Can you please help decipher this occupation ?

[Pennines]

Is it not a step up from 'apprentice' maybe. Then after the 'Improver' grade you are a fully fledged plasterer?

[Sandblown]

A Plasterer's Improver will have specific skills, such as Cornice working, and constructing Decorative Mouldings etc

Organisations like the National Trust value these skills, for restoration projects on the Properties, They hold.

[stanmapstone]

From the OED Improver: A person who is no longer classed as a novice or beginner, but is still at the early stages of learning a particular skill.

From the web;
but before you make a good plasterer you need to be a good plasterers improver i.e learning to mix etc then you can get on the trowel https://www.mybuilder.com/questions/v/945/i-want-to-re-train-as-a-plasterer-kettering-nn14-4xe

Stan

[Jane Sharp]

Plasterer 

It would help if you told us who it is so we can look at the rest of the page to compare

My apologies Rosie ! I was up late and not thinking very clearly. It is Alfred Sharp, b Oct 17th 1920 in Blackpool Lancashire, living at 12 England Avenue, Blackpool.

Thankyou to everyone who has helped I think Plasterer's improver sounds about right.

[Skoosh]

Upholsterer!

Skoosh.

[artifis]

I would suspect that a plasterer improver was someone who'd mastered the art of mixing the various grades of plaster/render for the plasterer and who could now carry out the basic plastering of infilling chases cut for pipework, electrical conduit and uneven brickwork etc. ready for the plasterer to apply the base and subsequent top coats.  The plaster used for the infilling world be a cheaper and coarser grade to the base coat, possibly even wetter mix lime/cement mortar, thereby saving money if a lot was entailed as less of the more expensive base coat plaster would be needed.

One of my uncles was a plasterer apprenticed in the mid-late 1920s so of the old school and he'd certainly use the above method where a wall was badly out of true/uneven/plumb horizontally/vertically, sometimes using two coats of the infill render if the wall was really bad.  This would be needed in some old buildings being renovated especially if they were timber framed or early brick built where settlement had occurred.  For the first ten years of my life I lived in an old building that was part early 1600s timber framed and part 1739 brick extension and the walls were all over the place.

[Colin Cruddace]

My two-penneth goes on the embellisher of plasterwork. At 19 he would have been an apprentice, but as the 39 register was for on-going use, may have put what he will become. In a place like Blackpool he would be unlikely to be short of work.

Colin

[roopat]

I don't know anything about plastering but my father was 17 in 1939 so similar age, & left school at 14 which I understand was the norm then. He started an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic. I know apprenticeships last a long time but if this chap also left school at 14 - is 19 a bit old to be an' improving apprentice '?


Just a thought


EDIT of course he may not have started with the plasterer straight after leaving school 

[youngtug]

Labourer working his way up.