Our nation's history hasn't just been built by leading players
making a lot of big political decisions,
but by a huge supporting cast of ordinary men and women
prepared to do some really lousy jobs.
This time...
The hot and sweaty job behind the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition,
the exhausting legwork of keeping the nation's canals moving,
and why cleanliness in the past meant someone boiling up roadkill.
Welcome to The Worst Industrial Jobs in History.
Britain invented industry.
In the 18th century,
the industrial revolution brought mass production and mechanisation
to jobs that previously had been done by hand.
Britain became the technological and economic powerhouse of the world.
She produced two-thirds of the world's coal, over half the world's iron.
It made the nation rich.
But for thousands of people working like ants in the factories,
there was a new and mind-numbing form of poverty.
The industrial revolution brings to mind images of dark, satanic mills
and smoking chimneys and crowded towns.
We all know that the workers had a pretty rough time.
But until you see some of the jobs they actually did,
you don't realise quite how awful things were for them.
Some worst jobs spring immediately to mind,
like the workers in the cotton mills,
or the men who laid the track for Britain's amazing railway network,
or the hot and dangerous job of producing iron and steel -
the basic building blocks of the industrial revolution.
But for me, the worst are ones you might not have thought of-
anonymous workers
who ensured that the great icons and geniuses of the industrial revolution
went down in history.
I mean, we've all heard of Isambard Kingdom Brunel
and the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
But he'd have been nowhere without the terrifying job of bridge builder.
Before the industrial revolution,
no-one would have dreamt of spanning a gorge like this
with a traditional wooden or stone bridge.
And then along came Brunel with new technology
and brand-spanking-new designs for a suspension bridge,
and the job was done.
But it was this very pushing at the boundaries of engineering
that made the job of bridge building much, much worse.
John, how did they actually build this?
Well, first of all, you have to build the abutments and the towers.
And to a degree, that's the easy bit.
Except, imagine how you're gonna get all that stonework on top of these cliffs.
Then the really difficult bit is putting the bridge across yourself.
So how do you start?
You've got to get a platform the same shape as the chain
from one side to the other.
And that was done with three wire ropes,
and then strapping a wooden platform to it.
You then laid each of the plates of the links onto this platform and...
...starting at both ends at the same time, and when you reached the middle,
you put the pin in and you've got a thin chain.
But until you've got that chain, you've got nothing underneath you, have you?
I know. This is a very dangerous place to be.
You know, I wouldn't have liked to have been anywhere near it!
You can imagine that first conversation
between Brunel and his bridge builders.
"Yes, a small wooden walkway from the top. No, nothing to hang onto."
"Oh, thanks, Isambard."
The bad news for me is that people still have to go up to check the cables.
It's a frightening echo of the original bridge builders'job.
What looks like a solid walkway is a series of chains that waft in the wind.
TONY: Why do I need a helmet?
If I fall all the way down to the River Avon,
it's not gonna matter much whether I've got a helmet on or not, is it?
Mind you, we haven't got a boat for you, either, Tony. (Laughs)
There we go. How high are we?
Well, I'm 250 feet off the water, Tony.
Uh, you're gonna go higher and higher.
But don't worry about it.
You're gloating. I can hear it in your voice.
Right. Am I OK to come up?
This safety wire has only been in place for eight years.
With no handrail, it does nothing to stop the feeling that you might fall off.
Thing you're most terrified of when you first get up
is that you're gonna fall and get run over by a car.
(John laughs)
OK? Yep.
TONY: Then you look over the other side...
(John laughs)
...and you think, "Actually, being mowed down by a car
"would be infinitely preferable."
If you do fall off and the cord holds, you hang like a conker
until a qualified abseiler's brought in to rescue you.
The original builders weren't so lucky.
At least two fell to their deaths during construction.
TONY: It is a long way, isn't it? JOHN: Oh, it certainly is.
Can you imagine if there wasn't a road here, Tony?
Just as the guys when they were building it, there wouldn't have been a road -
it would have been straight down to the water.
And they wouldn't have had one of these... harnesses on.
No, they wouldn't! There was nothing to hold them on.
I can... I can walk.
Walking's OK. It's just...
The idea of actually having to do something else at the same time
fills me with absolute terror.
It's the way the wind keeps changing that's really unnerving.
You... you just think you've got it, you understand about the wind,
and then the damn thing gusts in a completely different direction.
It's really swirly, isn't it?
Even on a relatively calm day, the gorge acts like a wind tunnel.
It gets much worse.
In 1863, a freak gust blew the fragile wooden walkway, and the men on it,
70 feet in the air.
Incredibly, they all lived to tell the tale.
I'd have needed a change of underwear.
After a while, you begin to get the hang of being up there.
