Why Building A Lighthouse Took So Many Lives | Worst Jobs | Absolute History

Bryn's history hasn't just been made by kings and queens and generals and admirals but by a whole host of ordinary people doing a lot of really terrible jobs and if you don't believe me take a look at how we came to rule the waves this time luxury liners that needed people working with sacks on their heads how Britain's very first Navy survived on minimal rations and why the heroes who kept our coasts safe didn't like getting their toes wet welcome to the worst maritime jobs in history [Music] [Music] the sea put the grades in Great Britain international trade politics and our military success have all depended on controlling the oceans many of our greatest heroes were sailors legends like Nelson Drake or Captain Cook but despite having trading connections long before the Romans we hadn't explored the oceans potential we had no Navy the sea kept us captive prey to invaders but in the ninth century the threat of the skilled seagoing Vikings forced a national crisis it was Alfred the Great who got into the record books as the first King to fight back successfully against the Vikings he built our first Navy which was a fleet of ships based on the Drakkar or dragon ships of the Vikings but if you were a land-loving Saxon desperately trying to emulate a Viking which means sea warrior you must have had a really miserable time so my first worst job is the Saxon oarsmen [Music] Saxon Osman had a double challenge they had to fight the Vikings but first they had to overcome their own fear and prejudice about going to sea they were forced to copy the enemy from the north so mine landlubbers learning curve also begins on a freezing Norwegian field with a bunch of experimental archaeologists [Music] most Viking crafts were comparatively small and well-built for stability and speed but as soon as you're on the water you get a worrying insight into how scary Viking technology must have been for the novice Saxons it leaks why the planks basically and it needs time for the wood to swell and as you can see it leaks just where my feet are it's a constant problem because if it rains it fills reward yeah if there's waves look at this this is what me as an oarsman would have had to use for the bits I couldn't reach with the bucket what do you call that it's just it's just basically it's called the spoon it's called a spoon there's an awful lot of water actually under this decking so all the time the water is only just above freezing the wind chill about minus 10 if your hands are sore from rowing bailing an absolutely essential part of the Osmonds job turns them red raw and the only alternative to bailing is the back-breaking business of row there's a lead map and basically everybody keeps pace with me so it's got to be the guy who's basically he's at the trunk or rather at the back everybody can see but a little craft like this could cross the North Sea they were the long-haul aircraft of their day forging the Vikings international reputation at the cost of personal comfort even Vikings hated it in one saga the hero moans about spending his lonely winter on the ice cold sea home round our cycles if they didn't make landfall nights were spent in the open boat with only animal skins and their hairy mates for warmth food was pretty basic - that's what's called phenol or salted and dried meat and basically what do you think that's all right yeah and the other alternative is fish those you're well there's pretty bony Carla stinks yeah he does bones and burns and Alton just chew it I can see you're impressed it doesn't taste like a smoked fish does it it just tastes manky the saxon oarsmen set the nation on a new course in the centuries that followed britain's really took to the scene improved design made for much larger ships a trade in warfare but our history at sea has always meant worse jobs on land as well and the massive expansion in medieval shipbuilding needed raw ingredients brings maritime tradition starts here with wood but in order to work the wood to make the ships you needed the skills of the ship right who was such a highly prized craftsman but he'd certainly never Sully his hands by making the basic component of the ship the plank making ships with sawn planks was a new technology literally at the cutting edge was one bad job and one worst job you always have at least two they would soar out the planks for the ship right by the 16th century and also a lot of the other Timbers of the ship they prepared most of the timber the ship so what was so bad about the job just unending labor I mean you know six days a week doing this I mean we play at it we do it for an afternoon at the weekend a few times in the summer that's okay but six days a week hour after hour they had a real reputation for drinking and you can see why it's thirsty work but it's also numbing work you'd rather be doing almost anything after the heyday of the under Sawyer came in Tudor times thousands of them were employed after the Spanish Armada building a hundred and seventy four ships in London alone they got through 40,000 tons of wood whole forests were turned into millions of planks and mountains of sawdust and a word for a whole new underclass was born what are these great grips these are unstable things they'd called dogs the topsoil usually the most senior person standing over the dogs a top dog and then the underdog the more junior person underneath the well those are small planks you could use for a small boat building you know for a big ship they'd be an awful lot bigger than that it's