Was This The Worst Job Anyone Could Ever Have? | Worst Jobs | Absolute History

how nation hasn't just been built by the leading figures of the day who go down in the history books but by a vast army of workers of all ages dedicated to doing some really horrific jobs this time why the royal succession relied on women with cricket bats how carrying the king's vital messages could be a painful business and why the very symbol of monarchy meant working with rotten shellfish welcome to the worst royal jobs in history [Music] [Music] loyalty is all about pomp splendor and privilege but behind the scenes is taken a lot of scraping spitting and polishing to keep the institution going worst jobs which have allowed our kings and queens to continue at work and at play in the medieval world the King sat at the top of the orders of chivalry sports like jousting proclaimed their status as war leader and perfect gentleman but in order for the king and his barons to show off without killing each other scores of men were employed in the thankless task of making the ultimate throw away designer object the ruling classes charging Full Tilt with each other in order to knock each other onto the ground was just a bit of sport the real bad job was reserved for the bloke who made this the Lance that you used in the tournament Roger he didn't make just one he made loads why so many Toby well the thing about jousting is the object is to hit your opponent as hard as possible when you have trained people doing that they're going to be hitting each other regularly and they're going to be hitting with such force that they're gonna break their Lance's skilled Lance makers had to make sure their weapons shattered on impact vital when royal safety was at stake so someone like Henry the eighth's would have dressed up in the armor and done all this yes Henry the eighth's himself was a very very enthusiastic jouster so much so that his courtiers often tried to dissuade him from it he was nearly killed in a joust in 1524 he was so excited by the event that he charged off without lowering his visor and his opponent who couldn't see very well couldn't really see what was going on and Henry was struck right above the eye and the Lance broke and splinters flew into the Kings face and he was within inches of death it was extraordinary that he wasn't even hurt actually so how many might these guys have had to make we do know in 1403 there's a record of a lance maker supplying 171 Lance's for a tournament in Spain and if you have a large impeding that's a lot of lances that are going to be going through light beautifully decorated superbly balanced and gone in a second the Lance makers job was so underrated that the very technology for making them has been lost we've had to get a master carpenter to work out how it was done Jerry tell me that these things are easy to make if only they were I've spent a week now trying to work out the way they made them I think I've got there now I think I've got there I believe you lost a leg but I think I've got that and you were using language that hardly ever heard power language I haven't used for a long time so tell me how this thing is basically what we've got we've got a tree yeah first of all we square it all and I'm using a side axe now if you look at that you'll find there's one side is flat one sides curved and it's basically for just taking away the timber making lots of small cuts along and then a couple of long sweeping cuts and as you can see it's beginning to square up already yeah would you like to have a go yeah you've got to remember this is going to be done on four sides if you do that for two hours I'll go around here two hours and after two hours it should look something like this which we then with the draw knife trim down for another three or four hours and once we've done it so this sort of size we take the scrapers and finish them all certainly get a nice round shaft one pile of wood chips later I naively assumed I'd done the most boring part we finished it no not quite still got the handle to do why do we do that over on the pole lathe let's this thing that's the machine if you've ever pumped up a car tire with a foot pump you all know that just a few minutes is exhausting forget five minutes each handle took a good three hours to make you get the idea with nothing to occupy your mind except the screaming aching your leg this is incredibly monotonous work but you have to keep alert as the pole gets thinner there's a danger that it will snap causing terrible injuries but after two days draping and chipping there's no thanks and about as much job satisfaction as making teapots out of chocolate now that is such a frustrating sight it must have been part of the status for the nobles to destroy something it looks so good but imagine what it must have been like for the Lance maker not only to see this beautiful thing trashed but trashed in about 35 miles an hour in about five seconds flat mind you that's not all after the tournament came the battle and the jobs just got worse and worse [Music] the centuries being a king meant going to warm it were Wars to win the throne was to defend it was with foreign powers medieval kings really fought the seven of them died on