While not all of us love our jobs in today’s society, it is highly probable that many of our ancestors detested their occupations. However, someone’s profession or trade typically defines who they are or were.

Statements such as “I’m a teacher”, “I work in IT” – or in Victorian times “I work down the pit” or “I’m a farm labourer” – hold a wealth of social information. When we look back in time, it is not always easy to translate what is written on censuses, certificates and other documentation from yesteryear into a language we understand nowadays. But as keen family historians we want to know what made our forebears tick, just as we would a new acquaintance today.

It is unlikely that Queen Victoria realised when changes were made to centralise the registration of births, marriages and deaths, and the official census every ten years recorded the names of all individuals in a household or institution, what an impact this would have in the 20th century when we all suddenly became interested in ‘where we came from’. The national censuses, from 1841 on, give the family historian a snapshot of the life of their ancestors at ten-yearly intervals. As the decades passed, more questions were asked of households and therefore more information is available to us.

Many of us will have agricultural labourers, servants, masons, blacksmiths, farmers and maybe a surgeon, policeman, prison warder and such like among the occupations of our forebears. However, some of our ancestors will have earned a living doing something which was quite commonplace in their locality though unknown in other areas and almost unheard of today. While researching a probate case a few years ago, my client’s birth certificate recorded her father’s occupation as an acid pickler, an occupation which I had never heard of before though could relatively easily work out: the lady’s father worked in a tin works and pickled the tin by dipping it in acid.

Many of the occupational terms you will find in historical documents are less than helpful in deciphering what our ancestors did and, indeed, how this will have affected their ability to support a family and what kind of life they led. Most of our ancestors had no pretensions: an occupation was something they learned in their early years and practised until they dropped. William Sillifant was a mason and a glazier, because that was what he needed to do to survive and provide for his family; indeed, many people had dual or multiple occupations. This was often the norm in Victorian England. Not all occupations followed by our ancestors were as straightforward as ‘blacksmith’ or ‘baker’, both of which were terms used nationally with little or no variation. By contrast, a man whose job was to finish cloth would be referred to as a ‘fuller’ in the east and south-east of England, as a ‘tucker’ in the south west, and a ‘walker’ in the north. Colin Rogers’ The Surname Detective highlights how these regional variations are reflected in the surnames derived from such terms.

Over the centuries, occupations have appeared and disappeared, as have the terms associated with them. A few decades after a trade has ceased to have daily relevance, it may well slip into history and only be understood with the help of a dictionary.

Very often, occupational terms and surnames are heavily connected, for example, Cooper, Thatcher and Mason, where the meaning of the surname speaks for itself. If your surname is Wainwright, however, you may well need to think more carefully (a cart maker); if it is Farmer, you may need to steer clear of the seemingly obvious derivation and think in terms of your distant ancestor being perhaps a tax collector, rather than necessarily someone who worked on the land. In this article we’ll look at some occupations where the name doesn’t tend to give much away.

Knock nobblers and jiggers
The wonderfully titled knock nobbler was, back in Victorian times, a churchwarden who was in charge of turning unruly dogs out of church. The term is still used today, with a book of the same title written by a man in the West Midlands who was a television director; when made redundant, he became a knock nobbler (see here). However, in the present day this is simply a dog catcher rather than being specific to the Church.

Some occupational terms have a wide variety of meanings so it is hard to deduce from a word on a historical document what your ancestor actually did – jigger is one of these terms. A quote from the Old Bailey proceedings against Cornelius Strong for deception and fraud in 1845 includes a statement from Mr Daniel Brown:

I am a labourer. On Wednesday, the 24th of Sept., the prisoner was at work with me, from eight o’clock till six — he was at work as a jigger — he might be occasionally going away to the water-closet, or such as that, but not for above a quarter of an hour —we had six men heaving up…

In this instance, the occupation of jigger is a worker in a mine who cleaned and sorted ore in a wire or wooden sieve when it had been ‘heaved up’. The term can also be used to describe the owner of an illegal still of alcoholic spirits, a potter and a dancer, so if your ancestor was recorded as a jigger, good luck with working out what they actually did!