But taking your hands off the rope and bolting the giant pieces of chain together
would feel like suicide.
It's a huge relief when the section's checked and you start coming down.
This iconic bridge made Brunel immortal.
And although his bridge builders died anonymous,
this is also their monument.
For millions of other forgotten workers beetling away in the world of industry,
there was no such consolation
as theirjobs got worse and worse.
Industry is useless without transport.
In an age of poor roads and no railways, moving goods was a huge problem.
The answer was a monumental engineering project.
Between 1760 and 1850, navvies dug nearly 5,000 miles of canals
to carry 30 million tonnes of cargo.
But barges didn't have engines.
Keeping the freight moving created a unique worst job.
This is all very calm and peaceful and idyllic, isn't it?
Except that this was the M1 of its day.
All the way along here, there would have been queues of barges
waiting to get through to the far side of the Pennines
so they could deliver their goods to the mills and factories.
Why were they queuing here?
Well, it's easy to pull a barge along by horse when you've got a towpath,
but when you get to that tunnel, there was no towpath, so no horse.
And at that moment, in the best traditions of The Worst Jobs in History,
the job was taken over by a poor employee of the canal company,
whose task it was to drag the barge all the way through that tunnel
using only the power of his legs.
And he was known as the legger.
Fred? Yes?
Can I get on your boat? You certainly can, Tony.
Listen, why did they build the tunnel so narrow?
If they'd built it wider, you could have put a towpath down the side,
and then the horse could have dragged the barges through.
One of the things is the cost.
I mean, initially, they said this tunnel would cost about $56,000.
The figure actually went up to $125,000.
If you can imagine the extra expense of putting a towpath in here as well.
It's like the Channel Tunnel, isn't it? Just a bit, yeah.
How long is this thing? Three-and-a-quarter miles.
It's the longest, highest, deepest canal tunnel in this country.
Alright, stop boasting. (Laughs)
So I'm gonna have to pull this boat three-and-a-half miles?
You certainly are, Tony. Come on, then.
Do I get up on here? Yes, you do.
I'll just throw this rope forward, Tony. Right. What now?
Yeah.
Right, what I want you to do now is lie on your back here
with your feet onto that side of the tunnel.
Lie on my back? Certainly, lie on your back.
Nice straight position, feet onto the side of the tunnel,
just so you can reach nicely.
Yeah. Just leave a bit of room for me.
You got your feet onto the side of the tunnel?
Uh... Yeah, I have now. Take sideways steps now, like a crab.
Right. That's the one.
(Strains) Oh, it's moving.
FRED: That's it. We've got to get her moving first.
(Tony groans) It's stuck.
That's it, just push. Yep.
Nice easy pressure.
One leg, then the other, like a crab.
Just keep it going.
This is the first worst job I've ever done on my back.
Oh!
TONY: Yeah, you can feel it, actually, in the, uh...
...in the muscles between your knees and your ankles, can't you?
You can imagine how you're gonna be after the next three miles, then.
This tunnel is the Mount Everest of legging.
Even though the barge moves smoothly,
we're pushing the equivalent of a loaded articulated lorry.
(Tony groans) How long would it have taken them to get through this tunnel?
FRED: About three-and-a-half to four hours to take a boat through this tunnel.
But you didn't need someone who was specially qualified to do this, did you?
Anyone could have done it. The bloke off the boat could have done it.
The trouble with that is the... what we call the non-professionals
would actually take longer -
sometimes up to four-and-a-half hours.
And this did actually cause a... like a bottleneck, a traffic jam, on the tunnel.
So they brought professional leggers in
just to speed the boats through the tunnel really.
So these were professional guys who worked for the company,
and the only job that they did was legging, all day long?
That's correct, yeah, but they did actually speed the traffic up.
They could leg a boat through here in sometimes just under three hours.
How much did they get? It varied a little bit.
I mean, mostly they got about one and six,
about seven-and-a-half new pence per boat.
That would have been quite a lot in those days, wouldn't it?
Yeah, some of it did depend on the cargoes that they actually carried.
Did they ever catch their feet between the boats and the side?
It does seem a bit precarious.
I should imagine that they would quite easily, Tony.
There are bits sticking out. There are hollows. There are ledges.
And they were bringing a cargo of limestone,
and one of the leggers actually missed the footing
and the boat actually bumped.
The cargo shifted just enough to cause the boat to take on water.
Yeah. And unfortunately, it did sink.
They sent a backup boat in and they found the crew,
obviously quite wet, but quite happily stood on the roof of the boat.
At the end of the grinding 3-hour plod through the tunnel,
the leggers had to pick up another cargo at the other end
and do the whole thing over again.
So how bad a job is this?
Well, I'm lying here, nattering away to Fred.
There's a nice breeze coming down the tunnel.