the battlefield so it was vital to the defense of the realm the King to have the very best armor chainmail was the business solid but flexible so the real architects of royal power from Hastings to Asian core were the poor souls who had to knit these coats out of thousands of bits of wire it's not hard to imagine the downside of being a link maker the fact is it was incredibly laborious and repetitive work it involved cutting thousands and thousands of rings and linking together one by one the problem was it was very dangerous in the sense that you'd often get lacerations from the rusty metal that you're playing with infection can get in tetanus and all those lovely things which we don't have to live with today luckily so what do we do when we finished that well once we've clipped this off we've got a little coil and next step into poses need to go over to a little work plate yep so first wind your wire into a long coil I've got a special set of crimping tools here which have a tiny little hole set about two million which is just over the wit to the wire then cut the coil into single overlapped wire rings and overlapped ring heat and soften the Rings in a fire until cherry-red a beautiful cherry red but they will come quite quickly Stage four hammer out the Rings to make a single flat overlapped link give it a tap see those and you can see that the ring is now threatened now it comes much more arduous because now these flat overlapped pieces have to be riveted together for strength so what you need to do is place the ring just over that hole you know what I'm worried about if I miss this little hole okay now you've done a bit too far there I've messed it up of there yeah that's not gone through in the ring split apart so can we use yours cuz I'm yeah sure might die of boredom otherwise okay bill triangular rivet here I'm going to do is force the little rivet into the hole that you've made so why was this job so important to the king well the provision of good quality Armour to the Armed Forces was integral to the security of the country and ultimately the security of the monarchy so he would've wanted his men to have the best quality stuff he could possibly afford so no mail no King pretty much you got it there's some people might a good thing and we're gonna set it by squeezing with these pliers and giving a good hammer strike on top and there you have it one highly durable solid steel male riveted ring which makes up one of the many on this Hauberg just over here there are something like 30,000 rings on this on there so just another 20 9999 and we'll have made a complete male shirt to do that each ring has to be riveted through its neighbor to make a strong and supple suit an incredibly laborious process so there was plenty of work for link makers who were apprenticed at age 12 and had to settle for working long boring hours without pay if I'm the king I want some more mail i want to Commission you to make it and I want it tomorrow let me do it for me very unlikely unless you've got a workforce of maybe a hundred pin or so because the King is going to have the very best mail available and it's going to be very fine stuff much smaller than the rings we're actually using here I've got one example here a bronze ring which you can see is about a third of the size of the ones we're going to be working with there are shirts which have in excess of 200,000 rings and are so dense that you can't even force a needle through it this is King Harald in the Bayeux Tapestry and that's not a mutant duck he's holding but one of the most expensive status symbols in history our Falcon hunting wasn't just a sport for the monarchy it was an essential way of showing who was boss imagine trying to keep a living Lamborghini with feathers happy and you'll see what was at stake for the Royal for sure we're out in the country with these fantastic birds why was fall canary such a bad job well because they were so fantastic I mean if you were to lose one of these you're in so much trouble these birds are worth a fortune worth more than a lot of the other hunting assets of the royal families so for example Philip the bold son was captured during one of the Crusades his ransom was two hundred thousand golden duckets but that was declined for just twelve dear Falcons instead so they're so valuable but should you lose one of these you were in real real trouble this part of the job doesn't seem great no you as a catch man had to carry these royal Falcons into the field for the royalty a catch man and Dodger the CAD goes where you get the phrase CAD your lift from you have to carry these through all terrain crossing rivers in the worst areas of the country possibly quite bad climatic conditions and would then normally have been about this number of birds well you're looking at more on this particular catch but you could have been carrying twelve even more than that and each bird weighing between one and a half to two pounds in weight of course is gonna weigh their old Cod gia down so if I lose one of these I'm in big trouble I have to carry this cage around with me all the time what else well you would have to make sure that you recovered the Hawks crossing icy streams risking life and limb to recover the bird