The Worst Christmas Jobs In History (Christmas History Documentary) | Timeline

now history in our culture have come about because a lot of ordinary people have done some really terrible jobs and our traditional Christmas is now exception however dreadful it's been that having to do all that shopping however ghastly being stuck with your in-laws and your relatives children you can put your feet up and gloat because there's loads of people who've had far worse Christmases than you'll ever have stand by to find out about the gross inside job behind the Christmas roast disgusting strangely interesting how slimy seaweed made Jane Austen's table festive and white panto relied on dangerous chemistry welcome to the worst Christmas job in history [Music] this could be the worst Christmas job shepherds abiding in the fields watching their flocks by night when low angel appears and they all go off and see the baby Jesus it's the most famous part of the Christmas nativity story but funnily enough it proves the Christmas didn't happen in December because December is the rainy month in Judea and all the flocks are taken in for the night so if the Shepherd's were good Jewish boys they would have all been tucked up asleep in bed listening to the Romans celebrating their midwinter feast the Roman feast of Saturnalia lasted from the middle to the end of December they gave each other presents they stuck down food they drank tomato soup and they nurse Saturnalia was so popular but when christians try to get people celebrating Jesus's birth in March or April hidden never caught on that's why they take their religious feast onto this older pagan Boozer so next time you're at the office Christmas party and someone starts bleating on about this not being the real spirit of Christmas tell them they're right shoveling down food with guzzling booze is the original spirit of Christmas fun for me yes Cheers was it the Romans who actually invented binge drinking though they drink an awful lot at the Saxon area at the time they're very luxurious they eat a lot and then they drink a lot but also in the 1st century AD they developed drinking on an empty stomach for the first time could they hold their liquor no and we have plenty of plenty of information about people being sick people throwing wine cups at parties and also in wall painting we find images of people throwing up aided by slaves often and it's throwing up that's central to our first worst job which used to take place in the Roman dining room and by an eerie coincidence we actually happen to have a Roman dining room right next door welcome to the world of the pubic collector Fiona what is that her Frisian curve did women wasn't it they signifies liberty there's a cap given to slaves when they're free but it's estimated everybody wears them because it's idea that this is the time where the poor and the rich and even the slaves will sit down with their masters and everybody is equal for let's say about a week of the year so Eric doesn't have to be serving all night well this has so don't we see I'm playing the Galatea game because not every Roman household does that so the Saturnalia so he's having to stand up he's still having to work Eric this is an egalitarian household you can sit down by I'll do your job thank you very much Joel have you got one of those there's a commentary where they used to throw up Dave shut up that's disgusting you're the slave community know that slaves had to clear up the sick of all we know this quite clearly from lippy writers Senecas letters are particularly rich on so condemning the excess of drinking and eating and also the excess of having your slaves do everything for you even clearing up puke puke collectors had to be prepared to do anything to their masters they were human tools who had to be invisible hiccup you can't sneeze you can't and even in some households such as the freedmen come out his house he goes for pain he washes his hands and he might cry his hands on your hair up there you're looking the threat of war now I hope not I said women he threatened considered loose women for scared daughters how many days a year do they have to do this it's a 365 day of the year job because you're the slave they don't have dinner without you so you have to do it at the session idea or our Christmas you might get extra food even the meanest master would give you extra wine so you do get something but you get free food which can't be too bad and please rather nice but however bad this job might have been at least it was indoors during the festive season some jumps were much more specially clear you do look a bit green [Music] 27:28 now this is a strange job someone had to do this every Christmas Eve here in Dewsbury since the Middle Ages and it gets harder every year because this isn't ordinary bell ringing in order to celebrate the defeat of the devil when Christ was born they do what they call The Devil's nail which is ringing the bell once for every year of the Christian era so that's over 2,000 Yanks of the rope by now and it's not just any Bell Blacktail weighs as much as a Mini Cooper that's 43 44 43 that's the year in which the Romans invaded Britain so there's still quite a few to go was on a few hundred years by the 9th century the Christian version of Christmas is spreading across Northern Europe in the Czech Republic a Christian Saint King Wenceslas goes down in history for his reputation for charity when Good King Wenceslas looked out in the Carroll the poor man who came in sight