their art
were the artists' models.'
'This worst job meant a chilly working life
spent in the most unusual positions.'
They would be strung up for hours and hours
with nothing to eat or drink.
Literally strung up on these things. Why, Martin?
Well, it looks like an instrument of torture, doesn't it?
But the idea was actually to help the model.
So the model could, as you say, be there for a long time.
And so he could keep the pose, keep still.
and not wobble or even fall over.
'The Georgian artists were sticklers for accuracy
and were taught through formulaic poses.'
'But the poor artists' model
would have to hold this pose for several hours,
night after night after night.'
The thing to think about when you are looking at Tony
is you must think of Tony as a god.
And, really, he is the male ideal.
This is the perfect man, OK?
That's what you have to think. It's not one individual man.
He is Apollo, he is Hercules,
he is whatever you want him to be.
Why were they so obsessed by this idea
of the classical physique?
MARTIN: They were looking back to the Renaissance,
to the classical world.
The male was...a kind of supermodel, in a sense.
The female wasn't regarded in quite the same light.
It was, in a sense, a projection of male moral perfection too.
So you are, in a sense, the, kind of, focal point of all those ideas,
and they're all coming into play here.
Of course, in the 18th century,
the male models would've been
soldiers, boxers...
One of the most famous male models
in the 18th century was a man called George White, "Old George".
Old George was famous
because he had a great figure, great muscles
but he also had a big, bushy beard.
So he could actually play patriarchs and saints, etc.
And...he was found in a fever hospital.
He was used at the academy, he went to live with Hunter.
He was also...used to do anatomical demonstrations too.
And then like most of these people, he disappeared
back into the...the undergrowth and was never seen again.
'Modelling could mean survival
for a poverty-stricken man like George.'
'But it was hard-earned money.'
- Are you still comfortable? - I'm very cold.
Normally, when you're cold, the first thing you do
is huddle your limbs together. It's the one thing you can't do.
And because the other thing is that my little finger
has gone to sleep because of the pressure from the rope.
This may not look a particularly bizarre position
but it's not one that my body is particularly used to.
I could do this for...half an hour.
But EIGHT hours?
- Eight hours is asking .. - That would be torture.
- Really torture. - You'd do yourself
a nasty injury, I think.
'The job may have been done by men down on their luck
but at least it wasn't considered shameful.'
'For a woman, modelling was deemed
worse than prostitution.'
'It was like being in some hard-core porn film,
your degradation preserved for all time.'
'The fact that a woman had more to lose by posing naked
was reflected in the pay.'
You got a shilling at the end
of the evening, for two hours.
If you are a woman, however, if you were the female model,
you would get half a guinea for the evening,
which is a big difference.
But that was very much the idea
that this was shame money
because the only women who would do it would be those
who really were desperate for the money.
It was something that you did very much as a last resort.
And even prostitutes looked upon it as a last resort.
TONY: Do we know the names of any female models?
The women, er, were anonymous.
There is an exception, her name was Bette Balmanno.
And she was a prostitute and she worked for a brothel in London
run by one Mrs Lobb.
And we know this because there's a wonderful story
about Mrs Lobb turning up on the doorstep
of the sculptor Nollekens and berating him
because Bette Balmanno had been posing nude
to Nollekens for about eight hours
without anything to eat, anything to drink,
and he paid her only two shillings.
It's ironic that it was... this perfect ideal
and they got dossers and prostitutes
to recreate it for them.
'And here he is in this classic painting.'
'Old George from the fever hospital
made immortal by Joshua Reynolds.'
At least, if you're an artist's model, you got all the attention.
You were literally in the centre of an artistic circle
unlike another Georgian job,
where you were paid for being completely on your own.'
'The Georgians lived in an age of confidence and discovery.'
'Anatomists pioneered our understanding of the human body,
while inventors like James Watt
powered the start of the Industrial Revolution.'
'And in Jane Austin's genteel Bath,
people sipped an exotic new Indian beverage.'
TONY: But all this elegance was a bit of a facade.
Respectable Georgian society was built on a bit of a crime wave.
To get from London to Bath,
you had to run the gamut of highwaymen.
The anatomists only got their medical knowledge
from the bodies that were stolen for them by the body-snatchers.