should it chase and kill something should you not be able to recover the trained hawk of course that Hawk one like hit once finally recovered would remove six ounces of flesh from your breast great the punishment of having a hamburger sized piece of your body eaten by the bird would alone make this a worse job but the terror started early at the age of seven their first job was to tame down a wildly trapped hawk so they not only had this huge bird on their hand they had a very angry bird with them as well what are we gonna do now well we're gonna give this guy his daily exercise a falconer had to exercise his Hawks everyday as well as the normal management of feeding cleaning look after them the hawk was a priority that came first above everything else you feel a nice bit of breeze their wings come out let him off exercising a falconer requires a bit more skill than walking a dog you have to swing a baited a lure just out of reach of a bird flying at 30 or 40 miles an hour what but the rigorous job spec also involved personal qualities in the late 13th century halyard ropes that have Falconer hat to be sober patient chaste sweet-smelling and avoiding preoccupations chaste as in not sleeping with people very much so because sleeping with the local prostitute could lead to disease which could be passed on to the falklands themselves that's encouraged to think I was perfectly cut out for the job it's my turn to put the birds through their paces I mean how hard could it be to swing my bidders meet on the end of a string any time you are so clever [Music] ah did that count we caught see cotton in one your swing you will know the roadway it will sweep forward at the boss all of the brothers will come Rose I tried to put it behind my back to readjust it she just followed it behind my back went down the good it you ask some smoker a full can hunt was a great social occasion but all the training was for nothing if you couldn't keep up with the Royals as they hunted rabbit and wild fowl remember the royal party are mounted on horseback these guys are being followed by you on foot so you've got to be up the hills and over the dales through the bramble bushes through the briars across streams the risk of drowning anything to recover your hawk and the quarry that it's taken so blade both anything yes there yep this proves that Faulkner's were brave and resolute and hunted their quarry until they were able to get it these waiters are leaking Jay it's freezing in here glad I'm not just in tights and the jerking of bare feet [Music] the court has always been vital to the smooth running of the monarchy by the sixteenth century it was a vast community of unseen workers of all ranks catering for every whim of the autocratic Tudors the present Queen has downsized her staff to 645 people poor things but in Tudor times the monarch had over a thousand courtiers and over a thousand servants and each one knew their place in the pecking order even if it was quite a lowly one like the whipping boy who was an aristocratic friends of the Royal Prince and it was his job to receive punishment every time the heir to the throne was something wrong and if you think that sounds fair just look at the demands that were made on some of the rest of the staff the court was a place of intrigue one group of luckless servants had the job of risking their lives to protect the monarch from plotting quarters a royal meal had anything up to 25 dishes any one of them could contain something deadly and what better way to apply in the slippery pole than to poison the food of the person that you're eating with hence the job of royal food tasters which is enough to put you off your food for life isn't it Kathy absolutely but surely it must have been a pretty easy job I mean once there was poison in your food well you need to know straight away wouldn't you not necessarily come because it's remarkably easy to hide something that's deadly dangerous in food and it would not be obvious to you until you had already eaten it what's the stuff this stuff's called frumenty which is what a sort of thick grain like I sort of porridge or something a very thick porridge yeah alright so how am I gonna poison this ah well you could do that easily with solid poison like arsenic or mercury what we call me austenite we do indeed this is our cynic so real arsenic is it no it's not it's Buster Faris so what we gonna do with it we are going to mix it with the Fuhrman teeth but because it's so solid and white it will be quite obvious first we'll mix it up with a bit of water where the Royals really under threat of being poisoned or was it just paranoid ah there was a great deal of paranoia but there were actual plots to poison the Royals like what well in the 1590s there was a plot allegedly by the king of Spain to poison Queen Elizabeth the Spanish government managed to find three Portuguese men who would agree to poison the Queen one of these three was her own physician doctor Roderigo Lopez who'd been living in London for decades but the plot was betrayed three were tortured and confessed and of course as traitors condemned to death and executed horribly hanged drawn and quartered now if I was a really subtle food taster how am I gonna be able to tell