gathering winter few L had a worst job he was a er for hundreds of years errs collected firewood to burn or sell for a few coppers were a poor man's law archaeologists have excavated medieval so we know how they were made bundling the twigs made them slower to burn but tying them with freezing fingers is a painful business you help me get it on my back yeah I know this must look like there isn't much to it but actually once the enclosures happened and the land everybody could go on was suddenly under private control this became a very difficult job because either you have to take the risk of going onto somebody's land and getting caught or else you born it off the landlord in which case you paid over the odds for it unless you got it on the black market and there are stories of people actually being sent to Australia to the penal colonies just for collecting so you know maybe in the early Middle Ages it wasn't so bad but after a while it became something that's very very scary to do see you later 20 21 we're now in the middle ages and that's when we get the first recorded Christmas Carol not good king wenceslas it was one about a Boar's Head because in the Middle Ages they used to eat Boar's Head at Christmas but of course in order to eat a Boar's Head first of all you've got to catch your boar and that meant more worse jobs a wild boar weighs up to 40 stone it can run at 30 miles an hour and deeper for foot gated when threatened its fairness its razor-sharp tusks and kill and maim and it's recently returned to the woods of Sussex in medieval times you have had to catch this king of the forest for the Christmas feast it was cold dangerous work unarmed peasants were sent out in all weathers to track them then you're and drive them from dense thicket towards their heavily armed masters luckily for me boar are also extremely shy so I had the other authentic medieval experience trudging around for hours expecting the worst but seeing nothing there's no prints but even once the ball was caught and killed the worst jobs were just beginning the ceremonial head had to be prepared by the cooks assistant in the grim world right so this is our Christmas celebration how do I get all this stuff off we're gonna have to burn it off you can't cut it off what over the fire you can put over the fire on the spit all you're gonna take it outside and you're gonna bury it in straw and set light to it hope you can do that now oh you are joking this is our authentic medieval reenactment well we really can do like this so what do I do you're just so smart yeah sorry that was a surprise right yeah okay now if you're going to take the hands there and you're going to get the crystals yeah that way I'm doing scrape it scrape it off why'd I scrape it because you want to get all that good stuff out the way I always like giving someone a haircut yes but there have been much meat on one of these there's a fairbell Queen but we're going to mash you stuff it with more meat it's quite a going yes you're gonna be little this time come on is this the ear that's the year you can leave use Oh leave those right yes the one bit I do well and you tell me what I need to do that calling this a lot of this stuff the assistant was way down the kitchen packing order you can opt out the supermarket for another Boar's Head so one first move he'd be having a very Nora Merry Christmas and if you mess this up yeah you realize that you're out what you mean out around no job this is these sentiments you've got a green light this is the testing of your test right and if I did it well do the world of your start just reveling in the trial if you've ever seen your hair you'll know that in its of it the debts come to the floor really really stinks that's pretty clean yeah and you're gonna cut yeah don't there yep you're gonna come round well okay the actual skull is flat down there don't cut it off yeah what have you do don't rip the treatment the heads bowed and then reshaped by stuffing it with the bores meet after the stomach turning stench of burning hair the primitive surgery isn't for the faint-hearted the inside of this and worse this is the moment when you can really hug it out Oh disaster you've made a right pig's ear of that happen - sorry I've gone right through yeah it's the overbite through its split up I was listening to what you were saying I'm sorry but that's no good so can we sew it up no no that's it if you're brewing Christmas I'm really crazy is no interest Oh stigma now back to the spoon I'm demoted yes but demotion wasn't the worst news cooks assistant this is what your first week only kidding what is it it's the flop plaque the insides yes what do these unknowns all the insides of a deer that no one else would touch the recipes simple do you boil them in we're sticks chopped into gobbets that's got sized pieces leaving the windpipe to one side add onions ginger herbs hello dove breads making mushy and thankfully red wine is the nicest thing I've smelled all day and that's the original number law humble pie the worst job as Christmas trees enormous alcoholic head and red wine alright it's alright if you like liver and lights and luckily for me we had a spare Boar's Head the cooked head is finished off by making it look lifelike you rub it with a dubious mixture of lard and soot so let's find out what the nobility of these two very [ __ ] fingers it's not it's a bit fatty there's a lot of fat running through it oh yes very rich mmm fatty no it's not bad I was close to where there's a