a bit monkey down here No well any holes in the ground tends to get wet yeah a lot of them would be working rather stinking so have to do well the idea is you concentrate on the line you steer the saw just like a children's scooter but only on the Downs track yeah and on the upstroke you push up slightly to help me lift the saw [Music] it is when we get the gas the women it blows up the most of it's going down in front of where you're cutting I'm down area isn't this has gotta be the worst job in the shipyards yeah it probably was one of the very worst jobs don't tip that's not on you that's you have to do that otherwise you can't see the line there may not have been a worse job in the shipyard but once the under Soyuz ships were launched a brand new world of employment misery bopped onto the horizon [Music] the sixteenth century was a turning point for the British at sea Queen Elizabeth's Navy managed to fend off the awesome Spanish Armada Walter Raleigh went exploring and discovered potatoes and Francis Drake went round the world on the Golden Hind they got the glory but all the work was done by anonymous sailors there were 80 on the Golden Hind risking death in battle falling from the rigging or being swept overboard but there was one arduous task beneath deck that strained every fiber even before leaving port sailors had to haul the anchor up to a ton of metal stuck in the seabed in the most cramped conditions imaginable if you're a physiotherapist look away now what do I do don't your job is to push the capstan you're gonna have to get one of the bars out here with the guys come on guys let's get this capstan bars out with the bar of the slot yeah and then with all the other guys I'm gonna drive the capstan around to pull the anchor cable up okay everybody ready okay let's go sometimes this job took days the commonest injury for sailors was a rupture this feels a physically hard job but what is it's all dangerous yes this could be a very dangerous job if the cable snapped the capstan would spin back and knock the men over the anchor snags could be really hard work try and pull it out presumably you're quite vulnerable when the anchor was rising as most of the crew had to be used to get the anchor up this was a perfect time for somebody to attack you to catch you quite literally with your crew below deck running around the capstan be nobody upstairs to defend the ship that's a very vulnerable time yeah that's it great job can we go shopping have a look yeah they're gonna see if you've done the job thanks guys oh wow that is big took quite so much effort but job done although having said that there is one even worse job isn't that what you're gonna make me do what is this the worst job on the ship it's not just pulling it's not sweating it's a punishment the job is called being a liar liar' is in pants on fire yeah every Monday morning the first person to tell a lie would be named and shamed and they would then have the job of being the swabiz mate and what were they swabbing they were swarming the outside of the ship they were swabbing the dirtiest parts of the ship in particular they were swabbing the toilet area out here on the big head this is down here come and have a look at this right down there and you want me to go and clear that up oh yes now how the heck do I get down there there's no ladder or anything we're gonna put you in the bosun's chair and we're gonna low you over the side take you right down there I'm gonna pass you the bucket and the swabs you do the job yeah so looking forward to this I'm glad you're doing it right lads come on riggers up the captain had his own privy everyone else had to negotiate this obstacle course to go to the heads clinging on to a rope and aiming between the slats can't have been easy in a force aid gale and we know that many of the British sailors during the assault on the Armada also had to cope with food poisoning this Golden Hind is a replica of the Tudor version and this is replicas too although to be frank it still makes you feel sick the great advantage of being at sea is you wouldn't have needed to do this job because this toilet facility is entirely self-cleaning in heavy weather right now do I have to get out on here yep right out there did they understand about hygiene yes they did the tutors already understood that disease was caused by dirt yeah and they didn't like bad smells so they cleaned the ship everyday with salt water if there was any suspicion of illness on boards they would scrub the decks down with vinegar and then they would fumigate the place with charcoal brazzers and frankincense why would these boats called swabiz then call swabiz because what you've got in your hand is a bundle of cloths or swabs how does any toilet paper no such thing they use bits of rope send and any other old rags they could find doing painful I tell you what I'm surprised anyone I've ever told a lie probably not twice it's just foul and at the end of a voyage if a sailor survived the dirt disease and back strain he could be dumped on shore with no pay the tough job of the workforce at sea didn't come with a pension scheme but in the 17th and 18th century people paid good money to see death-defying aerial stunts and sailors were uniquely qualified to apply with their head for heights and physical strength it's my next worst job and it's the forerunner of the high wire act the flying man but did they actually fly well I'm just about to find out what did the flying men actually do well Tony they slid down ropes rather like this one but attached a very high building sometimes three