Even the tea the Georgians drank
was more than likely illegal contraband.
Which brings me to my next worst job,
the riding officer.
And as you listen to this sorry tale,
please don't let your sympathy be swayed
by the fact that he is a distant forerunner
of today's vat man.
'With tax on over 2,000 imported items,
smuggling became big business.'
'A range of goods was brought in from the Continent.'
'A major item of contraband was tea.'
'Three quarters of it came in through the back door.'
'To stop the flow, the customs and excise
had boats patrolling the waters,
looking for smuggling vessels.'
'Guarding the coast, the last line of defence
was the riding officer.'
TONY: A riding officer did just that.
He rode along the coast looking for smugglers
rowing out to big ships offshore.
There was one for every 10 miles of the English coast,
one for every four miles where the traffic was thickest.
And given that smugglers deliberately chose
the worst nights of the year to work for cover,
the riding officer had to spend all his time
doing a night shift in the cold
and wet and raging storms.
And that was the easy part.
The difficult bit started
when he saw that telltale light offshore.
'There was nothing glamorous about being one lone officer
with only a pistol and cutlass
against heavily-armed criminal gangs
supported by the whole community.'
TONY: If our riding officer was galloping across the rocks
and he corners these scurvy smugglers,
- what would he have done? - You've got the wrong impression.
It's not one man and a couple of old ladies out there smuggling.
He'll be facing a gang - 40-50,
perhaps, 100, more, of well-armed smugglers armed to the teeth.
And people wanna get the goods away,
and they're not gonna let people stand in the way.
TONY: Did smugglers use violence on the riding officer?
Yes. They would use violence on anybody who got involved,
who was likely to affect their trade.
So what did they do to the riding officers?
If they caught them, they suffered quite severely.
There's one example of a riding officer who was murdered.
Another man called May in Cork, in Ireland,
he has his tongue cut out and his ears,
one of which is nailed on the wall of the exchange.
He is later found dead. Murder.
So, didn't the riding officers have any back-up?
They did. They had people at sea, colleagues at sea.
They sometimes had the dragoons on the shore.
But this is an age when it's very difficult to communicate.
You couldn't pick up your mobile phone and say,
"We need you all down here." And the helicopter flies in.
This is a question of really trying to organise people
in a really distant and murky way.
But surely there must have been times
when the authorities put the screws on,
and they had to deliver some contraband.
Yeah, but it's actually quite difficult to gain a conviction.
The local jury is likely to be packed with sympathisers,
JPs are involved, quite often, in the whole business.
And you've got to prosecute at your own expense.
It's often not worth your while trying.
So these aren't rosy-cheeked villagers
smuggling a bottle of Spanish brandy.
- We're talking about crime. - This is organised crime.
There's a lot of money involved and everybody
is likely to be involved in one way or another.
'The riding officer was a social pariah
met by a sullen wall of silence when he tried to do his job.'
'But the community had a lot to lose.'
'In the 18th century, Robin Hood's Bay
was rumoured to be the wealthiest area in Britain for its size.'
'This must also have been galling for the riding officer,
who earned not much more than a farm labourer.'
'And he had to pay for his horse!'
ROBB: People who lived here earned a living by the sea.
They were insular, close-knit, ship owners,
they worked the ships, they fished.
They were naturally suspicious of outsiders.
And someone like a riding officer, who was coming in...
to...to curtail one of their sources of income,
was certainly not a popular person.
'The smugglers used their local knowledge
to outwit the riding officer,
transporting goods through a network
of connecting tunnels and passages.'
'Even when the excise did manage a seizure,
they were outmanoeuvred.'
'In Robin Hood's Bay, in 1779,
the riding officer, accompanied by dragoons,
captured over 200 casks of brandy and gin
with 150 chests of tea.'
'The town called on the crew of a smuggling vessel.'
'After a pitched battle, the smugglers
seized back the contraband.'
'So the work of the riding officer had very little effect.'
I think it probably, at best, stemmed the flow - at best.
It really takes the reduction of excise duties
in the 19th century, really,
to bring an end to a lot of the smuggling.
'They might cut a romantic figure,
but the riding officers were underpaid, overstretched
and in constant danger of being attacked by violent offenders.'
