Oh What A Time... - #184 Tough Gigs featuring Elis ‘3x microphones’ James (Part 2)

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!We’ve got a brilliant episode this week: we’ve turned to history to find the worst jobs we can. We’ve got tanning (leather, not the sun beds), bridge painting, and the Victorian workhouse.. and take our word for it, they are all absolutely awful.Elsewhere, Elis’ grandad had tools for a career down the mine whilst Elis has 3x microphones for his career down the audio mine. If you’ve got anything to send us, please do it here: [e-mail] from now on Part 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, What a Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else, add free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets, and access to the Oh, What a Time group chat. Plus, if you become an O Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis, will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Watertime. Hello, this is part two. of tough gigs. Let's get on on the show. Okay, I'm going to tell you now, you lovely boys, about one of the jobs I think I'd fancy least in

the world, which, as we discussed earlier, is bridge painting. To do this, I'm going to take you back in the one-day time machine to 1718 when a man called Thomas Pritchard and another man called Abraham Darby, the third, stood admiring their incredible

design feat. And do you want to guess what this designed feat was. It's an amazing place if you've been there and seen this construction. What do you think it might be? Golden Gate Bridge. It's not. It's actually here in the UK. Oh, the one in Bristol, what's it called? Clifton suspension bridge, tower bridge. No, it's the first ever iron bridge, which spans the gorge between Iron Bridge and Colbrookdale. Exactly. Yeah. Have you been there? No, but I know I know where it is. It's breathtakingly beautiful. It's absolutely incredible construction. For the first time, with this iron bridge, a crossing had been made out of cast iron.

Traditionally before that, it had been stone, wood, and it's just an incredible achievement. However, there was one slight problem with this new design. What do you think that might be? What's the problem with iron? Rust. Correct. It rust. It's an issue that can be mitigated by painting the surface of the iron to put a barrier between the metal and the oxidising air.

So that's how it can be dealt with. And so over time, as more bridges in Britain and elsewhere are built, particularly in the United States, as this use of iron becomes more and more popular and then steel, a brand new career opens up. And that career is the bridge painter. And unsurprisingly, this was and still is incredibly dangerous work. On crossings like the fourth bridge in Scotland, Bristol's Clifton suspension bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, these are places where a simple mistake can mean the difference between life, and just plunging to your death.

So let's start with this. How do you think you deal with that sort of job? Do you think you'd be good at it? I can say, I think I'm too easily distracted for this sort of job. Like a pigeon would fly by. But like, oh, no, a pigeon I'd topple off. I think that's my problem. I'm terrible with heights.

Oh, are you? Okay. My daughter's 10th birthday was at Go Ape. And I found it an incredibly difficult day. So just take us through. What happened? Some other, well, go ape. It's just sort of, I think the tagline is it's a tree top.

adventure. Yeah. So, you know, I did the sort of one for older kids. You're probably 50 feet up. And some... Wow. ...eleven or 12-year-old kids who I don't know are shaking the net I'm in. And these are, like, 12-year-old kids from West London.

And I'm mouthing at them. Stop shaking at you little, broth. Don't you fucking shake this? Because I am at the end of my fucking turn. I don't leave it. So, go away. Like, but my daughter wanted to go again, and if so, it will be as he taken her. Because I just cannot, I cannot handle it.

The idea of being a bridge painter is, it is so beyond my comprehension. What about you, Scott? How are you with lights? The one thing I know about bridge painting, the one fact that sticks with me, is that the Sydney Harbour Bridge is so big that when the bridge painters spend their time painting it, by the time they're finished, the other end requires painting again. Wow. I don't know.

Someone told me that. I don't know how I know. I've heard that. But I think... Yeah. But that would be... That's such a frustrating job, isn't it? You would never have a sense of satisfaction.

Horrendous. Although maybe you're so constantly alert on not dying, your concerns about satisfaction are sort of pushed to the side a little bit because you're constantly aware of how quickly things could end. Because they could. They could end in a moment like that. Being a bridge painter, they required a real fortitude, essentially, that none of us have.

There's the height, there's the wind. Then on top of that, there's the rain. There's the fact that the job seems to never end, essentially. There was also, crucially, the matter of balance. Thoughts on this for an interview process. To land a job, prospective employees in New York in the 1920s had to prove they could balance on the beams of the Brooklyn Bridge. So they took you up and saw if you could balance.