or four times the height of this for instance see in 1546 at the coronation procession of King Edward the sixth a native of Aragon his name isn't known slid down from the steeple of old st. Paul's Cathedral who were the people who did this not an awful lot is known about them there was one case of a mr. Cadman who fell off unfortunately in 1740 in his descent from Shrewsbury parish church and was killed because the rope broke and this is the Rope I've got to slide down I'm afraid so all you had to do was glide headfirst down a single rope a sailor turned flying man could only years wages about 40 pounds from one successful stunt but it was crucial that others shared his expertise slack ropes could and did spell death I don't have much of a head for Heights so whizzing down a rope from a 30 meter tower definitely makes this a worse job for me a real flying man would step out onto the rope from the tower but I have to do though because of compulsory safety measures is to be winched into place hop on the rope and then slide down that's it trying to swing your leg over try and get up and over the rope what sounds like a doddle is actually complicated by the safety line all the top your shoulders are really really really weak I'm so that it's partly this this rope is so wet because I think I'm very cold can you know you down lies on the 5th of October 1732 a flying man fell off a slack rope tied to the Tower of Greenwich Church he was dead the next day his head so angry I'm so bloody angry I said because I couldn't get that flipping me over to do it here give us a shut up will you look everybody this is the action I'm supposed to be doing you take this leg down I know this leg down type the next axel and you slide along like this one of the things that made this so hard this time it's been pouring with rain all day and then she's so wet still I should not get one day just think what it might have been like in the 16th century or even in the 19th but I didn't have nylon roads like this but they would have just had em all surveyed roads it's pretty lousy in the 21st century it's a pride thing isn't it I so wanted to do that [Music] the Georgian Navy was a golden age for Britain at sea it was a time when legends were born from Nelson and Trafalgar to Captain Bligh and the mutiny on the bounty but there was no romance to life on board gun crews could be blown apart powder monkeys fetched and scurried top men went higher than they'd ever gone before and swabiz still swamped no one was immune even officers had a tough time particularly the very junior ones who could be as young as 11 or 12 these were little boys from well-to-do homes it was their first time at sea they were queasy they were nervous and they had to cope with a motley crew of men who were bigger and tougher and older than they were welcome to the horrible world of the snotter's the Midshipmen [Music] in their smart uniform they must have made their mums proud but for me it's the horrifying plunging of a child into a brutal man's world that makes Midshipmen the worst job these boys who may never have seen the sea had no idea what they were signing on for I had anticipated an elegant house with guns at the windows wrote a midshipman called Frederick show me a in 1806 but the shrill whistle squeaked the voice of the bosun and his mates rattled like thunder in my ears the decks were dirty and slippery the smells abominable tedious working in shifts day and night the tiny Midshipmen had the hourly job of measuring the speed of the ship so I let it out to the first knot yes if you hold the spindle yet one hand that's it so it's gonna run absolutely freely okay but obviously you don't try and pull it off the ship has got to let it take it itself yeah I got an accurate gauge of the speed 20 they counted actual knots on a rope as it floated away over a set period hence the nautical speed of knots we can say that's about point eight one - oh you're an 11 trying to pull this in you'd have a job wouldn't you yeah quite have you know three four or there's five six seven and the point eight we had and you knock it out yes okay no yeah yeah that's the young 11 with 12 year old boy hauling on that and it could be the middle of the night in the dead of winter he's freezing cold you've got nice pair of gloves on on a chest heat are we skinned his fingers raw just pulling that one in but even if he'd been up all night the exhausted midshipman had to join the captain and officers at midday for my least favorite part of the job from sextant readings at noon you had to calculate your latitude I'd rather be swabbing than spending my life doing hard sums but this was a key part of officer training the only way to be promoted to lieutenant was to pass the exam to show you could do all the maths failure could ruin your life twelve-year-old filly coma failed his exam in 1757 33 years later he was still a midshipman a laughingstock right I know how many knots we're doing and after about half an hour of intellectual struggle I've worked out what our latitude is but all that tells me is that we're somewhere in the world along this line here in order to work out our position I need our longitude and if you think it was a song-and-dance getting the latitude wait until you see what we've got to cope with to get the longitude [Music] the safety of Britain's shipping depended on captains knowing where they were one in five of all deaths at sea were from shipwreck accurate long it's usable east-west position wasn't reliable until the beginning of the 19th century to measure how far you are from Greenwich