medieval Christmas was a weird mixture of Christianity and pagan customs along with the Boar's Head no Christmas feast was complete without the giant you know if you've ever enjoyed a slice of chocolate you'll nog you may be surprised that it was originally a fertility symbol from the old Viking feast of EULA the Yule Log had to burn throughout 12 days of feasting so they needed the biggest tree in the forest this meant there was a worst job attached the Yule Log fella had to set off in the harshest mid winter weather to take on his toughest challenge of the year [Music] x13 me yeah about seven of these cars this is hard work with ninth century technology Andy yeah nice to get a little bark off after half an hour my initial enthusiasm had melted away in a large pool of sweating and this was mine no core ash you ulong could be twice as thick as this weighing several tons is fiying feeling even once the trees down there's more hard slog trimming scores of branches fortunately this time my fellow Vikings joined in then the entire bulk of the u-lock has dragged slowly home and you the night it was the death of the old yeah and a new year was going to revolve and that's the reason you need a fertility so you went out into the forest and you found the largest log you could see the largest tree and you could sit down so the log itself is a facility and it needed to be green because it should contain the juice of nature during your unit time you needed to drink you drank to holding you drank to fight and you drank to your with your salsa fertility garden and you were dependent upon these God to get a good harvest for the next year Andy what do you think the blokes were doing these guys have been up since first light worked all their that's probably not eaten only anything so now it's just it's food and beer and warmth it's just like Christmas nowadays isn't it yeah it's exactly the same I mean it's just this is the place to be it's as simple as that and especially after the day there was about [Music] so our traditional Christmas is a real Journal of pagan and Christian traditions which smacks of magic and superstition and after the Civil War Cromwell and the Puritan Parliament decided to ban Christmas the Puritans hated Christmas they called it the heathens feasting day the superstitious man's idle day Satan's working day evergreens were banned and Christmas puddings they shut down the churches even humble pie was forbidden which was probably just about the only plus and on December the 25th all the shops had to stay open come on open up and the ultimate mr. nasty responsible for enforcing the ban on Christmas was the Justice of the Peace robbing people of their Christmas celebrations was not only unpopular it was highly dangerous because just as fast as the magistrates went around demanding that the shopkeepers out not so mobs of workers and apprentices followed behind them insisting that they closed them again in 1646 in Barristan Edmonds to an armed confrontation between a crowd of youth with clubs with nails in them and a few JPS and constables who ended up defending one solitary shop for the whole of Christmas Day now that really is a worst job here's a Christmas riddle for you what's the connection between Jane Austen Christmas dinner and nine well by the 18th century the Georgians have developed their own refined and tasteful Christmas celebrations place settings were very much like what we have today they'd have had knives and spoons and this is a new innovation the fork the whole thing would have been on a crisp linen tablecloth and the port would have been poured into elegant glasses but all this elegance was bought at a price and the price was paid by workers here on the shores of Ireland the production both the linen and glassware that graced the Georgian Christmas table needed vast quantities of the chemical so dough it was obtained from seaweed which was harvested and burnt to make blocks of soda and as help home families used to be employed rushing out barefooted low tide to harvest this slimy stinking resource you only had a few hours to give it the seaweed and the bad news is it took 20 tons to make one ton of kelp your pretend alarm really by the weight of this stuff I've heard of harmless things are the carrying yeah yeah well tell us thank you some more right the worst bit over hey so there's another whole part of the process well the United States is burning it will have to reduce it to help the ashes of the seaweed and that takes two days so you have to be in attendance all day today tonight tomorrow and tomorrow night because at least constantly wrecked the already spread evenly I rinds okay so what exactly happens in there then well that's slowly burns guides from a sort of points like math at the bottom yeah don't you let it cool off and it's a very very heavy it's heavier than lead it becomes a solid mass and then you break it up you have to break it up with sledgehammers and it's then carried to a store heist I have to get it in out of the rain because very soluble as fast as possible and it's brought to market massive coastal industry we have these amazing descriptions in that some paintings of this part of the coast and every few hundred yards is a smoking killing like this it's very greasy isn't it these guys and women must have got filthy yeah the smoke went into the pores and their faces were totally black but after they finished the two days burning living off to their sweat house second solar it was an artist version of the