The bad bits are the water that keeps splashing into your face.
That's not too bad. But the worst thing is just here.
Those muscles just underneath the knee are screaming with agony.
I've only been doing it for 10 minutes.
So put your back into it.
The industrial revolution gave birth to consumerism.
A new middle class with money to burn
wanted fancy goods to show they'd arrived.
High tea was trendy - white tablecloths, the latest cutlery from Sheffield,
and tea served in fine bone china.
But fine bone china and best Darjeeling don't appear on the tea table by magic.
And up here in the Potteries, there were an awful lot of anonymous workers
who bore the brunt of all this social aspiration.
For instance, to make fine bone china, you need bone.
And the person cleaning all the bone was the bone cleaner.
Angela, I'm supposed to immediately start asking you about bone cleaning,
but as I came round the corner, there was this massive whiff!
These things are literally crawling with maggots.
Why have they got maggots all over them?
Well, it's old bone.
They didn't kill animals just for the pottery industry.
It was bone from anywhere, usually cattle bone.
It had been lying about for a while, and the unpleasant job for you is to clean it.
Oh, it really stinks, doesn't it?
You ought to add some water. You want to get as much as you can off that.
Once they'd cleaned all the rotting meat off the bones,
what did they do with them?
What did they do?
The next thing that happens is that they're more thoroughly cleaned in water.
And then they're burnt, they're calcined,
which takes out all the glue and the jelly from the inside of the bone,
makes it really soft, and then you can grind it down,
mix it with the clay to make bone china.
Ah!
It really is quite hard, isn't it?
I thought it'd be quite easy to cut the meat off, particularly with these knives,
but it doesn't half cling.
Do we know anything about the people who did this job?
It was a job which women did. Um... Surprise, surprise.
Surprise, surprise, yeah.
And we know that they hated the stink as well.
They also talk about how sore their hands were,
being in the cold and the wet all the time.
Oh, it's not just me being squeamish? No, it's not.
Oh! It is a bit, though.
How much bone is there in bone china?
It's about half. Half clay and half bone.
Why use bone?
It gives it whiteness, you can make a very thin body, and it's translucent.
All the qualities you associate with bone china come from the bone.
So all these middle-class people
would have been drinking their tea with their little fingers curled,
totally unaware that what they would be drinking out of was 50%- made out of that.
Been a bit of an eye-opener, wouldn't it?
Yep, it would.
You can smell rotting meat a mile off.
But a greater danger was that there were no health and safety inspectors around
to warn you about some of the more invisible dangers, like arsenic and lead,
which did for so many workers during the industrial revolution.
And here in the Potteries, there was this stuff - the dust -
that floated through the air all the time,
particularly during the final stages of the process
when the workers were finishing off the pots.
This stuff could give you potter's rot, or pneumoconiosis,
which was a lung disease which was potentially fatal.
But hazards lurked among even the most innocent-looking jobs.
Even the pressers who made the cup handles
risked injury to their internal organs.
See, look... Press it together. Really push hard. Come on, hard!
They called it jumping, 'cause they actually landed,
landed on their stomachs with it, if you were a bit smaller.
Yep. Yep.
I see what you mean by 'jumping',
because after a while, you just... you want to get your feet off the ground
in order to put your weight on.
I suppose the smaller you are, the lighter you are, the more you've got to do that.
There's testimony that was taken in the 1840s -
a young lad called Herbert Bell.
He talks about how it hurts his stomach, how hot it is,
about 98 degrees in the factory.
You're also right over the clay, breathing that dust in all the time.
How many of these would they have had to make in a day?
They'd have been making about 50 dozen a day,
working with a team of others.
Hang on, 50 dozen - that's 720, isn't it?
No, five... five... What's five times...
600. 600 a day. About 600 a day.
Here we are. Let's see if I've actually managed to cut through.
Oh, not bad.
Then you take the excess off.
Should really let it dry a little bit first, but...
Oh, it has cut hasn't it? Oh, that's good.
Do you know, I think that's the first time in this series
that I've actually managed to complete a job with some degree of efficiency.
Except the middle of it isn't cut out!
Industry reduced workers to tiny cogs in a giant production machine.
Workers did one small, repetitive job day in, day out.
There were fettlers, piecers, placers and saggar-makers' bottom knockers.
The drawer's only job was to take the fired pottery out of the kiln, quick.
Imagine balancing on a ladder inside an oven
that's been heated to 1,400 degrees
and shifting 10 kilos of burning-hot pots onto your head.
Ooh, gosh, it feels like it's gonna go. Oh!
One breakage and every single person in the chain would have their wages docked.
So that's the china sorted.
But our high-tea set also needs cutlery.
And for that, you need another terrible job 100 miles up the road in Sheffield.