'If they rode the cliffs alone,
it was mainly because they had no mates.'
'The 18th century was also the age of landscape art.'
'Designers like "Capability" Brown
changed the course of rivers and moved mountains
to redraw the English countryside.'
'Now, he was at the top.'
'At the bottom lurking in the undergrowth,
my next worst job.'
I'm now a hermit putting the finishing touch
to this beautifully sculptured garden.
All I have to do is stay in my cave
and not speak to anyone or have a bath
or cut my hair or cut my nails or have a wash.
And at the end of seven years,
- and only at the end of seven years - I get paid.
And, believe it or not, this craze
for having a hermit at the bottom of your posh garden
lasted for 100 years.
Now (BEEP) cos I'm not allowed to speak to anyone.
'Smelly, bearded recluses had a strong pull
on the 18th century imagination,
symbolising all that was unworldly and spiritual.'
'Rich Georgians liked to show the world they still had a soul.'
'But too busy to withdraw in contemplation,
they hired eccentrics, romantics,
and misfits to do it for them.'
I'm still being a hermit. Although, quite frankly, I don't like it.
Mind you, at least I'm above ground.
One hermit was forced to live underground.
For some reason, he was allowed to take his organ with him.
Another one was told he wasn't even allowed to speak
to the servants who gave him his food.
And another was told that every time one of the guests came by,
he had to go like this.
But the thing that would have really hacked me off
is that you had to keep on doing all this hermity stuff
even when the people in the big house
had gone away on holiday.
'Back in the 18th century,
taking the waters was all the rage.'
Thanks.
It does taste a bit foul but they also used to bathe in it.
It was supposed to soothe the gout,
help cure the pox
and calm scrofulous skin.
Which brings me to my next worst Georgian job
- the bath attendant.
'It may look like a glamorous workplace,
but the bath attendants spent their whole working day
up to their necks in this mineral stew.'
'They were at the beck and call of pox-ridden clients,
who had to be lifted from their sedan chairs
into the steaming waters.'
'But what really makes it a worst job for me, is the uniform.'
DR CHALUS: The idea of wearing, for an entire day, maybe 10-12 hours,
wearing wet canvas clothing,
it would have been incredibly uncomfortable.
On their heads they wore a hat, and from 1737, all the bath guides,
by the bath council orders,
had to have a tassel on their hats so they could be noticed
and recognised in the water.
TONY: Would the bathing attendants have had to lower them
- into the water? - With some people.
Some people were fit and were only coming
for social affairs and, you know, just to have fun.
But if you were very ill, then you would have tried
to be manoeuvred to someplace where you could sit,
or sort of stand or hold on to one of these iron rings.
How did you hold on to the ring
when you've got the water down here?
You wouldn't have been able to do it if it had been at that level.
But if you look at the wall here and see the colour of the stone,
- this is staining from the water. - So that was the water level?
Yeah. So if you see the height that you and I are standing,
we would've been barely above the water,
even if we would have sat on one of these seats.
TONY: So your head would be just sticking out, wouldn't it?
Yeah. And so you can see why people did hold on like that.
- So was the water this colour? - No, the water isn't that colour.
It'd be the colour that it is today.
But because it's got such a high iron content in it,
as soon as it's here for a period of time, it stains the walls.
If you think about somebody who's actually a bath guide,
who's in this water day in day out, day in day out,
you can see why 18th century types who came visiting used to say,
"These people with lacquered hides,"
and describing the bath guides as if their skin itself
had been turned this sort of strange orange
as if they'd, you know, done too much fake tanning.
'There were only 12 guides to look after about 60 bathers,
in an era when people couldn't swim.'
'And despite the presence of a sergeant-at-arms,
the atmosphere was often unruly,
with young boys dive-bombing into the water.'
'And the bath attendant had to handle people
with hideous diseases.'
Some of the ailments would have been particularly nasty,
because you're dealing with a society
when you're looking at a mixing of people with open sores
and open wounds and ulcers,
all kinds of different skin ailments
that would've all been in here bathing.
TONY: So it's a kind of gravy of human detritus.
Yes, exactly. And the 18th century contemporaries
often commented on that.
It's often talked about as having a filthy scum on the top of it.