If you struggled to balance, the job wasn't yours. Surely do that on the ground, like chalk something out. Don't take them up. puts a new spin on the idea of a bad job into it, isn't it? Yeah, when really badly, actually, I couldn't balance and I died. Also, would it not be really windy up there? Like, that's not, that's not balance, is it?

Well, I suppose balance is crucial. It's dealing, it's accommodating dealing with the wind and all the elements. That's it, the rain. These are the things that you're having to deal with when you're way up there. Serine gigs, George Best, messy. They all had great balance. Exactly, yeah. Low center of gravity. That's what's crucial now. And even today, there are fear of heights tests. So if you want to be a bridge painter today,

there are still these fear of heights tests. Recently published accounts of the exam to paint the George Washington Bridge in New York record questions such as climbing up the steel cables high into the air, horrendous, which is a piece of metal, which is six inches wide. And if you fall, you fail, and you die, basically, essentially. So it's a six inch line of metal that you have to climb up and feel safe on. And what's the first. And what's the same? And what's more is it took ages. This isn't something you're going up briefly. You're up there for ages. When painters started work on the San Francisco Bay Bridge in 1937, 11 years later, they were still working on it. In fact, they still had another 20% of the bridge left to paint. So they've been

going 11 years and they still haven't finished it. What was a team of 40 workers in 1937 was reduced to 14 during the war years, with that total split into two gangs, one working from the east side, the other from the West, the idea being the teams would aim to meet in the middle. I think I'm probably feeling quite competitive at that point. I'm probably thinking we need to get there first, I imagine. There's a sense of like beating the other team to the middle, sure. Oh, I'd be phoning it in. Fairly a brush stroke.

So what do they earn for this? That's one of the next questions we can ask. Let it be colossal. Well, their salaries, according to an advert published in the San Francisco Labor Clarion, were. This is 1937. $175 for a painter a month. And for the gang foreman, $200, which is $2,100 to $2,400 a year, which is equivalent to today's money, $50,000 to $55,000 a year in today's prices.

But I would guess, I don't know this. I don't know how you'd even begin to know this. But I would guess there wasn't a lot of £55,000 jobs. Yeah, I reckon for the time. There's probably really good money. Well, you say that it does seem like a lot until you realise that roles in the city such as supervising vegetable standardisation inspector

got $240 a month, which is much more. So there was money knocking around. Oh my God, let me supervise the vegetables. I can do that. The vegetables aren't going to make a run for it. I'd argue they don't need supervising. They're just going to be where they are. However, in the hands of the journalist, photographers and playwrights of the day,

including renowned writers such as Tom Stoppard in his play, Albert's Bridge, the bridge painter's tough gig and suddenly it's kind of gained something of a romantic reputation, one which is cemented by images captured by Eugene de Salinac in New York in 1914. Now, the Boston Board Salinac, he was a city employee at the time, a photographer for the Department of Bridges, and he was tasked with putting on a record of the construction of New York, icons such as the Manhattan Bridge, the Queenborough Bridge. And in late September

1914 with a war raging in Europe, Salinac visits the Brooklyn Bridge where workers are busy painting the suspension cables and he captures images that highlight the vulnerability of these men. So here's the things that he saw. They have no safety harnesses whatsoever. They have no

helmets. They have nothing. Well, a helmet. I mean if you're falling from that eye, it means you can still be identified, I suppose. Nothing nothing at all that would save them in the event of a fool. But we also observe from these photos their supreme skill. They are lying, sitting, standing on the cables and they're all fully aware of what it takes to balance high up into the air, showing one iota of fear. And Salinac was clearly fascinated by what painting gangs did, how they worked, their techniques, and time and time again,

he scrambled up New York's various bridges to photograph these men in the act. In some of his less famous images. We have two men, one lying on the cables, painting the underside of a cable. His bucket of paint is hooked onto the lower cable and another man who looks to be closer to 60. So they're working quite late into their years with a vast moustache covering his upper lip. He's sort of preparing to paint some of the tensile mechanism. It's kind of a remarkable photograph. If you quickly look on our shared group, we'll put this on our... Yeah. I've, you sent it the other day. I can't... Yeah.

