CURIOUS NAMES

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 56, Issue 280, 8 September 1936, Page 8

CURIOUS NAMES

PUZZLES FOR HEALTH MINISTRY The Ministry of Health in Great Britain often comes across strangely named occupations among the 16,500,000 men and women who are State-in-sured. If a trouncer, for instance , applies for insurance benefit they have to know in Whitehall that he earns his wages by assisting the holder-on and occasionally doing a job of bumping-up. Actually (a correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph” writes) he is employed at engineering works, where he catches hot rivets and passes them to the man who inserts them into their holes. When a riveting squad is at work in an awkward place he hacks up a hammer with a holding hammer. ‘Scribbling engineer,” in another good name. This describes, not a man who tries to add to his income in his spare time, but one who looks after a machine which does the first carding of wool in Yorkshire mills.

A “hoveller” may he a tenant of a house as semi-detached as the next man’s. Ho pays bis rent with money made by helping barges to negotiate bridges in the Medway. So far as the Ministry knows, the name is a local one, but it may have the same origin as “liobbler,” a man employed to help Bristol pilots to navigate ships into dock.

Another of these localised occupations is that of the “sworn, meter and weigher,” who weighs and measures goods brought into the port of Kings-ton-upon-Hull. This is a very old title. The “knocker-up”—a profession now on the down grade—still has a fairly wide habitat in factory towns, where some workers even now prefer a tap on the bedroom window to the ringing of an alarm clock. The “rubber-down,” on the other hand, is looking up. This is due to the popularity of cellulose spraying on surfaces which it is his function to smooth with pumice-stone or sandpaper. “Lookers” and “laggers” have no time to waste. The former take care of sheep moved in the spring from upland farms to marshland. The latter spread non-conducting paste on the outer surfaces of boilers and steam pipes. The “backhander” also lives a peaceful life, holding iron bars for blacksmiths. To the latter “blue bricklayers” are no relation. Their function is to line sewers and tunnels.