Mean Time you need a really accurate clock and this was only possible when the genius John Harrison created his famous ship's chronometer we may know about the first clock designers but I bet you're not aware of the contribution made by my next worst job the extraordinary tedious task of fusee chain making the fusee chain was vital to the accuracy of the new clock it released the energy of the mechanism to the hands at an even pace an essential component but once so small and fiddly that making them was a full-time worst job who was the person who made the future the huge chain in this instant was probably made by workhouse people or children in work houses which is wrong oh they started about 9 to about 11 and they were mostly girls they had good dexterity skills they could handle small components here's a little chain here and this is the size that they would make the small deck watches so navigation again what was their day like they would start and probably do Oh from first sunlight really to right down to sunset and they would do a complete day at 70 hour week and they would have two hours a day for a bit of going out for a fresh air in 20 minutes for education it's got to be the worst job in watchmaking isn't this pretty bad yes so how do you do it well I've got one here this particular one is a chronometer chain yeah and this is making the old-fashioned way these are the raw materials sheet steel softened ready for hardening and wire ready to go in yeah we're going to stamp out the link thank you okay tap that out just gently does it didn't that's it lovely clear off the thing and then we just push the link out which is in there look in the press there we go hey I made whistling how many of these do you reckon one of these workouts kills what amazes us well we know one lady did 150,000 in a year so we're talking of change Millions right there you go okay yeah now steady as she goes if you rest the pin on the table that acts as a sort of lock that's it cut I'm gonna get my glasses oh I can see it it's got housing all right okay Oh preach college guy I posed on those little girls I probably get whipped for that I'm afraid you would have done in those dad yeah when you've touched the head of the wire as well I'll triumph all great triumphs that are okay now if you use the tweezers and put either side to the actual point and push down and you lock on push down with the tweezers on toads or tweeters no okay now it won't actually stay on very well yeah I've got a little bit too much metal shown so we need to file it down after stamping out the minuscule links you have to begin the eye bending task of putting them together you'll see why you'd have needed natural light trying to do this an artificial light would be very simple I'm just honey we were down there so if you want to snip off on the other side good it's complete rubbish is about quarter of an inch of metal sticking up out of this yeah that will keep the nation's ships on course that way it will take me about a month to make that so would you like to do some more do this another few hours five hundred and forty nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine and I've done my year's worth yes for me fusee chain makers really were the unsung heroes of longitude [Music] [Music] the 19th century brought the industrial revolutions of the sea with steam and steel a new form of luxury transport was born the massive liner in these floating hotels the idle rich could Swan across the globe in style but none of this would have been possible without the workers who suffered in the deafening roar and wilting heat of the boiler room below deck they were the Stoker's and it was a job so unpopular but it was forced on penniless workers from the colonists whose contribution is only now being reviewed by historians that's a heck of a big boiler than that yes they really have been that size onboard a ship they would have been that size but you that had poor instead of just the two Roger what do you have to do to keep one of these boilers going well it's quite an art Tony it's maintaining an even fire bed and shoveling in the cold I'm not gonna get all my stuff dirty oh you will indeed you better change into some suitable working gear boiler suit okay you know the little one cliff right so what do you do well well open the furnace yeah Oh blimey it's hot in there it is and you bring this power back yeah now what am i doing you're raking the fire bars yeah and you're removing any obnoxious clinker yeah bring it out on the floor Tony - able to protect themselves from being burnt at all well the good old guys used to make themselves Hessian hoods which they put over their head and protect their faces the others for me where's the ice oh here they would just burn wouldn't it well they used to soak them in water they dug them in the bucket oh that is better it is better it may look ridiculous but it does work she makes her go and the other furnace for oh you'll probably need to level it off with the fire irons so we're gonna break that then just break the boughs to remove the ash okay who are the people who did this work lift well a lot of them we're Somalis and people from sort of the the the ex-colonies places like Calcutta where a lot of the shipping companies had the headquarters so what were they doing it because basically very few British people wanted to work below decks how hot directly would have gone well in the Red Sea up to 168 times well it would have been just as bad for Africans and Asian's as it would have been for people from Britain presumably it was but it was