The bath guides have to sort of stay on and help clean out the pool afterwards.
- It's not a great job, is it? - No. Not at all.
I'm doing all right! I've already been here two hours.
I've only got another 6 years, 364 days, 22 hours to go.
And then I'll get a pension of 50 per year!
I'm a bit nippy. So is my skull.
But, at least, I'm physically intact.
Which is more than can be said for the person doing my next worst job.
'Does Robbie Williams have a bad job?'
'No. Nor Will Young.'
'But the pop stars of the 18th century had a tougher time.'
'They were superstars of the new craze of opera.'
'But the price of their success
was having to undergo the barbaric practice of castration.'
'Dr Peter Giles sings countertenor,
the nearest we can get today to the sound of the castrato.'
'But, he admits, it's a pale imitation.'
TONY: Who were the castrati?
DR PETER: They're a whole breed of super, male singers.
And they came from the ranks
of usually choir boys in Italy.
It nearly all happened in Italy.
Why did they castrate these boys?
Well, it stops the normal process of puberty.
And it's got to be done when the boy is eight or nine,
not much more.
And it stops what happens, obviously, from the testicles,
the testosterone starts to move in
and change the whole body from a boy into a man.
It's got to be done before the boy gets too old.
Of course, they didn't do it to just any boy.
The boys had to be already singing very well.
So castration didn't make you a good singer?
Oh, no! All it did was to preserve
that high pitch.
TONY: Did it hurt? (PETER LAUGHS)
I think it did.
There were various ways that they did it.
One of the ways was to put the boy in very, very hot water.
This was full of various herbs and spices
and they would be given alcohol and drugged.
They would then manipulate the testicles
until they wore down.
- It sounds awful but... - What do you mean, wore down?
..they wore down, they broke down the structure
because they were only young.
It just...it just...
destroyed the...function.
And then, of course, once they've done it,
they can cut the spermatic cord.
There are clippers and all sorts of things
that they used to use. It was just awful.
'18th century observers didn't care about the downsides
of being a castrato.'
'They raved about them having the voices of angels.'
The variety of it was incredible.
And a lot of the most important music
which we associate now, perhaps, with female voices,
was actually written not for female voices at all
but for castrati.
The big period for it was between 1650 and 1750.
But it went on and on and on. And I bet you don't realise
when the last one died - 1922.
- Really? - 1922.
'Alessandro Moreschi.'
'He was the last castrato of the Sistine Chapel.'
'It's not a very good recording, Moreschi was past it
and was never of the first rank anyway.'
'But it does give you an idea of the unearthly quality
of the castrato.'
Back in the 18th century, they would shout out,
"Evviva il coltello!" Long live the knife!
They would...because they just couldn't believe
how wonderful these singers were.
'But only the top castrati had fame and fortune.'
'Out of 4,000 boys castrated every year,
perhaps one per cent made it,
99 percent were sad failures.'
'Worse still, they looked like freaks.'
'Castrati tended to be abnormally tall,
obese and with no body hair.'
DR PETER: Some of them were absolutely wonderful singers,
others were ordinary and others were total failures and some died.
A really bad deal.
You couldn't have a normal, ordinary family life, of course.
You run the risk of disease, premature disease.
You could be very badly deformed.
You had all sorts of difficulties, of that sort.
But musically, if you were of the top, you know, top drawer,
you were laughing.
When you were a choir boy, if you were a good soloist,
- and showed aptitude, - (SINGS) Paaa, pum!
you might have been one of those boys back in the 18th century,
as I might have been.
Luckily, we didn't live in that period and in Italy.
What an intense relief! (DR PETER LAUGHS)
£ Like as the heart
£ desireth the water brooks
£ so longeth my soul
£ after thee
£ O, God! £
And I've still got my testicles!
I'm not being a hermit any more, I've retired.
The job was so dreadful and lonely
that despite the promise of a lot of money at the end,
very few people lasted their contract.
In fact, there was one hermit who only lasted three weeks
before he was sacked for being caught in his local pub.
But however dreadful a job it was,
people would have volunteered in their thousands for no money at all
if the only alternative was to be press-ganged into the royal navy.
'Britain really did rule the waves in Georgian times,
thanks to Nelson's victory at Trafalgar.'