sauna but the girls who were working here with Gwyneth sitting sitting in sweat hikes for three or four hours until they they got all the sits an oil out of their pores they don't do this kind of process now presumably no no it's a long-dead industry it really collapsed here in the eighteen twenties the discovered that gets soda from from salt by a new method I was in your so the money all went so much in recession massive recession is very very hard to write the artists coastline and Scottish coast but this terrible job that makes his sleep deprivation stench filth and smoke got another lease of life when they found that machine I got another extra bus because developing so all those romantic photos of the kelp burners couldn't have been taken if it hadn't have been for the ID mat the kelp burner extract I have to say after you've been stuck in here for a bit you can you can hardly see anything it is so it's like a really greasy oil it gets in your skin and gets in your nose and it does enough stink of rotting seaweed by the 19th century the festive season was getting much closer to our modern Christmas Victorians had Christmas trees Christmas cards and in fact panto dates back at least 200 years and it comes with its own very obvious first another performers love doing pantomime to be frank I can't stand it eight sometimes twelve shows a week all that dreadful dialogue lots of screaming kids but if you are gonna be in a pantomime beep buttons be the day be Cinderella don't be the back end of a cow the downsides obvious it's hot sticky dark silly and anonymous see for the back end it means you spend your working life bed double with your nose pressed into a comics bottom in the Victorian age actors like Johnny fuller specialized in playing animals they transform themselves into spookley man shaped poodles Pussycats don't be shy girl [Music] [Music] if you want to get all your laughs in a modern pantomime your first priority is to be seen the stage needs to be bright and attractive and well illuminated and that hasn't always been the case I'm to the beginning of the 19th century this is the kind of light that you'd have been lit by on a stage it's dull it's flat it's Gaslight you can see the gut better than you can see me face here can't you if I wanted to be brightly lit I needed to be in the limelight right lads limelight what exactly was it well it was the burning of calcium oxide in a very intense flame and when did the job of limelight of again well famously the first recorded instance in many ways was a production a pantomime by the famous actor manager William McCready in the theater on injury Lane in 1827 how was the process of lighting by lime discovered well it was a chap called girls with a gurney who's an inventor and he invented a blowtorch which became the gurney torch which he was hydrogen and oxygen for a flame and I suppose he was messing around with this thing wondering what to do with it and he found that when he played the flame on a lump of lime it gave that intense white light you're gonna show us what that light's like yes it is can we get this customer sir yes so did the whole process of lime lighting develop it did indeed yes it started with just flooding the stage with this new light source which was 40 times brighter than the gas equivalent and then they decided they found a way of controlling it by putting a lens in front of it then became a much more precise instrument like today's photo spots where did the line lightest stand the limelight is operated from the wings up to the side of the theatre right ready this is gas light and this is lime light just a week or two ago me Papa rode Uncle Bill oh no you've never seen limelight before have you I haven't that was quite amazing I don't think you're gonna be disappointed now why was limelight do such a bad job well because you using hydrogen which is really very flammable and oxygen in fact to get the hottest flame you needed two volumes of hydrogen and one volume of oxygen so where's the line the line is here this is this little little thing here and the line one's job will scoop the line in the hottest part of the flame just by adjusting there's even just by adjusting levers and the line man has to keep the ratio of the two gases in that two to one ratio all the time now we have the separate gases in the cylinders they of course had them in gas bags but can you imagine mixing the hydrogen and the oxygen that was really asking the trouble that was really an explosive bag of gas and of course you'd see an hour or so before curtain up in the West End coming down the Strand men with bags of hydrogen and oxygen on their shoulders and if you were to bump into them with your cigar or your pipe we've certainly know about it I think did it did I'm in the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh burnt down in 1875 and although we don't think the lime started it it certainly helped it on its way because had gas chambers underneath the building nevertheless these limeliters were putting their lives at risk for showbiz so now ladies gentlemen for your delectation and delight we three will demonstrate for you the trials and tribulations of the humble limelighter gentlemen please [Music] impressive hydrogen burns but the reaction creates less energy [Music] [Applause] but it oxygen in the ratio of two to one and observe [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] but if founder the theater spelled danger Christmas joy for rich kids meant misery for other children toy