it was poison though the first thing you're going to notice is a very strange grittiness but it's not going to be so strange that you're going to feel I shouldn't eat this you'll swallow it then what's it gonna do to me oh that's appalling the first thing you're going to feel is burning not necessarily strong but something going on in the mouth if you've got an empty stomach within an hour you're going to start vomiting uncontrollably you're going to have extreme pains in the stomach area it feels like rats gnawing on your insides and then after about an hour perhaps two you're going to start suffering from purging which is a polite way of saying that's enough so Elizabeth the first was paranoid she saw poison everywhere every dish was tested before she ate even her gloves and handkerchiefs were checked in case they'd been impregnated with something nasty and it was her disposable servants who were put in the frontline the royal food taster comes into the room is there any ceremony there is yes the ladies in waiting would come and begin the ceremony by laying the table and then the men would bring each dish from the kitchen and lay it on the table and the ladies in waiting would supervise each person who'd brought a dish was then required to eat one bite from the dish that he had carried and when this ceremony was complete and there might be as many as 20 or 25 dishes then it was safe for the monarch to eat from these dishes remember this is a time of evasion potential invasion by the Spanish the monarch embodied all that was England and thus had to be kept completely safe you had to have food tasters so being a royal food taster wasn't bad because you were actually going to die it's just that you were terrified you were gonna die yeah that's about it well this food is still pretty good potentially dangerous Elizabeth's courts didn't have a permanent address to ensure the loyalty of her subjects and to save on housekeeping the Queen went walkabout and the whole court went with her in the summer of 1578 they plunked themselves on 25 different households saving the equivalent of ten thousand pounds per day it may have been a good deal for the queen but for the men and women of the court it was like moving house every day and the biggest load was literally on the shoulders of the broom of the chamber and I don't just mean one or two carts we're talking two or three hundred and everything in them had to be offloaded and got into the staying house on time and in order ready for the Queen's arrivals if you were the groom of the chamber you had to be something like a cross between Paul Beryl and Arnold Schwarzenegger which is a very attractive image really is it [Music] summer tours or progresses would last 8 to 12 weeks each stay needed days of preparation [Music] when queen elizabeth ii goes off on a royal tour it's all pretty relaxed just has the odd bit of red carpet and occasional five-star hotel and a private jet or two but queen elizabeth the first was much more demanding the groom of the chamber had to take out of her palace all of the Queen's necessary possessions that meant not only the furniture and the carpets but the pictures and the wall hangings and her jewelry her legal documents and the Queen was renowned for having quite a temper on her so if you wanted to avoid her roof you had to have great big muscles and patience for not only good memory Simon Bowyer who organized the tour in 1578 had all those qualities at the Mutis estate he spent two days setting up with his team only for the Queen to change her mind after staying for dinner and set off for another location add to this indecisiveness Elizabeth's bouts of toothache and the groom of the chamber had the boss from hell she wasn't much of a guest leader so not everyone was that happy about having to lay out the old red carpet in fact there was an estate called Gautam place where they were so worried about the possible expense and hassle of having a royal progress that they decided they'd try and put the Queen off by all collectively feigning a kind of madness so the royal progress turns up and all the aristocrats and servants there suddenly go whoa and the progress all run away absolutely terrified although I suspect that the groom of the chamber had a bit of a smile on his face when he left the groom may have ended up with a strained back and frayed nerves but at least he had a roof over his head not all royal employees were as lucky [Music] [Applause] with the court moving around so much communication became vital to the institution of the monarchy hence the job of royal messenger can the Royal messenger was important not just simply in order to tell people where the king and queen were at any particular moment in time but also to let them know about royal births and deaths and married married and much darker things like intrigues and stabbings and assassinations anything you wanted to know the Royal messenger would let you know it started a system of messengers that road between staging posts in kind it became the Royal Postal Service which is why the Monarchs head is still on stamps but for early messengers every journey was tough and fraught with danger when Elizabeth the first died it was royal messenger Sir