The buffer lass worked by hand, polishing knives, forks and spoons -
thousands of them - all day, every day.
Emma?
EMMA: Hi. I want to be a buffer lass.
What do I have to do? Right. Come on.
Let's dress you up first, I think, then.
Oh, yes, please. Right. What do I have to put on?
Buffer lasses, they wore what they call a buff-brat,
a bit like an operational kind of gown, with strings behind your back
so you didn't get them caught in the machine.
This is one of these? Something similar to this.
What's it called again? A buff-brat.
So we tie that round your back so they don't get caught.
You want a brown paper. Now, you might think, why brown paper?
Very readily available.
They would use this in the workplace to wrap all the finished products together.
What, I put this on?
You put this on as an apron round your middle.
This absorbed the oil that was used in the buffing process.
They used Trent sand and oil, and this would be absorbed,
rather than getting your nice calico outfit that dirty.
Was it really that mucky a job? Oh, it was.
Definitely, yeah.
The dirt bit comes when you do the buffing
and the sand and the oil flick off from the wheel
as you're passing the knives, forks and spoons
through and underneath the wheel.
Yeah.
And put these round your legs to protect your legs,
because you don't want to get oil on them either.
They often got mucky faces and impregnated dirt in their hands as well.
What, dirt that would actually sort of never come off?
Not come out, no.
What kind of girls were these?
They were notoriously loud, seemingly, and rowdy.
They were often known to be foul-mouthed,
and the language that came out of some of these workshops
was not to be repeated here.
And in their workplaces as well, men didn't dare go through the doors.
I'll bet they were terrifying. I'll bet they were terrified.
They'd probably get shouted at and rubbed down with sand and oil.
This is the buffing wheel, and now you're in your costume, shall we give it a go?
Yeah, yeah.
In the pot here that you can see, we've got Trent sand and oil,
so these were dipped and rubbed before they were ground.
Can you smell it?
It's like smelling a petrol pump!
So, shall we give it a go? We'll start with something easy - a knife.
Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready.
Hold it fairly well underneath, 'cause it's gonna come towards you,
and the dirt will possibly flick up at you.
Alright there?
Oh, yeah, all the dirt keeps... bouncing off the wheel onto my face.
Can't have been very good for you.
No. I mean, it would get impregnated in your fingers, all the oil and the sand.
And also you'd get dermatitis. Many of them suffered from that.
As an errand lass to start with, you'd do odd jobs around the factory.
You'd work your way up, then, to doing handles,
and then eventually you'd get to more complex things like spoons and forks,
'cause they're a lot more intricate.
Look at the state of my hands. They're really...
Oh, gosh. It's pretty mucky, isn't it?
Yeah, the oil's becoming impregnated now, which is...
The buffer girls had that, and they were quite disfigured, really.
How many of these girls do you reckon there would have been in a factory?
Several hundred.
But say in, like, one workshop, there'd be long benches down each side
and maybe 25 to 50 people all with their own individual wheels.
So it'd be very loud and rowdy. Imagine this 50 times over.
Buffer lasses were paid by the piece, which kept them glued to their machines.
And every piece had to be perfect.
TONY: There you are.
That's not bad, is it?
EMMA: Well, perhaps compare them to these ones.
That's just the beginning of the process.
So, various stages of buffing, and this is your end product
before they'd be packaged and sent away.
If deafening machines, filth, dermatitis and repetitive work weren't bad enough,
mass production had one more downside for factory workers.
It created a whole artificial working life.
If you lived in the country, you'd be woken up by the church bells,
and you'd stop work when the sun set.
But in the increasingly mechanised world of the towns,
factories could operate 24/7,
and in order to make that happen, the owners instituted the shift system.
And the first shift started at 5am.
Now, if you had to wake up at that time nowadays,
you'd set your mobile phone or your alarm clock radio,
and ting-a-ling-a-ling - hopefully you'd wake up on time.
But in those days, you wouldn't have been able to afford a phone.
But you had to get to work on time,
because as far as the owners were concerned, time was money.
So they invented their own human alarm clock, called the knocker-up,
and his tool of trade was the long stick,
and he went round tapping on everyone's window very early in the morning,
and he used to do this every day for the whole year,
come rain, come shine, come snow.
Morning!
Apart from the factory owner,
he was probably the most unpopular person in the whole town.
But the reason it was a worst job was because there was no knocker-up
to knock up the knocker-up, was there?
Where there's brass, there's muck.
And while the industrial revolution brought Britain wealth, it created filth.
Coal and chemicals brought smogs
that would make Los Angeles seem like an alpine meadow.
Industrial Britain lived under a thin film of grime.
And ironically, one of the messiest jobs of all
was one designed to keep everyone else clean.
You needed a strong stomach to apply for the post of soap boiler.