'As we continued to fight France and Spain,
the contemporary song, Rule Britannia,
summed up Britain's determination never to be slaves.'
'Others weren't so lucky.'
'This was also the time of the slave trade.'
'Thousands of captured Africans
were shipped in horrifying conditions across the Atlantic
via ports like Liverpool and Bristol
to work in the American plantations.'
We can't do justice to their lives.
Worst jobs implies at least some element of freedom
and, of course, they had none.
But we can see where some of them ended up,
because when the British came to their senses
and abolished slavery,
the British navy was sent into the Atlantic
to try to intercept some of the French and Spanish slave ships.
'Some of the liberated slaves ended up enlisting in the ships
that had saved them.'
'Once aboard, they joined sailors from many different races
and also a number of women.'
'Most of them can't have known
what they were letting themselves in for.'
'Although nothing was as bad as slavery,
Britannia's rule of the waves was maintained
by a whole host of terrible jobs in ships like this.'
'Life was so tough that British recruits
had to be dragged on board by the press gang
and captains were frequently offered prisoners,
debtors and patients.'
Richard, if I was a raw recruit fresh on your ship,
what kind of tasks would you give me to do?
The press gang isn't giving me the seamen I want
and the quota acts are pulling in every vagrant
and ne'er-do-well from all corners of the kingdom.
- You look like a landsman. - I'm a landsman.
So what did you do when you were ashore?
I'm an actor, a writer, a television...
- So you can read and write? - Oh, yeah.
We could turn you into a surgeon's assistant
and start you off as a loblolly boy.
- Where do I go for that? - Down below.
'The Historical Maritime Society
has developed a unique way of demonstrating
the primitive nature of surgery at sea
using fake blood and pork belly.'
'For the loblolly boy, having to witness these barbaric operations
must have been one of the worst parts of the job.'
- Carl's a loblolly boy, isn't he? - He is.
He is. Effectively, he's a manual assistant to the surgeon.
His main task is, as you can see now, is to hold the patient steady,
while I'm trying to remove this musket ball from him.
- What do you want me to do? - I'd like you to hold his legs.
I think the pain may bite in fairly shortly.
- What's this op? - Trying to locate a musket ball.
The patient's hit on the front
and the ball just travelled through.
I can feel it. Just can't get hold of the ball.
I'm trying my best to get the ball out with my fingers.
I can feel it just below the line here.
But I'm trying to avoid the spine.
Why is a loblolly boy called a loblolly?
It's an allusion to the colloquial name or slang name
for what we call "portable soup".
- It's derived from that. - It's not soup.
No, it's a lozenge, it's a rounded lozenge
of animal matter mixed with vegetal matter.
- Smells like a rancid Oxo cube. - Absolutely. It keeps for years.
So basically what you're doing is feeding the sick consomme.
- Exactly, yeah. - How are you getting on?
Yeah, it's a struggle.
It's coming. Hold him!
TONY: He's really twitching now. Hang on, Carl!
Woah! There we've got him!
Hang on! He's rolling around on the floor.
Blimey! I thought he was a tiny little bullet.
No wonder you were having problems getting it out.
I don't know if he's laughing but he's shaking,
I think you've cured him. You all right?
(GROANS IN PAIN)
He's got a case of very bad acting.
Could you make yourself useful?
'The loblolly boy also got the job of rounding up
the amputated limbs and tossing them overboard.'
'But though his job must have been bloody and depressing,
at least he avoided some of the other horrors of life on deck.'
- What're you going to do now? - You tell me.
It's about time we turned you into a topman.
- What's that? - They are important members
of the ship's crew. All the manoeuvring on the ship
requires handling the ropes,
heaving the braces, trimming the sheets. A lot of it's done aloft!
- Aloft means up there? RICHARD: Up there.
I think we've got to show you the ropes.
- That's what the expression means? - Yes.
You should go up to the main top, see how you get on up the rigging.
You gotta start by climbing up on the carronade,
- over the hammock netting. - Hang on. Onto here?
RICHARD: Yeah. TONY: Yeah?
RICHARDS: Over the hammock netting and into the shrouds,
Those thin ropes are the ratlins.
Up you go! All the way up to the main top above you.