Malkins and yowlers
A malkin was a term used for a female kitchen worker back in the 19th century. A Victorian kitchen built 200 years ago was discovered in 2011, almost untouched with original fixtures and fittings right down to jelly moulds with ‘VR’ on them, in a mansion in Cefn Park, near Wrexham – just the sort of place where a malkin might have been found.

The kitchen, built in the early 1800s, is thought to have been unused for 100 years before being used as an underground shelter during World War Two. It was blocked up at the end of the conflict but was found by the new owner after he took over the property from his father (see here ).

The 1881 census reveals that the property’s residents included a live-in butler, valet, footman, two housemaids, a gardener and coachman, with the previous owners including Sir Roger William Henry Palmer, a soldier who took part in the charge of the Light Brigade in 1854.

A yowler was a thatcher’s assistant who held the ‘yowls’ of straw and passed them to the thatcher. Straw was the predominant thatching material in use in England up until the 19th century – either longstraw or combed wheat reed. Norfolk Reed (or water reed) was traditionally used in the counties of East Anglia and other wetland areas. A diversity of styles developed over time and, coupled with different materials, distinct regional characteristics were apparent. The combed wheat reed roofs of the West Country for example, are shallow pitched and ‘pudding basin’ in appearance compared with the steeply pitched longstraw roofs of East Anglia. The treatment of ridges, eaves and gables varies in different parts of the country and in those areas where there is a strong thatching tradition a departure in style even today would look out of place.

Pancratists and urinators
Pancratist was the term used when referring to gymnasts of the Victorian age. Although gymnastics has its roots in Ancient Greece, Johann Friedrich GutsMuths and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn brought back the art of gymnastics in the 19th century. Around this time, they made use of several pieces of equipment for teaching gymnastics. Equipment such as horizontal bar, parallel bars, side horse with pommels, balance beam, ladder and vaulting horse were introduced by Jahn.

The end of the 19th century saw men’s gymnastics gain unprecedented popularity. It was owing to the popularity of the sport that it was included in the Olympic Games held in 1896. However, the gymnastics of the 19th century is very different from what we recognise now. In that era, a gymnast performed exercises such as team floor callisthenics, rope climbing, high jumping, running and several other activities.

Urinators performed their ‘pancratic’ tumbling routines into water, though British diver Tom Daley would undoubtedly not appreciate being referred to as a ‘urinator’ in today’s society. Professional diving became popular in Sweden and Germany in the 18th and 19th centuries, primarily practised by pancratists. In the late 19th century, a group of Swedish divers visited Great Britain, putting on displays (hopefully not publicised as ‘urinating displays’!) that proved hugely popular and led to the formation of the first diving organisation in 1901. Diving was included in the Olympic Games for the first time just after the end of the Victorian era at the 1904 Games in St Louis. The springboard and platform events have been included since the 1908 Olympic Games in London and, since the Stockholm Games in 1912, women have taken part in the diving events.

Picking a quarrel…
Similar to the profession of jiggler, other ambiguous occupational terms included battledore maker and quarrel maker .

The modern game of badminton developed from a game called battledore and shuttlecocks. The battledore maker or stringer made the racquets for the sport – but manufacturers of cane and wooden carpet beaters or paddles (to get rid of the dust) were also known as battledore makers.

‘Battledore and Shuttlecock’ was simply two people hitting a shuttlecock backwards and forwards with a bat as many times as they could without allowing it to hit the ground. In 1830, the record for the number of hits was made by the Somerset family and was apparently 2117 hits!

More often than not, the term quarrel maker was used to describe arrow makers. The name ‘quarrel’ was derived from the French carré, ‘square’, referring to the fact that the arrows typically had square heads. The term was later used to describe a manufacturer of small diamond-shape glass panes, also called quarrels.

The letter Q in the list of interesting occupational terms from yesteryear also includes:
• quassillarius – a pedlar;
• quarrel picker – a colloquial term for a glazer; and
• quidnunc – a news vendor.

The world of work has changed enormously with many once-familiar terms falling into disuse, only to be understood with the aid of a dictionary.

There are in fact over a million different occupations recorded in the 1881 census. However, this is due mainly to the inability of the census takers to spell. The vast majority of the occupations listed only have a single entry and nearly all of these are errors for other, more common – correctly spelt – job titles!