taken that they were better adapted at that time to work in those sort of conditions and sometimes they wore a leather apron as well because they could splatter and sometimes he would even explode because of the temperature difference I'm not surprised I had to wear these things it really is boiling in here yes and that we know that they did wear these oh yes there are diagrams of them wearing and kids were sort of told that if they misbehave the goony amman which is you we've come up and grabbed hold of him and take him away another boogeyman yes yes I am the goon Yama the Stoker's didn't just need three horse the furnaces had to be carefully balanced or they could explode accidents were common in 1859 five Stoker's lost their lives when Brunel's Great Eastern blew an engine jacket on her maiden voyage safety valve guys I think we putting up : in spite of advancing technology working at sea remained extremely dangerous 20,000 sailors died in shipwrecks between 1793 and 1815 lots of life could always be ignored but lost cargo never as the British Empire grew and trade burgeoned the huge loss of revenue became unacceptable to merchants and industrialists the daring solution was a new system of lighthouses perched on top of the very rocks that caused the wrecks a major engineering challenge and construction required a suicidal worst job the lighthouse builder know where was their job harder than this place wolf Rock a handkerchief of land and the entrance to the English Channel you might think that the ambition of building a 30-meter tower out of two-ton blocks of granite when the waves reached 35 metres is quite bonkers and you'd be right the granite for wolf Rock was loaded here at Penzance we decided to follow the lighthouse Builders course to see what they had to face anyway that was the plan how did you start to build a lighthouse grounding here just cut the one thing and after all that we never even got close our skipper made us turn back 2 miles from the wolf but that's just like the lighthouse builders they were paid by the day but they only managed to get to work about 80 days a year this sea really fools you doesn't it looks as flat as a Mill Pond but if you look at those rocks down there you can see it's really swirling around yeah well that was the whole problem with anything like that if you wanted to put a structure on it you had to watch out for the sea because it holds no mercy where's our lighthouse just out on the horizon behind the rock I've been thinking that our skipper had been a bit chicken but this is the wolf from 9 miles away those waves are at least 10 meters high and would have swamped us and they start to build one of these things well it's quite a quite a problem they had to land first of all they'd have used that flat section on the right-hand side of the rock landed on there is this about the same size then no roughly yes it was a bit lower than that but near enough to say yes they blow the top off and then they have to put stakes in all the way around for safety reasons tie ropes on them and then employ a man who was called a crow to shout out when when there was a dangerous wave coming in that would seem to be an appropriate shout we haven't got casualty figures for the wolf but at Bell Rock men were crushed by cranes and rocks boats capsized and one builder Charles Henderson was simply washed into the sea the only thing that stopped the building going the same way was a unique design each block had the double mortise on it vertically in horizontal mortise on it and each one interlocked rather like a Lego in a way and once the lighthouse was completed it was said that it was just like a solid block of granite the success of the Victorian lighthouse builders was bad news for another worst job the island lighthouse keeper he was a volunteer desert island castaway who needed huge mental reserves when you lived how did you cope the worst part of the job was a psychological side why was one of the lucky ones and I saw it through because I always said there's always another day and I always knew that my maker was up there to guide me through there was something there's a certain religious aspect I found we're being off on a lighthouse like the wolf weren't there terms when you thought all that solitude would drive you nuts either no because I have so many interests reading books modeling I used to like to say what surprised peas was one of the items I used to eat a lot and I used to use the packets from them and make model buildings from them and that kept you safe yeah that kept me sane yes Victorian lighthouse keeper's worked in pairs when their supplies ran out they had to live on fish from the sea if one died or was injured his mate had to work 24 hour days for weeks until he was relieved the work was sheer heavy slog daily window cleaning may sound easy but perched on a ladder in a force 9 gale trying to cling onto the handholds as a parents business and then there were the stairs if you've ever lived in a block of flats when the lifts broken you'll know the drill the light was turned by clockwork every hour day and night a bell would ring and the keeper would have to trudge up to wind it again it was a devastating mixture of boredom and aerobics workout but apart from giant carves and going stir-crazy the lighthouse keeper was safe and clean others weren't so fortunate our maritime history was about Empire building and trade but it was also about feeding the nation the women may have managed to avoid the rigors of fishing at sea but when their menfolk came back home after days and nights of