makers were the poorest of the poor and the hardest life of all was that of the doll maker expensive Christmas gifts were produced in slum dwellings by anonymous workers as young as 6 Julia is extraordinary in here it's like a dream did you actually make these actually made the dolls for to next to you there but the ones in the far corner actual Victorian dolls it seems such a lovely thing to do it's hard to believe that this would have been a worse job it's a very nice job for me these days but they worked under much different conditions to mean the Victorian town lots of the conditions would they have been in when they were making the dolls they'd be working in very cramped small little houses in the kitchens working with the hot wax and the children are babe playing round and naturally doing parts of the jobs as well so this would have been on the kitchen stove with all the kids really oh yeah dad would probably be the one doing the pouring of the wax very dangerously would the wax could get so hot that it would actually combust and burst into flames as well it's like working with hot fats not chips oh yeah no I hold them all slightly tilted you pour into them all just pour it all pour it in that's it stop look there we go no that's just this succulent set a little bit now how much would a doll like that of course would have been about five guineas which would be all year's wage for one of the workers the little child who was making the dolls wouldn't have been able to afford to buy one of those no way no just for the spoke rich children dolls weren't for playing with they were expensive accessories it was fashionable to have dolls with faces modelled on one of Queen Victoria's children these burns off that's right take the band off now and you lift them all straight up okay oh oh that's not bad is it so just just gently ease it out at them all night oh my first little doll lovely it does look a bit like an alien doesn't it all the excess wax has to be trimmed off the scalpel and the eyes have to be set back but we need to put the top off the head of this oh you're kidding yeah brain surgery no I've only just made her she's got a little lobotomy already oh that's very unpleasant why do you do that that saw the eyes can be set from the inside of the head one the two the eyes are set in the featureless face then comes the most painstaking part of this worst job that I'm routing here's one by one in that way I'll just press it into the wax just a few hers at a time one has been moodle's used to use human hair mostly on the heads but it could be diseased to her because it won't sterilize it just today so it could be from a dead child that died of something awful and then they'd be working with this hair on the doll what's worse is that the horsehair they used to stuff the bodies carried tuberculosis it's really fiddly isn't it yeah very strange imagine doing that on the whole head for hours and hours at a time restrain your eyes really I'm working on their own when it come to the costumes each one of those holes is actually stitched round and did big yards yards and yards of the fabric done like this to make the cloth and each each little bit of this stitch by hand and the lighting would be even more of a strain on their eyes so in the spirit of worst jobs we put out our filming lights oh that's ridiculous I can't see anything at all what would have happened if they'd muck one up they just have to be scrapped their won't be accepted by the tour shops if they weren't up to standard so they won't get any money at all then presumably this was the worst part of the job not really it gets even worse but the changing in the coloring then you've got the the legend the paints and if they were licking the brush to get a nice fine point they'd be full of lead paint and then there was the arsenic in the coloring as well and at the end of the day these poor little kids wouldn't have earned enough money to have the doll of their own no way no they'd be lucky to even get a Christmas dinner and talking of Christmas lunch I'm a Gosford old goose heard for centuries if you wanted a goose fresh from the market there was only one thing to do it had to be walked there and goose herds used to walk there geese all the way from Norwich to London that's over a hundred miles at the stately pace all right all right yes all right at the stately pace of two miles an hour the goose has had sleep rough and as you can imagine the charge has got fairly grouchy so it really was an extremely tedious job but it wasn't the worst poultry related job that there isn't it definitely wasn't the worst Christmas job in history come on [Music] I've been looking at some of the worst jobs in Christmas history but which job is the very worst whew collecting was disgusting but it didn't have the risks of Victorian showbiz and even kitchen now for me the very worst Christmas job of all has to belong to a woman after all it is women who bear the brunt of Christmas it's them who peel the sprouts and wrap the kids presents and try to keep the warring relatives apart but imagine trying to do that after a grim month in freezing conditions making sure that the rest of the nation has got something to eat without the job of Turkey farmer's wife we wouldn't have the traditional Christmas dinner we eat 10 million turkeys every year most production today is mechanized but some free-range farmers still prepare the turkeys like they used to the farmer's wife had to face the job of pulling the guts out of hundreds