Scrapping through the ages. From Totters to Scrappers!
Here we go,
Scrapping from the early day up to now.
Totters
A totter is a rag-and-bone collector.
Quote:
The totters’ name is from the old slang term tot for a bone, as in the nineteenth-century tot-hunter, a gatherer of bones, a word also used as a term of abuse; both may come from the German tot, dead.
Totters were once a familiar sight in the streets of every town and city in Britain, often announcing their presence with the ringing of a handbell and the cry of “rags, bones, bottles” that had been so often repeated it had been reduced to a hoarse, inarticulate shout. The original totters, of nineteenth-century Britain, really did collect rags and bones, among other items. The former were sold to a rag merchant who sold them on to firms that reprocessed them into the cheap material called shoddy. The latter were the remnants of families’ meals, which were sent to firms that rendered them down for glue. Some even swept out the fireplaces and ovens of the more prosperous households, sifting out the ashes to sell to soap-makers and selling on the half-burnt coals and logs to those in need of cheap fuel. It was recycling at its most basic.
Later, the cry was often “any old iron”, commemorated in a famous music-hall song. By the early 1960s, when BBC Television produced Steptoe and Son about two rag-and-bone men in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, the totting trade in its old form was pretty much extinct: nobody wanted rags and bones any more. The men of that period and later were scrap merchants, picking up any unwanted item of junk that looked as though it might be worth a few coins.
Before mass transport (and long before regular bin men) he would not only collect unwanted materials but supply those unwanted objects to others who needed them. He was the original recycler. Household bones, for example, were sold on to be boiled down to produce glue and bone meal fertilizer. The rags were *re-used to make cheap cloth known as “shoddy” or paper.
He would frequently ring a hand bell to announce his arrival – a hangover from the Great Plague of London in 1665 when carters rang a bell and cried “bring out your dead” – so that householders had enough time to put their junk outside for collection. And often the horse would be festooned with *balloons, which he gave to children in exchange for old rags. Over the years those rags – which were liable to spread diseases – and the bones gave way to unwanted metal objects (bedsteads, prams, lawnmowers and the like).
Despite this change many of the old timers would still cry “rag ’n’ bone”, while in my street in East London my merchant with his cart pulled by a shire horse would shout: “Rag and bone, donkey and stone.”
Totting:"In the Victorian days, totters used to get money for rags and bones, "If people had roast joints, the rag-and-bone men would collect the leftovers to make glue and soap. Bones were used for oil and soap. People collected bottles. Bottles and bones. Anything was saleable: mattresses, rubber tyres, inner tubes. Iron was four shillings a hundredweight."
Skip Divers [me]
London is a city renowned for its wealth, abundance and creativity but it also has a parallel culture of 'scroungers'.
Scroungers, also known as skip divers, recycle and refurbish discarded objects to create new, interesting items or simply give them a new lease of life.
Modern Day Scrapping
Long gone are the traditional rag and bone men, with their horse and cart, and ringing a bell.
Now we have Scrappers, who signal their arrival via megaphone & sometimes a bell, a cry of “any old iron”.
The horse and cart has been replaced with a box van or open back.
Today its all about the metal.
Be Lucky