Robert Carey who rode to Scotland to tell James the heir to the throne he was now King riding in all weathers he also had to avoid potential assassination from those who wanted to delay news of the Queen's death the marshal met me coming and bade me be gone but he had learned for certain they would betray me wind rain 200 miles and people waiting to kill me I can't wait but Sir Robert had to press on because for the royal family succession is vital the whole institution is based on births deaths and conceptions was the Queen going to have a baby was it the Kings the evidence was gonna be right here among the Royal sheets and one of the people who would have known most about it was a worse job not an aristocrat but the person round the back mopping up after all this messy business the royal washer woman but being a royal washerwoman was tough messy and also surprisingly dangerous you can see why so very many women die drowning can't yes yeah huge cause of death amongst Elizabethan women falling him well slipping in palms all that sort of thing whilst you're busy bucket after bucket after bucket you get tired and tired or especially something near dinner time when everybody was tired you know sort of when you look at the coroner's reports this is so blip you know just before dinner it's difficult to imagine just how tough the women had to be all the water had to be lugged from the moat before the washing could begin there was no soap powder just water repeatedly strained through wood ash to make lie it contains that the chemical the alkali which is what dissolves the grease so presumably it's not to gun your hands it's terribly heavy water yes it's gonna pick up all the chemicals out of the ash and then the pay and the gravel will strain it act as a filter so what comes out the bottom should be quite clean looking shouldn't look ashy at all oh it's coming out nose no yeah a little bit muddy and sort of like a liquid soap it'll move through and you had been quite tough what are you doing in Washington oh you had to have muscles there's no doubt about it it's nothing about is jump know what right well we just let that trickle through slowly we don't want to hurry it particularly there's going to be dissolving any grease that's in there yeah these are called battle doors not bats but this feels very much like a strenuous version of cricket if you weren't so knackered after the water carrying and but loading it would be a way of venting your frustration of the job hey SEC dunk Carl over that five minutes I must be really cracked and bleeding their hands and I'll grab the other yep the sign of every birth death and marriage is gonna be in there yeah yeah sure hang this out for drying they used privets rather than pegs and washing lines but if the wind got up and blew the sheets into the mud the washer woman would have to start all over again I got a great fall by the way and my horse with one of his heels gave me a blow on the head that made me shed much blood we hadn't meant to recreate every bit of Robert Kerry's journey oh then pomp and ceremony have always been a way of establishing royal status but before the days of amplified music and RAF fly pasts there was no more spectacular way of celebrating a victory or coronation than a royal firework display thanks to Handel's music for the royal fireworks it's George the second magnificent firework displays that are so well remembered but behind all the oohs and the ahhs and the big bangs lies another worst job that involves blood and burns and physical injury welcome to the highly explosive career of the fire worker making and firing fireworks was a very primitive business there was only one color no safety awareness and it involved playing around with large quantities of gunpowder in small pieces of paper if I was a really daft fire worker yeah what kind of things might I have done to cause an explosion well you could and I've got to illustrate this you could be doing this in front of your fireworks people really smoke they smoke sparks came out accidently thought it actually shows that people were smoking making fireworks right Daryl as soon as I've got this pipe in my mouth show me what I might have done all right Hey [Music] that was so hot I can tell you we were what 10 meters away and you really felt it didn't you Wow and lots of little bits of stuff in my eyes wish I'd done that presumably there must have been more to their fireworks than just a long line of gunpowder oh of course yes Rockets are basically flying fountains course you would have had problems with Rockets because they used to fire them horizontally rockets coming out horizontally yeah well that was bad for the audience because they weren't necessarily line up like that they would have been sometimes around and therefore the audience got the rocket but then of course so did the people firing they would have got a lot of other problems as well there were lots of explosions people get them through their clothes because they weren't wearing appropriate clothing John this looks like the kind of bomb that the roadrunner has indeed in the times that we're talking about the 18th century they were called balloons balloons I could see we're gonna do something dangerous with