You can see in the sort of harbour below how high up they are. And it is all just terrifying. It is remarkable, isn't it? And the guy really, like, the lower down worker who's painting the underside of the cables, he is literally just simply through the confidence of hooking his elbow over this wire, is holding himself up from dropping for two minutes properly. Oh, no, not two minutes. What if you need the toilet?

That's what the bucket's for. Finish the painting, use the bucket. And as a closing point, if there's one reminder of just how tough this particular gig was, it comes from an observation made in the 1950s when journalists compared life insurance premiums and the excess payable by different occupations, airline pilots were asked for $2.50 for every $1,000 taken, which is the same rate as a house painter. But bridge painters were asked for twice that, $5 for every $1,000. So it was considered twice as risky as being an airline.

pilot at that time. Fair play to these people. It's incredible and the people that continue to do it today. To have that sort of mindset, I just find absolutely mind-blowing. And especially if you look at these old images that we'll put on our Instagram, they are really just wearing their flat caps and holding themselves up with their own bodies and just believing in their abilities to not fall. And it's just truly remarkable work. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no. No, no. No, no, no, no. I'm happy with a rusty bridge. It's not painted, to be honest, to stick with it.

It is, I like it. Right. Now, it's one of the most famous moments in all of literature when a hungry Oliver twist was up to the workhouse master, the superintendent, Mr Bumble, and he asks for more. Please, sir. Bumble's hostile reply symbolises. the absence of kindness

and the man's own cruelty and greed. I found that very upsetting when I saw the film when I was a little kid. Please say, can I have some more? Yeah, absolutely. No, I actually thought he was impertinent. Respect the workhouse rules. The consequences of Dickens' character

who first appeared in serial form in 1837 and his attack, well, there were journalistic attacks on the workout system as such, even today, just the name Workhouse is enough to suggest oppression and nightmarish individuals preying on vulnerable people. So a pretty tough gate. Well, it's a matter of how you look at it.

Now, when Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, which appeared in novel form in 1838, because it was serialised first between 37 and 1839, the workhouse system in Britain was relatively new, certainly in the form which Dickens was writing about. So it had been introduced by the Paul Law, the Paul Law Amendment Act, or the new Paul Law of 1834, which is a piece of legislation,

And I think you still see the impact of this. It treated poverty with hostility. And so it sought to deter any demands on the public purse, right? Because, so in this system, the superintendents were supposed to be horrible. But they were also under pressure to keep costs low, not to be a burden on the public purse, and also, if possible, to become self-sustaining. So it's this no-win situation.

So they paid low wages. And the workhouse wasn't an attractive person. proposition even as an employee. And obviously if you were threatened with a workplace, it was a disaster. It was a catastrophe. Usually maybe, you know, your parents had died or something or your partner had died and you were, you know,

completely bereft and destitute. Do you think anyone ever applied for a job in the workhouse and was like, sat down with HR going, what's the package? Annual leave? What we say? Will you pay into my pension? Yeah.

And sort of the hours, obviously, overtime, presumably, but I can knock off at five. Do you have a cycle-to-work scheme? Now, in this system, sort of, you know, as I said, the superintendents were supposed to be horrible, but on the staff were other figures such as the matron and the nurse or the wardswoman. And again, the way Dickens writes about them

is very uncompromising. So in an 1850 walk in a workhouse published in his magazine, Household Words, he describes one such nurse as flabby, raw bone, and untidy. What does raw boned mean? I couldn't work. I couldn't work out what he meant by that. Flabby and untidy obviously makes sense. And wearing a shabby gown half on, half off. So he wasn't forgiving about the attendance or the guards either, the male wardmen or the porters and the other members of the workhouse staff. Now, the largest workhouses at really sizable staffing levels. Because they're big

buildings. The workhouse in Kamarthe and Ryg Group is still there. The building is still there, I should say. So Whitechapel, one of those places familiar to Dickens from his journalistic work, employed nearly 200 members of staff for its nights. All to cater for residential population measured in thousands. Now, I'm going on a school trip tomorrow, and I think the rule is there are four kids to every adult. In a workhouse, in the 1850s, on average, they were around five staff for every 200 or 250 inmates. Wow. Wow. Now, with that, level, if they decide not to listen to you, what happens then? Yeah.