- What, to that platform! - That's right.
RICHARD: When you get to the top, there are two ways of handling it.
One, you can go through the lubber's hole close to the mast.
That's a bit dishonourable, but it's your first time.
Or you can go over the futtocks,
which means climbing out backwards and hanging out over the deck
- and going round the outside. - I'll miss out on the futtocks.
TONY: This is for real? RICHARD: This is for real.
RICHARD: Good luck! - I don't know if I can do this.
RICHARD: Yes, you can.
'I had it a bit easier than in the 18th century.'
'I got to climb up the rope ladder rather than the ratlins.'
'It was still precarious.'
TONY: I know the sensible thing is not to look down
but the problem is...you get your feet jammed
on...on the bits of rope.
And so you're forced to look down but every time you look down,
you can see quite how... Oh, God, all that way.
Less than halfway, Oh! I'm slowing down now.
It's not tiredness, it's just fear.
Hard to believe that when they used to do this,
they'd be on a grog ration
of...something like...
..half a pint of rum mixed with water.
So they'd be climbing up like this
on the equivalent...oh, God!
..of...about 12 rum and Cokes.
Oh, I don't like this bit.
I can't get my foot in the...rung.
This feels like I'm not very secure at all
I feel very sick...
..and shaky.
It swings out here every time you do a step.
Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy, lordy!
It's so steep.
I don't quite know how...to get on.
Oh! I've done it! (GASPS)
That is by far the most frightening thing I've ever done in my life.
I'm bloody glad I've done it, though.
It's extraordinary to think that the guys who were doing that
could have been doing it in a storm,
with the boat pitching and tossing
and...tossing and pitching.
And then, when they got up here,
they might well be asked,
"Do you see that thing over there, that yardarm?"
They would have been asked to go along there
in order to furl or unfurl something.
In fact, my legs are shaking so much. I'm gonna sit down for a bit.
That was bloody scary.
'In reality, a topman would have had to get up there in under a minute.'
'I took five times that, getting down
and I didn't have to untie and haul up the rigging.'
'After that, I really needed my grog ration.'
The good news about the food is that there's plenty of it.
You have it in this square thing, so you actually get a square meal.
And the drink
is this half-rum, half-water cocktail,
which is...remarkably good.
Er...the meat on this plate
is THIS stuff, which is salt pork,
which you soak to get rid of all the salt
and then cook it up.
That's very, very, very salty.
but...it's bearable.
And the biscuit to go with it - it's not that nice, actually -
is this thing.
It really is hardtack and the real problem with it is...
Can you see those little holes in there?
After a while, when you've been at sea a few months,
it gets riddled with these little beetles.
You can just about see one there.
You can see them... This food really is quite disgusting.
You can see...the beetles
crawling around in there.
And the biscuit is so hard
that you have to soak it in this gravy.
Actually, there's not much gravy. It's all, kind of,
congealed fat
and god knows what.
And, then, take a bite and...
..I think I've got about 17 beetles in here.
It's quite disgusting!
This is not nice at all.
Two! Six! Heave!
'At one time, the Navy was fighting the Spanish,
the Dutch, the Russians and the Americans.'
'So action stations was the cue
for an even worse job in the Navy - the gunner.'
'British gun crews were pushed hard.'
'They had to fire at three times the rate of the opposition.'
'This made them more vulnerable to accidents
causing horrific injuries and death.'
What other dangers were there in the battle?
One of the most dangerous things would be a ball hitting the side.
When that happens, the inside of the ship
erupts in a great shower of splinters, some of them 6ft long.
So far more injuries caused by that
than by a cannon ball itself hitting you.
The splinters were the real dangerous things.
If any of these ropes were severed, one of these cannons
could break loose. And if there's a heavy sea, that could be a problem.
That would be lethal. I've seen what a dead weight these things are.
That's the origin of the phrase "a loose cannon"
because that would cause so much damage rolling inside the ship.
'During a naval battle, this would have been a terrible place.'
'Ships often used to fight yardarm to yardarm,
and pound each other so the cannonballs would be smashing
right into the opposite gun room.'
What could be worse than being a man
doing this kind of backbreaking job at the height of battle
on a deck drenched in blood?