Emanating from somewhere over there isn't the smell of Lux or Palmolive.
It actually smells more like the insides of 1,000 dead wildebeest.
And my head tells me that it's to do with our next worst job - soap-making.
You look like you're boiling a Martian in there. What is that?
Well, actually, I'm not boiling a Martian. I'm boiling parts of a dead sheep.
And, uh, we actually need some more,
so why don't you throw that one in over there?
So is that what you make soap out of, the insides of sheep?
Well, you make soap out of fat and, uh, believe it or not, caustic soda.
The most common form of fat was from boiling down animals.
Will this do? Oh, no, that's far too good.
That's our lunch. Put in the sheep's offal.
(Laughs)
Here we go.
I have to say, I've never got used to this job.
So you're saying they could have used virtually anything at all to go in there?
Well, Tony. You're a soap-maker, OK?
You know that any bit of animal will do to make... to get fat from.
So if you see a dead dog or cat, rat or anything,
you're gonna put it in your soap pan, aren't you?
But first, you have to take the skin off. Yeah.
And then you have to take out its entrails so there's no waste products in it.
'Cause you don't want waste products in your tallow,
but virtually anything else will do.
It does smell fairly disgusting now, doesn't it? What do we do with it next?
You have to cook it, let it cool, take the fat off the top.
Yeah.
And then repeat the process to get a pure tallow.
And eventually it ends up like this.
Why's it clear on the top, but got that big yellow ball in the middle?
Well, this is liquid tallow, and the big ball in the middle is actually solid tallow.
And what are we gonna do with this?
We're gonna pour it in this pot, and we're gonna make soap.
In it goes.
So what do we do now?
Well, Tony, we add in the lye. What's that?
Well, lye is caustic soda, or what they used to call potash,
in a solution of water.
That must be dangerous. Well, it is.
I mean, certainly, if you put your hands in it, it will burn them.
So not only did you have this horrible stink,
but you had the terrible burning stuff as well.
Absolutely, and if you get splashed with it, or it gets in your eyes, it will blind you.
Is this the caustic soda? That's it, Tony.
Right. Cor, it's heavy.
Now, tell me when. I'll tell you when.
That should do nicely. OK.
And now we heat it up. Now we heat it up.
Now, you see, the lye is mixing with the fats,
and then very slowly, very gradually, it will turn into soap.
And that process is called saponification.
I'll tell you what, it's starting to go really frothy.
You normally can't tell how long it's gonna take to saponify.
Sometimes it happens quite quickly.
But normally this process would take about four days.
And you can see the soap forming on the surface.
This is only one little bucket, and it stinks.
Imagine the smell from a soap factory
rendering animal carcasses seven days a week.
That's weird. There's some fumes coming off it now.
They're really making me cough. (Coughs)
Well, that'll be the caustic soda, because it's boiling so vigorously.
So that means that we've now got soap, but a load of caustic soda as well.
What do we do with the caustic soda?
You actually add brine to it, which is salt water,
and what happens is the soap basically floats to the top as pure soap.
You'll have soap on the top, then glycerine,
and then all the bits of animals that didn't make fat, and caustic soda.
What happens to the rest of the caustic soda?
Well, once you've finished, if there's any waste caustic soda,
you'd either use it again or you'd just flush it down the drain.
Into the water supply? Oh, absolutely.
Oh, that's great, isn't it?
So you've got all these fumes coming off, you've got the stink,
and you've got the fact that your water source is being polluted.
It's a messy business.
So Tony, what we do is we pour the soap into a mould, like this,
and then we let it cool down.
Yeah. And then we take it out.
This is the soap?
Absolutely.
There we are.
That's some travel, isn't it, from the bits and pieces of meat through to that.
Do you want to try some? Yeah.
There we are. Take a chunk of that.
Now, it's not going to lather very well because there's no coconut oil in it.
In the 18th century, soap was made from tallow,
and tallow soap does not lather particularly well.
Well, there's not that much lather here, but...
But it does the job.
It's still got a bit of the old animal smell on it, hasn't it?
Yes, it has.
We all know that the industrial revolution wasn't just driven by sweat and toil,
but by brains.
There was Brunel and his suspension bridge,
James Watt and his steam engine.
But behind these towering geniuses lies another worst job -
those inventors who dedicated their whole lives
to devices that never saw the light of day,
basically because they were complete rubbish.
Like James Boyle and his ingeniously polite saluting device -
a cunning mechanism that meant
if you had a budgie cage in one hand and a pound of sausages in the other,
you could still tip your hat to a lady.
Equally futile, the deliverance coffin.
If Auntie Flo wasn't quite dead when you buried her,
one movement would send a spring-Ioaded mop
shooting out of the 6-foot pipe to alert passers-by.