Okay, fine. I think there'd be an awful lot of me saying, okay, fine. If that's where you think is best, do you carry on doing that? Is you hit on the back of the head with yet another paper aeroplane spin round? But the really tough gigs inside the workhouse obviously were reserved for the poor themselves. So they had to earn their keep, and so they were put to work to and all sorts of manual and menial tasks. Some were not far removed from prison labour. They had to break stones or they had to work in the workhouse kitchens. Other jobs involved picking apart old rope or oaken using a nail stuck in a piece of wood, crushing animal bones, which was one more product of the

slaughterhouse for use as fertilizer. And if that wasn't bad enough, if the local factory mill or farm needed extra hands, well, you had no choice, but you had to go along and you have to work for free. So this was a thing. It was, you know, workhouses were for the most destitute people in society. Yeah. I had no idea they were that packed, though. I would not. I would never have thought it was thousands of people in one workhouse. Yeah, I thought it was hundreds. Yeah, that's what I thought. I didn't think it was that many. It is something I had, it's because of Dickens, but it was a thing I used to dream about and fear as a child. Yeah. The idea of the workhouse was something that really stirred something in me. Well, my great-grandfather died in World War I,

and so my grandmother, she was one of four, being looked after by her mum, they were threatened with the workhouse in the sort of 20s. And when we used to drive past it, she had to turn ahead, you couldn't look at it. Oh my gosh. It was an enormous amount of shame involved in. Wow. But you know, like the thing I never really understood about the workhouse is that ultimately it's about productivity.

And history has shown us that people produce more when they're happier. But there seems like the whole workhouse culture is as bad as possible. The lowest possible morale you could have from a workforce. Yeah. And it's like the whip is that the, the only motivating factor. Surely there must have been a workhouse at some point that was like, we'll introduce a coffee break.

You can have a weekend off. And they were, the Carmarvan Workhouse was, it was on the market because the building is next to my old school. And it's sort of derelict and it's a bit of a ruin now. But it was, and it was a, we did it on the pod, ages ago, the Rebecca rioters who were angry with things like toll booths because they were prohibitively expensive. And eventually they turned their attack onto the workhouse.

Now, the building was still used as a workhouse in command until the 1930s, unbelievable. Wow. As a workhouse? Yeah. Wow. It's remarkable. But anyway, so, you know, we have an idea of what it was like in the workhouse. In fact, so often in history, it was often a bit more complex than that.

So towards the end of the 19th century, workhouses struggled for inmates, and so they had to employ outside labor to fulfill basic tasks, such as doing the laundry. But it's the horror stories from earlier in the century that get our attention. So in 1845, the House of Commons debate on employment in the workhouse heard that in one institution, there is a wheel at which persons seeking nightly shelter of food are placed at work from one to four hours in the morning. This is not a wheel which produces anything. It draws neither water nor grinds corn, but is established solely for the purpose of hard labour. What?

From one to eight persons can work at the wheel, and there is more than one. the master put on an additional weight so to make the task more difficult. These people were... That is something from a George Orwell or not. Yeah, they were being... Well, he talks about spikes, which is where sort of homeless people

were living in London in the 30s in down and out in Paris London. But it was... Poverty was... You were punished for it. So it was like humans being put into a hamster wheel. Yeah. So parliamentary commissioners

told the master that this was illegal and that it should stop. And he just shrugged and ignored the letter. So there was a pile of scandals which hang around the entire workout system. And the thing with the new poor law was that it was punitive. So it was supposed to save money on welfare spending

by reducing the number of appeals for relief made by the unemployed, the poor, the destitute, the sick and the elderly. So this was, after all, long before the welfare state. You know, almost 100 years before the welfare state and parliamentary legislation was imbued with the Victorian principles of laissez-faire economics and a belief that making

ends meet was the responsibility of the individual alone and that the state shouldn't be a part of it. But it also wasn't a uniquely British system, I thought it was. But the method was exported around the world, not always in the same way. So the most direct export was, of course, to Ireland. But then Adelaide in South Australia had its destitute asylum, which operated on similar lines and opened in 1851. Then there was the Canadian system of houses of industry, which opened across central and eastern Canada. South Africa had its work colonies and the US. had its poor houses or poor farms, all very oppressive in character.

