Do you remember those signs people used to put on their gates: NO CIRCULARS; NO HAWKERS? Circulars are now called junk mail or spam email, and a sign won’t keep them out, but what about hawkers? This week Radio 4 (xxxxx yyyyy zzzzz) revisits some curious old jobs, to find out how people actually earned their living a hundred years ago. According to the Daily News of 19 March 1895 a hawker was a man who travelled about selling goods with a horse and cart or a van, while a pedlar carried his goods himself. A pedlar’s licence cost five shillings (25p) from the police, but a hawker’s licence cost £2 from the Inland Revenue.

When Victoria came to the throne she brought with her the second half of the industrial revolution, and automation on a massive scale, which must have brought an end to dozens of time-honoured professions. Clearly even the Victorians would need grimbribbers (lawyers), piss-prophets (doctors who diagnosed your ills by inspecting your urine), and knocker-uppers, who went around the northern mill towns at dawn, banging on bedroom windows with long poles to wake the workers for the early shift. But would there ever again be a call for braggers (wool merchants) or bottomers (whose job down the mines was to lug the ore from the face to the bottom of the shaft for removal), and how about belly-builders (who made the insides of pianos), bummarees (middlemen in the fish trade), and wanters, who like Crocodile Dundee went fearlessly out catching moles?

Some of the jobs in these programmes are slightly obscure. Obviously a feather-curler spent his or her time curling feathers, perhaps to go in hats or pillows, but I can hardly wait to find out the day-to-day routine of a sagger-maker’s bottom-knocker. Saggers, as I am sure you know, were large containers of pottery – made from sagger clay – in which fine porcelain pieces were placed for protection while they were fired in the kiln. When you were making a set of delicate bone china cups and saucers, for example, you would not want to expose them directly to the fierce flames; so you put them in a sagger, which would moderate the heat, rather like a bain-marie for the gentlest baking of egg-custard in the oven. The sagger-maker must have made saggers, but the bottom-knocker? Well, your guess is as good as mine.