But there was a job worse than the people who invented rubbish.
It was the bloke who invented something brilliant
and never got the credit for it.
This is Cromford Mill in Derbyshire.
It was here that Richard Arkwright first used his water frame.
This revolutionary device enabled cotton to be spun on an industrial scale.
Arkwright's machine transformed production
and assured his place in industrial history.
The only problem was, it wasn't his invention.
He'd pinched the idea from an inventor called Thomas Highs,
who'd developed the water frame with his partner, John Kay,
but had been too poor to be able to afford a patent.
Arkwright's only contribution to technology
was to buy a few rounds of drinks,
which he poured down John Kay until the poor bloke was so sozzled
that he blurted out the secrets of this wonderful invention.
Arkwright went on to patent it
and installed a water frame here in this factory.
Not only that, but he sold the idea to mill owners throughout the country.
Highs eventually took him to court, and he won, but by then it was too late.
Arkwright had made his millions, and Highs died a forgotten nobody.
But Victorian Britain didn't have time for losers.
This was an age of self-confidence.
In 1851, to show that the UK led the world, we put on the Great Exhibition.
The country's finest technology was displayed
in the purpose-built Crystal Palace.
It was architecture designed to awe.
The architect Paxton got all the plaudits,
but the Crystal Palace was a giant kit of parts
prepared with extreme skill and a lot of puff.
In fact, there were 293,655 panes of glass in the original structure,
which meant an awful lot of work for the glassblower.
Paxton's plans gave glassblowers their ultimate challenge.
They were already working to capacity.
The Victorian building boom meant a huge demand for windows.
Every single one had to be blown into a cylinder, then flattened into a sheet.
But Paxton went further.
He pushed technology to the limit
and demanded the largest panes of glass ever blown.
Working flat out in conditions of extreme heat
meant mistakes were bound to happen.
Glassmakers were a tight-knit bunch. Accidents were rarely recorded.
But as glass is heated to 1,200 degrees to work,
even the briefest of contact causes third-degree burns.
Right, what do I do, Andrew?
OK. Hold the stick. Yeah.
Put your hand quite in close. Yeah.
Yeah, and you want to be pulling away.
Don't want it to fold in on itself. You want it to come out.
And down. No, back hand down.
Right.
And then, as it gets there, then just straight.
Don't worry about the heat. If you can feel something, you're doing it right.
If you can't feel anything, you've burnt your hand off.
And if you do feel heat, just dip it in water afterwards.
Oh, blimey. OK, in you go.
Right. Closely. In you go.
Yeah. That's it. Pull up.
Hey! That's good. There you go. Yeah?
Oh, I enjoyed that.
Can you feel the heat on your hand? Yeah, not half.
It's still there, then. It was wet a minute ago. Now it's...
Oh, it's still wet.
That's the easy bit done.
The glass cylinders are then cooled and cut lengthways
with a diamond cutter.
Then they're blasted again.
Working in the heat of the furnace,
the glassblowers have to flatten them into a sheet.
This is my big moment.
Right, what do I do? Just ease it that...
Oh, it's gone down that way, yeah. That one'll fall out on that side. Just...
Pick that one up from... as it is.
Don't let it fall down.
That's good. That's it. Oh, no.
Argh! Sugar!
That's not too bad. That's good.
Hey! Well saved!
OK, so, what we do now is we put this one away.
Yeah.
And we get the large block of wood.
So we just run it over the glass
until you get it flat.
I really feel it here!
Yeah. Oh, my gosh!
Does it matter that I've set the pusher thing on fire?
No. Oh, no, no, not at all. It's wood. It's meant to burn.
There you are.
Only another 363,654, or whatever it is,
and we've built the entire Crystal Palace.
I'm going for a beer.
It's funny how something can be really dangerous
and yet we turn a blind eye to it.
The world's very first cigarette-making factory
was opened in London in the year 1856.
For the first time, ordinary men and women
had access to tobacco in a handy form.
But this wasn't the only dangerous thing about smoking.
Match-making was one of the most poisonous jobs
in the entire industrial revolution.
The first generation of cigarette smokers
just loved Bryant & May's strike-anywhere Lucifer matches,
produced in a hellish factory in the East End of London.
In the 1880s, the Bryant and May match girls became famous
not only for their disgusting job, but because they organised, and won,
a strike to get their appalling working conditions improved.
Their action was the beginning of the trade union movement.
But in a world where you could fall off bridges, get lung disease from clay
or burn in a glass furnace,
how did they create a cause celebre
out of a gloop that looks like salad cream?
Louise, it's hard to believe that this tiny little thing could be dangerous.
It's difficult to believe, isn't it?
Of course, it was just the little bit on the end, as well -
it was just the striking tip that caused all the problems.