And the oppression was still there when George Orwell entered the casual ward. If you've read, down and out in Paris and London, they were referred to as spikes at the time. So it was London workhouse in the early 1930s, which was usually the preserve of tramps, as he referred to them as sort of rough sleepers,

what you'd say now. So he stayed overnight, but almost immediately fell foul of all the rules. You went out tobacco, you went out matches, You went out to have change in your pocket. As he writes in the book, that people used to hide cigarette ends under their toes. Wow.

Now, I googled spikes in the 1930s, and they were called like Four Penny Coffins. Basically, it was like a wooden bed, and you got to lie under a tarpaulin. Right. And it was the cheapest way of sort of, you know, if you were destitute in London, then it was the cheapest way.

of having a sort of a roof over your head. But the problem was that you weren't allowed to stay there more than a couple of nights, so to keep moving, which is why people would tram. They would walk to Kent and back, and it was just, yeah, just a horrible, horrible system. There's such little care for a huge bracket society, isn't there really? Yeah.

It's what it is really. You talk about the idea of being about efficiency and productivity, Chris, but really, you know, well, this is... Culturally, there's no... actually there's a feeling that these people are to blame and that they are... Yeah, they've got some responsible. Yeah, exactly.

It's like it's horrendous and cruel. Well, this is the really insane thing. So, yeah, they were called four penny coffins. And if you Google image them, they are like coffins, but you'd get a pillow and a sort of bit of tarpull in. You could sleep under that. But the really crazy thing that comes up in Downing Mount Pines of London is he was always put to work in the workhouse's kitchen,

ostensibly peeling potatoes then doing the washing up but any leftover food was to be thrown in the bin and so the bucketful so he later complained he said you got all this

enormous amount of food being wasted even after the tramps had eaten and we can afford to waste at this or well argued we can afford to do better by those who find themselves in such places and that's the contrast

between sort of Orwell's time in the 30s and Dickens his time in the 1830s but it was the same system and the same failed result. This sounds like absolute hell. And on that note, I took the kids to Disneyland Paris at the weekend. Actually, Disneyland was great.

I had a really good time. Kids absolutely loved it. But on the drive back, we got the shuttle under the Channel Tunnel. And as I was driving up north towards Calais, we passed the Somme. And I've always wanted to go. They've got a Somme museum there. And I was thinking, that'd be quite the adjustment for the kids. Disneyland to the Somme.

There is an age where I think you can make the argument that they'd find it interesting, but your kids are too young for that. They are just... They're only just wrapping their heads around goofy. They are just too young for the Somme museum experience. I reckon my daughter would... I think I could do it with my daughter. Yeah.

My son's a bit young. You'd need a day break after Disneyland. You need a some sort of... There has to be a pallet cleanser. A neutral day where there are... on the beach or something. Like a day of nothing. And then it's the Solmuseum experience.

Anyway, so there we have it. You decide, as a listener, which would you prefer to do the least? Would you like to work in a tannery? Would you like to be a bridge painter? Just, oh my God. See, I can put up with disgusting things. I don't

think I could put up with my heart rate being at 195 beats a minute because I'm up a bridge for eight hours. Yeah. So I'm actually, I'm the opposite. I think yours, the workhouse is the one I definitely wouldn't want. Because I feel I have no control over my own situation.

That's what I would find most dislikation. I can pull over that. Absolve me of all responsibility. Oh, I'd hate that. But at least as a bridge painter, I'm choosing to do a job. I'm up there. I'm going to be mega careful. I'm not going to be fast, but I'm going to make sure I survive.

And I'm not sleeping in a mini coffin. The dog poo collector, you choose your own hours. Exactly. Exactly. So there you go. If there's any other horrendous job from history that you'd like to hear about in the future, do send them into us where I think is a great subject. It's a rich scene we will explore in the future.

And thank you very much for joining us once again. And we will be back with you. Yet more history, hopefully less of it to do with dog poo in the very near future. Bye. Bye. Goodbye. Oh Watertime is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else.

Add free. Plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the Oh Watertime Group chat. Plus if you become an O Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash oh water time.