Tony Robinson's Worst jobs

[the.fee.fairy]

There was a whole day of this on some sky channel last week. Some of the jobs were really interesting!
I watched the one where he works as a tanner - that was interesting, the scraping of the skins was quite disgusting, but it showed exactly what rough Jack was explaining a while ago.

Then there was the Wattle and Daub building - that one really interested me!! It looked easy ( i understand its probably not!) and looked interesting for those who keep chickens/pigs/animals outside to make pens. Does anyone do this? how do the buildings hold up in the rain?
I liked the alternative use for animal poo to hold the stuff together.

Anyone else catch this programme?

[Magpie]

We watched this too, our children enjoyed it too. I felt sorry for the children in the Victorian episode, cleaning the lint from the looms or whatever they were...

[Wombat]

Yep, we saw it on Foxtel or at least part of it - from the point where he was a Victorian Navvy onward.

Whe I worked in the chemical industry, back some 25 years a go I did some work in Brisbane in a tannery that looked (and probably smelled) like the one Tony was in. They were a customer of ours.

They told me that some of the pits would develop a mould that looked very much like concrete and on more than one occasion people, and one unsuspecting dog, went swimming in the pits. Bleeech!

The tannery closed many years ago and there is now a shopping centre on the site!

Nev

[the.fee.fairy]

I think i could imagine what the tannery smelled like!!

I was thinking of tanning any rabbit hides that my dog happens across before i saw that...

[Millymollymandy]

I saw the whole series a while back and thought it was brilliant.

[red]

yeh - good if revolting series. the purple maker seemed like the worst to me.

[Super.Niki]

I don't know about the purple guy being the worst, red... how about the poor sod who had to keep treading in stale pee to make the cotton(?) softer... ew... no way!

[red]

the purple maker had to - crush up shell fish - leave them to ferment and could tell when they were ready by tasting the goo

would much rather tread in pee then taste fermented shell fish! (lets hope it never comes up as a choice I have to make...)

[Eigon]

Wattle and daub holds up very well as long as you plaster it. The same goes for cob buildings, which are basically mud. You do need a huge amount of withies, though.
We looked at this last year, when we were thinking of building a Viking/medieval hall for re-enactment purposes. We eventually chickened out and got rough planking, which looks rather good with the painted round shields displayed against it.
I saw an article in a newspaper recently that reckoned that the most green and sustainable buildings ever were the Tudor timber framed houses with wattle and daub infill, because all the materials would have been local and from sources that re-grew.