What was it made out of?
Well, that would have had a mixture like this, a composition -
what the workers called a compo - like this,
which is sulfur and resin.
But presumably not just in a little tin?
Well, no, Bryant & May wouldn't have got very far
if they'd been working on this kind of a scale.
They had a huge factory in the East End of London,
massive rooms, massive vats of this composition.
But what was poisonous about it?
Well, nothing poisonous about this, or I wouldn't be standing here,
but what they would have used to make the Lucifer match was this here.
This is yellow phosphorus here. This is very nasty stuff.
It was used as an insecticide. People used it to commit suicide.
What did it do to the workers?
Well, inhaling or ingesting
even a really tiny amount of this would make you sick.
And not just sick either.
I've heard in the course of my research
that the streets around Bryant & May's biggest factory in East London,
when the girls came off shifts,
was pretty much awash with pools of fluorescing vomit.
Because it would actually make you fluoresce.
If you were poisoned by phosphorus, it would actually make you fluoresce.
It made your clothes glow and made you very sick.
But it got a lot worse than that as well,
and what was special about Fairfield Road, the Bryant & May factory in Bow,
was that they had no canteen there.
So there was no separate area for the women to eat their food.
So they ate their food where they worked.
So whatever bread... probably a bit of bread you'd brought in from home.
Yeah.
The phosphorus all day has been settling on it,
the particles coming out of the air, settling on your bread, like a deadly seasoning,
which when they then ate it and ingested it
would get straight into their mouths and into their teeth,
through holes in their teeth.
And it would start to decay the jawbone itself,
and pieces of bone the size of peas
were apparently worked out through the gums, if you can imagine that,
and it caused the most appalling smell,
to the extent that some of the women suffering from it were almost like lepers.
They were disfigured. They had to live on the outskirts of town.
And that's why it's often known as 'phossy jaw'.
That's what the women themselves called it.
The women used to have all their teeth pulled at the first sign of it,
'cause toothache - that's where it would start, with toothache -
seemingly quite innocuous, and swelling of the face.
If they didn't have all their teeth pulled, Bryant & May would make them do it.
One woman who was pregnant didn't want to.
She was concerned about the risk to her baby, the risk of miscarriage.
She refused to do it, and she was actually sacked - dismissed without a penny.
Why did they use that stuff?
Because this Lucifer match was the most popular kind at the time.
It was the best seller. Yeah.
That's what Bryant & May wanted to continue making,
although they could have actually used this here.
This is red phosphorus.
And that's completely safe.
But because the Lucifer, the strike-anywhere match,
was the most popular type -
didn't need a box, didn't need a striking strip, like this did -
that's what they kept making,
and that's what caused the problems for their work force.
What an incredibly vicious process just to create that effect.
But were there any jobs worse than one that made your jaw rot and drop off?
I'll find out in a bit.
I've been looking at the worst jobs in industrial history.
But which job's the very worst?
Bone cleaning was certainly revolting work,
but it was reasonably safe compared to the leggers,
who risked torn ligaments and drowning to keep the canals working.
And building the great bridges of the industrial revolution
required nerves of steel.
Where on Earth could there be anything worse than that?
Well, nowhere. But underneath the earth's a different matter.
In every historical period, there have been worst jobs underground,
down the mines.
Without coal, there would have been no steam and no industry.
By 1800, Britain was getting through about 15 million tonnes a year.
Getting it out of the ground was a dark and dangerous business.
Any job down a mine would have been pretty horrible,
but if you were a child, it must have been doubly bad,
which is why I'm nominating the child miners known as hurriers
as having the very worst industrial job.
Ceri, I thought miners were all big lads like you.
What were children doing down there?
Um, well, in the past, of course,
the tunnels weren't as large as they are in modern mines,
and it was easier for children to negotiate them,
and also cheaper to employ children than fully grown adults.
So, what did these hurriers do?
Well, the hurriers, or drammers, as we call them in South Wales,
they actually brought the coal from the coalface,
which had been cut by the colliers, back to the main roads.
How old were these kids?
Officially, they started about eight years old,
but there have been cases of 5- and 3-year-olds working underground.
And that's what I've got to do? That's what you've got to do.
I can do what a 5-year-old can do. Of course you can.
Come on.
You'll get an idea of how bad being a hurrier was
when I tell you their eventual replacements were pit ponies.
I can't shed the years to get an idea of the terror of a 6-year-old
going down into the dark for the first time.
But I can at least shed the hard hat for once.
Instead, I get some breeches and a white shirt,
and I've got a feeling it's not gonna stay that way for long.
Hurriers' only light was from candles, which could cause explosions.
They were forced to buy them at marked-up prices from the mine owners.
They had to walk up to a mile to the coalface.
