NO WORK FOR SWEEPS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21640, 4 November 1933, Page 3 (Supplement)

NO WORK FOR SWEEPS

SCARCITY OF CHIMNEYS • PASSING OF CLD INDUSTRY The trade of the chimney sweep, after flourishing for centuries, is dying in England. So serious, and so sudden, has been the falling off in the numbers of chimneys needing to be swept since the War, that the British Sweepers' Association recently sent a letter to the British Commercial Gas Association in the hope that it might be considered at a conference. The letter suggested that gas companies should give special consideration to chimney sweeps' sons when they asked for employment, because hitherto chimney sweeps have always followed in their fathers' steps, and the gas industry has made this impossible. Chimney sweeps and chimney sweeping firms were pessimistic when consulted by the Morning Post on the future of the art. " It's one of the Seven Trades of Man, on which all the others have been built," a sweep—and proud of it —said. " But another fifty years or less and a sweep will be a curiosity. " People here, round Lincoln's Inn, luckily think the same way, and can afford to keep their coal fires and their chimneys. But work's not what it was, and in the suburbs a sweep can hardly live, these days. The people there won't have a chimney or a fireplace." " We used to have six sweeps hard at it eyerj' day," a member of a sweep firm said. " Nowadays, we keep two — and it's the hospital contracts that keep them in work. But don't you believe the sweep's son wants to follow father to-day. Education has changed all that. Son says chimney sweeping is too ' foggy ' —sweep language for dirty—for the likes of him. " It's only city ehophouses and suchlike places, where they want an open fire for grills, that keep us going at all," said the son of a family in Easlcheap that has been sweeping the city's chimneys for 150 years. " 1 expect they'll be changing to gas, too, and more big buildings will be put in, using central heating instead of fifty or eighty chimneys, and then we'll have to move for good and all."