Well, being a boy, doing pretty much the same thing, I suppose.
Believe it or not, there were boys as young as six or seven
doing one of the most dangerous jobs of all on a ship,
being a "powder monkey".
But it wasn't just boys, was it?
No, there were women on board and anyone who wasn't involved
in the actual manning of the guns would be helping,
running the powder from the magazines.
- Come and show me what they did. - OK.
TONY: So what did the powder monkeys actually do?
You need to carry the powder from the magazine,
which is down the bottom of the ship, as fast as possible,
up to the guns and the gun crews.
- Were there many powder monkeys? - Quite a few.
But you have to do it in relays so there would be continual stream
coming down to the magazine and up to the guns.
- They'd be carrying it in this? - Yes, a powder keg.
TONY: And this presumably protects it from sparks.
JEN: Yeah. If there's a spark anywhere, it will explode.
And so you're not trailing gunpowder through the ship.
And when you get there, it's secure until you need the powder.
- Where were they running from? - From the powder magazine.
- Down here? - Yeah.
TONY: It's quite away, isn't it? JEN: It is.
Here's the powder keg. You need to go and get that filled up.
- There's a bloke down here. - Yes, that's a marine,
and he's there to stop unauthorised people coming into the magazine.
- But, I'm authorised? - Oh, yes.
Morning.
TONY: Right, what do I do? - Come in. Put that down.
I'm gonna refill that. Start filling that up with the cartridges.
- Why are these walls copper-lined? - For two reasons,
First of all, moisture. We're below the water line here.
We need to avoid moisture getting in.
Water and black powder don't mix, it stops black powder functioning.
Secondly, to avoid sparks. copper doesn't spark like iron.
A spark in here and we'd all end up in heaven quickly.
TONY: Well, I'm full. - OK, get back up to those guns.
'During the Battle of the Nile, one French ship, The Orient,
was blown to kingdom come when a red-hot cannonball
rolled into the powder room.'
'For the powder monkey, speed was of the essence,
not easy during a battle when the deck
would have been sanded to soak up the blood.'
'There are stories of naval engagements where blood
was literally pouring out of the scuppers.'
'At the Battle of Trafalgar, one in five of the crew
was either killed or wounded.'
'It's carrying deadly gun powder
that could kill everyone amidst the carnage of battle
that makes powder monkey the worst job for me.'
That was just one cannon going off.
Imagine, if they were all going off at once.
And imagine if you were an eight-year-old raw recruit
and this was your first time in battle.
Mind you, if they did win and manage capture an enemy boat,
then the powder monkey's got a share in the prize money.
I reckon it is that perk rather than patriotism
that made the Royal Navy great.
FIRE!
'I have set myself the task of actually doing the worst job
in every era of history.'
'But which was it for the Georgians?'
'Cleaning out a giant bath was messy but relatively safe.'
'Riding officers and powder monkeys may have had risky lives,
but at least they had the glory of fighting for king and country.'
'And even the shame of being an artist's model
could lead to immortality.'
No. For me, the very worst job started every morning
right here, at 6am.
And as you can see from the size of the beds, it was done by children.
It was actually two to a bed here.
And these kids could only ever dream of becoming powder monkeys.
The 18th century saw the birth of the Industrial Revolution
that changed Britain forever.
But it would never have got off the ground
if it hadn't been for worst jobs like the mule scavenger.
'Mills like Quarry Bank near Manchester
were technological marvels, using first water
and then the new medium of steam to power cotton production.'
'But they weren't so forward-thinking about employment.'
'The mill owners here, though by no means the worst,
used to buy - yes, buy - children as young as six
from the workhouse for a couple of quid
to be apprentices.'
'For not more than board and lodging,
they worked at least 12hrs a day.'
The very worst job in a factory,
right at the bottom of the hierarchy of the mill,
was the little scavenger.
They were mostly the youngest children.
And what they had to do was to go underneath this machine.
TONY: What, right through to the back here?
- Ooh! Didn't see the wipers, - Yeah.
Right under that machine there, while it was working,
and clean away all the bits of loose cotton that had fallen down.
- It must have been quite dangerous. - It was incredibly dangerous.
If you think about it, the early mules couldn't be stopped.
You couldn't stop the machine to clean them.