On the way, I accidentally found out
about one of the hurriers' young colleagues.
Are we at the end, Ceri? No, we're not at the end yet, Tony.
Well, what's this thing here, then? This is a ventilation door.
It's a door? It's a door.
I can hardly see it in the dark. Why do you have doors in mines?
Well, mines have to have doors. It directs the ventilation around all the workings.
So does it stay shut all the time?
Yes, except when there's coal's coming out,
and then, obviously, it's got to be opened and then closed behind again.
So who opens and closes it? A young child.
They were called trappers, or door-boys, in South Wales.
Well, I have to say, that sounds just about the easiest job in the whole world.
Yes, of course it is. You sit there.
Right.
Hold my rope. You hold your rope.
Yep. You hear a noise. You open the door.
Well, it's a doddle!
Now, then. Do it in the dark. Yeah.
With rats scurrying around.
(Tony laughs) It is totally different.
As soon as the lights go out, you feel the cold. You feel so isolated.
You can turn the light back on now, Ceri.
It's weird the difference it makes, isn't it?
Lmagine a little child being stuck sitting down there. How many hours a day?
Up to 12 hours. (Exhales)
And presumably they'd be the first person in?
They'd be in first thing in the morning,
and then have to stay there until the last collier left.
There's a nice story which comes from
the Royal Commission's report on children in mines,
and the commissioners were actually visiting a colliery
and they came across a young trapper called Mary Davis
in the Merthyr Tydfil area,
and she was actually sleeping by the air door.
When they woke her up,
she said that the rats had run off with her bread and cheese,
and she was so upset, being in the dark on her own,
she closed her eyes and went to sleep to forget about it all.
But darkness, rats and long hours were just the start for the hurrier.
They had to drag tubs of coal from the coalface to the lift shaft.
They wore leather belts and were attached by chains to the tubs,
which were often just sleds that slid over the rocky floor.
And this is where the hurriers would have worked?
Yes, this is one of the mine tunnels, and this is a coal cart.
These little kids had to drag these things along?
Yeah, they pulled weights of up to half a tonne.
But apart from the weight, it's the dust. Their clothes must have got filthy.
And they got ripped and everything else.
So they had a solution for that in the north of England.
Which was? Not to wear any clothes.
You're kidding. I'm not kidding.
The women usually kept their clothes on from the waist down.
Yeah. But the men would work stark-naked.
Am I allowed to keep my trousers on?
Of course you are. Bless you.
So, what do we know about these children and the work that they did?
Well, one of the best descriptions we've got is of Edward Edwards,
aged seven years old, of Briton Ferry.
He described his day's work.
He dragged one of these back and forth, 60 yards at a time,
from the coalface to the main roads.
As he said, sometimes he pushed it, sometimes he pulled it,
sometimes it fell on him and broke a bone here and there.
Not a very pleasant occupation at all.
I'll tell you what, it isn't half parky in here!
You're not gonna beat me up if I don't do it fast enough, are you?
No, not at all. Right.
I'll have to get down on my hands and knees, won't I, 'cause it's so low here.
Right.
Gorblimey! I can hardly... move the thing at all.
Lord knows how... a 4- or 5-year-old did it.
And that tunnel's about the size of the tunnel they would have been working in.
Ceri, I think there's a gradient here, isn't there?
Yes. The tunnels actually followed the coal seams themselves.
I don't know how these kids managed to get these things uphill.
Well, in some places, of course, some modern collieries,
they actually had rails down and little wheels on the cart,
and it made it a little bit easier.
But on the other hand, the cart could run away with wheels on
and run over the children.
I think I'd rather take the risk of being crushed and have the things on... rails.
You pay your money and you take your choice.
I tell you what, every time you try and yank forward,
it really digs into your knees.
(Shouts) How long would they have been doing...
Oh...
How long would they have been doing this for at a time, Ceri?
Well, up to 12 hours a day.
Back and for', back and for'.
Full ones out, empty ones back in.
The other thing, of course, is that every time you move forward,
you're kicking up the dust.
And then, as soon as you've finished the forward motion bit,
you breathe in like mad in order to gulp some more air,
and the dust goes straight down your throat again.
(Sighs)
The rubble laid down after the mine closed
makes pulling the tub even harder,
but, then, I am a few years older than the average hurrier.
That is a horrible job. It's really disgusting.
It's all the dust coming up, choking you.
I've got blood on my knee from somewhere,
and I've got a cut on my hand there.
But without all those little children
pulling these trucks miles and miles through those dark passageways,
the captains of industry would have been literally powerless.
But next time, even more worst jobs.
I'm going to sea to find out why telling fibs could get you a job swabbing the toilets.
How Britain's very first navy survived on minimal rations.
And why maritime heroes didn't like getting their toes wet.