it whatever you call it it's a dangerous fire don't look down the mole tip because one of these days it's gonna have a shell in it but there many injuries from these things oh there were loads of injuries yes you can imagine if one of these actually explodes with in a metal motor like that you've got shrapnel flying about do we know very much about the people who were hurt we don't know anything about them they were killed and the whole thing was hushed up really yeah in fact in one display four people were killed they just carried on the display where were these things fired from a lot of displays in the 18th century would have used water as a backdrop and actually barges would have contained all these mortars and there have been a bloke on there lighting that there would have been more than one blokes on there lighting them if one of them actually went you've got big trouble because the whole of the bar goes and the men end up in the water well I'm glad we're on dry land what do i do just load it just slowed him but keep your head away yeah and try and keep your hands as far away as possible yep this was a job no one wanted to do so the Royal fire workers were volunteered from the lowest ranks of the military and with burns to the skin perforated eardrums and deaths they didn't just put the one in and go home the most dangerous part is reloading that was the worst thing is that they're probably burning embers in the bottom there so I've got a whole nother load of gunpowder and you've got to put the shell back in and they release it out and they really did with the embers in with the amazeen [Music] even george ii firework displays didn't go without a hitch the king had forked out 8,000 pounds about a million today with a crowd of 12,000 people waiting the decorated frame holding the fireworks called the fire the designer wasn't happy and the hapless fire worker ended up with a sword at his throat [Music] by the 1900's the political power of the Royals had eroded but show was as important to them as ever they were still the people to know sharing their lavish lifestyle with their favored movers and shakers an invite to one of Edward the seventh shooting parties at Sandringham was the ultimate social accolade and every guest wanted to look their very best which brings me to my next worst job which is very much at the bottom of the pecking order literally below stairs it's the boot boy [Music] Edouard loved shooting and he worked his guests hard they'd spend long days blasting away at wildlife [Music] before returning late for a lavish dinner port cigars and bed as the snores broke out over Sandringham the royal boot boys day was only just beginning and it was up to the poor old boot boys freep around the corridors last night collecting boots and shoes and then polishing them so they'd be bright and shiny for the humps next morning and given the king edward insisted that the entire hunting party should be able to crack of dawn and everyone had to set their alarms really early a poor old boot boys hardly got any sleep at all so Edward the seventh upstairs he's brought his full a hunting party with him how much work is that gonna be for me the boot boy a horrific amount of work when the hunting was going on chaps like you really did have a rough life right I've got the shoelaces out what next you've got to learn how to make your own blacking if you come round here I'm gonna read you missus Beaton's rat recipe for blacking are you ready yep take four ounces of ivory black go I think it's good stuff then an ounce of olive oil how many of these are we putting in the green side of this job wasn't just terrible tiredness Lewis I'm mixing up some pretty foul and caustic ingredients which could be deadly we got an answer sulfuric acid it's when you'd be very careful of IBM I better do this for you yeah Oh God look we're gonna die Oh rotten eggs you bet oh how much did they get put eight pounds a year which wasn't very much but then they did get their keep so most of that eight pounds their mother would expect them to bring back home to them on their monthly day off always be good to your money in times of earlier monarchs working for the king or queen could bring you riches but by the 20th century back-breaking royal domestic service wasn't even well paid by Edward the seventh time most young men at that time didn't want to go into domestic service they wanted to go into something much more glamorous and manly like the army march out to the colonies in their red coats so domestic service was beginning to be really looked down on so when you did get your very rare days off you go out there and people with jeer at you rather for coming from a house rather than coming from some job in the new industries of growing up pretty scant reward for doing all this work nevertheless it's tough kept the boots polished I'm rather proud of that even they distinguish sugar and it didn't stop at hunting boots there were all the party shoes to shine as well by the time those were done the hunters boots were back again [Music] but at least one of my jobs had men to it what with all the falls and the ambushes not to mention losing my lovely hat and having to ride about 200 miles just to deliver a simple