of turkeys but first they had to take off the feathers in choking dust there was literally plucking held Dave unless my eyes deceive me you're not a woman was preparing the turkeys a woman's job yeah my grandmother used to do this bucking the turkeys all her life they used to do four or five hundred of Christmas so you sling it over you like a banjo yeah you can do it however you like I normally start on the net yep and the more you can pull out the better right you've got to be very careful not to tear the breast of the bird yeah in some areas of the bird you can go hammering songs and other areas you just take it nice and steady oh I tell you what it's a load of feathery dust coming off this bird yeah it is you'll be finding feathers for weeks after all the little tiny ones that get right up your nose and then you've also got the problem with your fingers get sore after a while yeah and if you're doing a lot they actually start to split really hurt ship yeah after I just thereafter we really know and using different muscles you wouldn't use the rest yeah okay look it's coming off you know that's it that's it but this is what you're trying to avoid I'll tone a bit of skin the big rip there so what would happen if I presented a pluck bird that looked like that probably be rejected that's the most important part that as you see that's when it's brought to the table so you've been losing money just from one tiny little rip yeah yeah although you could you do and I think how long would it take an experienced plucker to do one whole bird anything between 20 minutes in half an hour and how many do you reckon they'd have had on the firm in the old days I suppose something up to about 500 and you had to get them done by Christmas obviously the one day when you can't be late so yeah under pressure all the time right yeah yeah a lot of pressure well can we assume that I've done this wing because quite frankly if I do it properly it's gonna take me about a fortnight what happened next well they used to hang them to get a bit of flavor to them yeah and then you take the tendons up the legs that seem to pull the sinews out of the legs and that was a woman's job you'd have to be quite a strong big book some woman to do that one buck so enough well should we see yeah so what you do now is pull the sinews from the leg it's easy in it so this isn't the worst poison no that'd be the cutting yeah I had a feeling of dread rising up in my throat doing the neck ends bad enough you have to unwrap the skin like a stocking cut off the neck and remove the crop the strange white sack where the turkey stores its food then it's up to me it's a really gruesome job of tugging out all the innards through the turkeys bottom the vent but all the pokemon yeah you've got to be careful you don't we you know we don't want poop everywhere that's the important thing so so how do I avoid it just mascara this way around yeah at a slight angle there okay so now that's Luke well that wasn't bad was it that's not too bad yeah now this is this a bit I wanna yeah you don't start pulling it yet you don't wanna break the tube you put your hand in right and try and release all of the guts go around don't a stain me dress oh well something squidgy yep that's just they just weren't your hand in and work and I run around yeah you want to go right in apart from going through a lot of very interesting squidgy things stop bashing my hand against the ribcage yeah well you've got the ribs then you've got to fetch the lungs out from the rib yeah and I'll rip your knuckles after you've done a few so you reckon that the women who did this would have had bruised hands yeah bruising swollen hands yeah Heather yeah that's not bad easy that's pretty good now what do I do with this look we can't throw it away just yet because I need a few things from it to go with the giblets here so we need the heart yeah and then the lungs yeah turkeys were brought to Europe by the Spaniards in 1519 who said to a first hand turkey instead of goose for Christmas dinner tell you the smell is coming off Oh God until Victorian times doing this pew up to your wrists in gunk it doesn't make much difference if it's goose or turkey gutting a slice is free so you want to keep in muscle turning to kept cold so they stay fresh and the gut comes out in one blow the rib cage its food and then there's the stuff you don't want to eat all this stuff I can see stuff yeah look at that stuff so that's the inside of anything it seems oh yeah Oh loads of stones and stones and stuff yeah disgusting was strangely interesting done that a stupid thing as doing it and oh excuse this away that's it how it's done with all that what do you have for your Christmas dinner beef no surprise now I have two so that's one done another 499 to go [Music] 1908 one 1982-1984 83 1883 one two three happy Christmas [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 246,258

Rating: 4.8556628 out of 5

Keywords: worst jobs in history, history documentary, christmas documentary, documentary history, the worst jobs in history, full length documentaries, bbc documentary, tony robinson, documentary movies - topic, tv shows - topic, full documentary, worst christmas jobs in history, timeline documentary, tony robinson worst jobs in history, worst jobs in history christmas, tony robinson documentary, history of christmas, christmas history, worst jobs, worst jobs christmas

Id: b_autVoFg-0

Length: 47min 33sec (2853 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018