And, in any case, the spinners were paid by the piece.
So they had no interest in stopping the machine.
And I suppose the thing about kids
is that they tend not to concentrate, and muck about.
Absolutely. Kids and machinery just don't mix.
And after 12 hours of working in this place, you can imagine,
that children would be tired and inattentive,
and it only required one second of inattention
to get a finger caught in one of these wheels
or to even get...squeezed
between the carriage and the back of the machinery.
'There was only one thing for it.'
'Time to put on my calico trousers
and get started on my career as a scavenger.'
So I'm all kitted up, no shirt, as you can see.
It's really hot in here. It can't be much cooler
because otherwise these threads can snap.
And no shoes either
cos normally, they'd have worn clogs with metal studs.
But if your clog hits part of this machinery,
it can cause a spark, and, as you can see,
there's lots of little bits of fluff in here.
And if a spark hit one of those, then woof!
The whole thing could go up in flames.
So Peter, I'm ready to go. What do I need to do?
OK. Here's your scavenger's brush.
- Yeah. - And here's your scavenger's sack.
What you've got to do is get into this space under the machine.
And basically - the job's pretty simple -
you've gotta brush up all of this waste cotton.
There's a load of muck up here as well, isn't there?
It's all stuck all over the machine.
That's your job too. You've got to brush all that down
and make sure that it's not going to contaminate the cotton.
It's incredibly dusty actually, isn't it?
PETER: It is. TONY: Chris! can you start it up?
TONY: Just want to see how...
PETER: You could imagine how dangerous it would be
to be cleaning off these wheels as well,
and the ropes and the machinery.
TONY: It would be if your concentration shifted.
'For 12 hours a day, the scavenger needed incredible agility.'
'Today, there's an emergency button to stop the machine.'
'But even so, I still had to watch out.'
'Losing your concentration could be fatal.'
'As the memorandum book for the mill records
for one accident in Georgian times.'
"A very melancholy accident befell a lad named Joseph Foden,
about 13 years of age."
"While engaged sweeping under a mule,
his head was caught between the roller beam and the carriage
as the latter was putting up, and completely smashed,
death being instantaneous."
PETER: Be careful!
It would really take your feet off, wouldn't it,
if you're concentrating over here and you got your foot down there?
PETER: Feet, fingers.
You know, the real problem is
that there's no even rhythm.
It starts off really slowly,
and when it gets to the top, there's this...
..rather unnerving pause.
And you're just, kinda, waiting for it to start again.
And you're trying to do as much work as you can to get in position.
It starts to roll back quite slowly and then gets faster and faster.
Did you see how that last bit was a real sprint?
So, because there's no...steady rhythm,
it's hard to work out a steady strategy
so that you're always in the right place.
And your feet feel incredibly vulnerable...
..for when it comes back behind you.
You don't know if you're gonna whack them on..on this thing.
So it's actually much more knackering than you'd think it is.
It's so knackering, I'll tell you what it is.
If it was a rhythm, you could work out how you were gonna do it.
But because it's in such jerks, it's like driving a car off-road
that you're constantly having to concentrate.
You know, I imagine what it must have been like for kids
because the moment you let the concentration stop,
you lose sync with the rhythm of it.
And it's actually the backing out. Backing out through here is a doddle.
As long as you know you can go straight back,
even if you got bumped over the head, you'd come out.
But get stuck in this stuff here,
you try...there is nowhere to go!
So for a kid...a hell of a job. PETER: Very dangerous.
'After 12 hours of backbreaking work on their hands and knees,
the children returned to the apprentice house,
where they'd be rewarded with a supper of thin gruel
and chores before bedtime.'
'Then it was up again at six for another day's scavenging.'
Our modern Industrial Age was born in places like Quarry Bank,
and if it hadn't been for young workers
like the doffers and piecers and scavengers
doing all the worst jobs, the whole thing would have ground to a halt.
And if you think things can only get better, you'd be wrong.
Join me next time on the bottom rung
of the Victorian jobs' ladder.
'I'll be showing Raitrack, what you can do
with two litres of beer and a kilo of meat.'
'Having my hands full as a rat-catcher.'
'And experiencing what may be
the worst job of all time.'
Oh, God!
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