message that job is frightening dangerous not to say very very tedious but my very worst road job is also extremely disgusting oh and now of course I've got a ride all the way back again come on poppy up we go I've been looking at the worst jobs that supported the monarchy down the centuries but which one was the very worst job moving house for Elizabeth the first was back-breaking but pretty well-paid fire working was fun so long as you remember to keep your head out of the way Wow blimey and even royal Faulkner's had a family firm to support them when they were old codgers ah does that count no for me the very worst job of all is an incredibly disgusting and very ancient one and one that underlies the very symbol of royalty itself the purple maker purple has been the color of royalty since Roman emperors because it's so difficult and expensive to make I am a purple makers assistant and this is the worst job that disappeared during the siege of Constantinople when all the purple makers were wiped out so we reckon that this is the first time in over five hundred years that this particular process has been demonstrated at which you hit that's quite true one of the shortcomings of television is that you can't smell the incredible NIF that's coming off this rather disgusting mess why are we killing all these innocent shellfish well this Tony is the basis of the whole of the Imperial purple industry this was the dye the most prestigious Tynan in the world in fact the Romans of course made it impure monopoly and this went on Viking to the Middle Ages in actual fact so how do you make it out of these things yes well basically we have the mollusk this is the the murex trunculus and what we have to do is to make an incision into what in fact is the type of rank your gland and when we've done that the the dye or the precursor comes out and the air in fact oxidizes it to the purple pigment but of course the old dyes have to do this on a vast scale and this involved in fact no no you're gonna do that don't hit you too hard otherwise you get to all the entrails over the floor don't tell me was you've acted that's the technique yeah we all have to work through these I've kept these on one side I've done those for you previously smashing a few stinking shellfish is stomach-turning enough but the purple makers had to smash at least a thousand to die just one cloak I can understand why only royalty could afford so now these will be put into the water and then eventually to get to the actual die takes about ten days fermentation this is in order to affect the die and what the pigment from the macerated smaller then the die now stand for an hour or two to collect pigment in liquid add wood ash for its alkali and leave the putrifying shellfish to rob something for ten whole days because you want it ferment so that's what we've got here yeah now you notice we have a lid on it what well basically we want to keep it in the dark otherwise what happens is that the light in fact tension can break the dye down to one called determinate it's in other words we take the redness cells and we end up with a blue so we can end up this color as opposed to that one how do we know when this is ready and this would be tested in fact either by by the feel we just feel slippery or by the taste and this is shellfish that have been fermenting for 10 days exactly yep Oh fathers bad out there this powerful stat is really disgusting and what happens when you feel it what do you if it's real slippery and this gives an idea of the degree of alkalinity if it was actually it would be rougher let's see take mark and then they really taste it and the other ways to taste it in factors [Music] just a thought really it's so disgusting only having done the fermented mollusk taste test is it now time to put the cloth in the VAT lid firmly back on socially leave it really for half an hour also to to pick up the dye and leave it so I'm sure if you like oh that was an adventure and after half an hour it's time to expose the cloth to the air and see if it's worked oh look that's really changing fast isn't it so when it comes out of the VAT it takes usually a couple of minutes he does a greeny colour and then slowly turns the purple colors you can see look at that now isn't that fantastic we've really proved the process works so the lives of all these poor little foul-smelling shellfish weren't sacrificed in vain and if it hadn't been for all the stirring and the bubbling and the feeling and the tasting then our Royals would never have been swathe in all this kind of stuff they'd have been dressed in fuchsia pink or lime-green join me next time when I'll be down the bottom of the careers barrel again scraping up some more rust jobs next time I'm on my knees down a mine as a child hurry er up in the air finding out what it took to make Bruno's reputation non right back keeping the whole industrial revolution moving [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 531,802

Rating: 4.8599038 out of 5

Keywords: timeline, worst jobs in history, royal family, what were the worst jobs, horrible jobs, tony robinson, tony robinson documentary

Id: ZxQgJbTRrIM

Length: 46min 42sec (2802 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2019