Most unusual or unpleasant occupation

[Zaphod99]

I did some research for a friend and I discovered that one of his ancestors was a vellmonger, a dealer in animal entrails. I really enjoyed telling him.

Zaph

[Viktoria]

That is interesting , how far back was this?
Fell is the dialect word in Yorkshire for skin dealers ,” fellmongers”-the men who deal with dead farm animals etc and in the case of horses ,cattle ,sheep,  their skins .
Vel is Flemish for skin ,Flemish and Old English have great similarities.
Dialect words are often old versions of present day words.
They did not actually tan them I don’t think .
Open to correction.
Viktoria.

[melba_schmelba]

That is interesting , how far back was this?
Fell is the dialect word in Yorkshire for skin dealers ,” fellmongers”-the men who deal with dead farm animals etc and in the case of horses ,cattle ,sheep,  their skins .
Vel is Flemish for skin ,Flemish and Old English have great similarities.
Dialect words are often old versions of present day words.
They did not actually tan them I don’t think .
Open to correction.
Viktoria.

Tanning i.e. to be a tanner was also a pretty unpleasant occupation I think, I know that tanneries smell awful I think that is partly due to the chemicals they use. Comes to think of it, a hell of a lot of occupations of our ancestors were probably unpleasant and dangerous - mining comes to mind, in terms of deaths or injuries from accidents and the likelihood of poisoning for those who mined metals and lung problems from coal mining too.

[manukarik]

If I recall correctly animal skin was soaked in urine as part of the process of tanning. Must have smelt to high heaven!

[melba_schmelba]

If I recall correctly animal skin was soaked in urine as part of the process of tanning. Must have smelt to high heaven!

Perhaps that was used in the past? This is a quite good page on the process, after the initial scraping and cleaning, it seems many stages of different chemicals are used

https://bestleather.org/leather-tanning/

[Zaphod99]

It was on an early census, so early Victorian.  I wonder if VEAL has a similar root.  Possibly even actor Michael Vell.

Zaph

[melba_schmelba]

It was on an early census, so early Victorian.  I wonder if VEAL has a similar root.  Possibly even actor Michael Vell.

Zaph

OED doesn't record it as a variant. Are you sure it wasn't a funnily written F? I have seen capital Fs that can look like Vs.

[Viktoria]

Urine was used for taking the lanolin out of fleeces, the ammonia in the urine being a good degreasant .
Just off the motorway the steep road into Ramsbottom ,there is a tank for collecting urine, people were paid for it!
Ammonia used later.
The tanneries up the Irk Valley into Manchester discharged the rubbish from raw skins into the little River Irk, which was the only source of water for the thousands of slum dwellings built to house workers in the mills round about .
The back to backs, no water
It gets worse,—- dog  Pooh was used in the tanning process ,I kid you not.
The tanneries were up near Smedley  Vale ,Queens Road.
Water etc ( don’t forget the etc ) flowed down towards the city centre then as ,now goes underground and under platform 11 of Victoria Station.
No wonder there were epidemics.

Veal in French is Veau.
Dutch /Flemish have more words than we do
skin,hide, pelt, peel, —- huid,vel,schil,pel,vlies.


Vel still seems the origine-  has slight connection with fell from O,E.
Fell is also in the Chamber’s Dictionary as :- skin,membrane,Oxford as skin still with hair .
Viktoria.

[Ian999]

Going back to the "Night Soil" Men, Edinburgh has some fantastic pubs and one of them is Dirty Dicks.
Here is the sign with Dick and his little poop shovel and the cart used to take it all away!
The big question is why you would frequent a pub with that name?