exhausting back-breaking work an especially smelly worst job became the woman's responsibility but despite the dangers of being a fisherman for me it was the gut girls who had the worst bit of keeping the nation in kippers what could be worse than being a gut girl faced with the unending task of removing the innards of up to 20,000 fish a day very very smelly oil and if you go anywhere where there's people that hasn't come in contact with it they spun it right away the stench must have been unbelievable the gut girls were paper fish so they worked incredibly quickly up to one a second the fish were packed in ice so hands were numb and frozen when they cut themselves they hardly noticed be really boring for the women who had to do it all day every day well it's like everything you get used to it how do they get through the dirt oh they used to gossip what'd they talk about women having affairs with men did joking know each other services like rabbits or anything sometimes they used to make fish manure with it used to put away into a fat dream the god girls were eventually replaced by machines amazingly they couldn't get fish any faster than the girls but they didn't need a lunch break this is the guts of about 60 fish which in the old days would have taken one fish cutter about a minute to do imagine how many guts you'd have had by the end of an entire day of course this is a lousy job it stinks of fish Krauts here and it's cold and it's all slimy but I can imagine that if you're doing this day after day with a group of women like Margaret so if working elbow deep in fish guts isn't the very worst job in maritime history waters I've been looking at the worst jobs in our maritime history but what's the very worst stoking was hard work but didn't have the ice training tedium of the fusing maker sailors risk their necks but could make a fortune as flying men and even the frightening childhood of the Midshipmen offered the chance of promotion for me the very worst job of all is completely counterintuitive imagine if there was a raging storm out there a wrecking storm what's the worst thing you could possibly do row straight out into it and yet that's exactly what my very worst job is all about it's the job of life boatman or indeed lifeboat woman because we all remember Grace Darling don't we who rode out into the storm with her dad in order to rescue the drowning sailors and there are still grace darlings even today doing exactly the same Volker job on their terms and indeed there are how did they use the rescue people in years gone by they literally got in the boat and rowed out often into the teeth of a storm because that's what would have caused the original problem and went out there and hauled them into the boat and rowed them back again so what do you want me to do we're going to go to sea so we're gonna get you dressed up in Victorian kit we're gonna put you in the boat give you an oar we're gonna row out and hopefully we're going to rescue someone I'm not being rude when I say I'd like you to go home would you well I want you to start at home because that's where you'd be any volunteer life boatman would be going about his business when the alarm was raised and he'd have to get running from there okay let me know when you need me no problem the bizarre thing is even though I know this is just an exercise and demonstration after a while it just the weight starts to wind you up they've given me this to somewhere this bizarre floatation jacket thing authentic apparently from Victorian times this waterproof jacket the old sail Westar [Applause] [Music] okay like cushion their toner and then this is your or Tony where my hand is here see you this job was risky 435 crew members have died in rescues over the years because we know we've got to get them out to the water the job was never worse than in 1861 when the Whitley lifeboat crew paid the ultimate price on the 9th of February they made four separate launches in a gale after rowing for hours in mountainous seas and saving the crews of four ships the lifeboat men were exhausted then another schooner ran aground the crew set out again as they approached the stricken vessel the lifeboat was capsized by two freak waves [Music] only lifeboat man Henry Freeman survived it was his first day on the lifeboat on his face like a dog Naurang these features we've gotta bounce him down three times hold on tight to avoid breaking ribs you have to drag the victim in backwards it's a dead weight and needs great strength I found this job difficult on the sea as flat as a Mill Pond in pitch black in a real storm it must have been impossible once let alone coming out again and again Henry Freeman went on to serve for 40 years Britain hasn't been invaded for the best part of 900 years and surely that must be in part due to the really awful jobs that our sailors and volunteer rescuers have done over the centuries next time I'll be back on terra firma where the grounds may be firmer but the jobs are just as terrible there's no rest for the wicked out in the country when you sell read for a living turn white keeping church spires in good Nick black and blue washing sheep the old way [Music] you

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 209,741

Rating: 4.8352804 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, sea of thieves, sea of thieves gameplay, cursed sails, Absolute History, lighthouse keeper, the worst jobs in history, tony robinson, history of the world, history of the sea

Id: aB16WFO2gmk

Length: 49min 14sec (2954 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2019