No best answer has yet been selected by simms. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here. A rag and bone man was, quite simply, a junk man. In England, the rag and bone man was sort of a heavy trash pick-up man, picking up items of trash not accepted by the regular bin-men. The rag and bone man travelled the countryside collecting scrap materials, e. Rag and bone men used to be called "totters. They passed out balloons and even goldfish to the children who came out to them.
A few times a year they would come out with the horse and cart to collect larger items, such as old bedsteads. There was what was called the National War Effort where everybody was asked to donate glass, iron, aluminium, glass, old clothing and paper, as resources for fighting the war.
We were asked to take whatever we had to a designated area at the end of the road where great heaps accumulated. This was donated for free and collected by designated contractors. After the wars rag and bone man did re-appear briefly, mainly using vans, although some clung to their horses. Harold like his father had served in the army, but returned to the streets of London.
Their old yards where the horses were stabled and where they stockpiled their scrap materials had been taken over for housing. Today we have Council rubbish tips and car boot sales to take all unwanted household articles, a service that rag and bone men had provided for hundreds of years.
If you can add anything to this page or provide a photo, I would be pleased if you would contact me. Guest contribution The rag and bone man would cover a district about once a week. Guest contribution The advantage of rag and bone men over dustmen was two-fold. Peter Johnson. Guest contribution When the rag and bone man came to our street, ringing his bell and shouting to let us know he had arrived, the horse would stop at each house and wait to see if any householder appeared.
Rag Rag was any form of clothing. Written by Expert Skip Hire on 09 March Many of today's younger generation have never heard the term 'rag-and-bone man' as these enigmatic figures have largely all but disappeared from our modern streets. It was extremely common back in the s to hear a rag and bone man calling to householders as he travelled slowly down our roads, shouting 'old lumber', 'rag-and-bone' or something similar.
As some will also no doubt remember, the profession even spawned a hit TV show in the s in the guise of Steptoe and Son. If you're new to the term, a rag and bone man sometimes referred to as a 'totter' was a person who either travelled by horse or pony and cart or in a van at a snail's pace down every neighbourhood street, looking to collect a wide range of materials to sell for a profit. On hearing their call, residents with items they thought the rag and bone man might want would go outside into the street and stop them.
The rag and bone man would then tell them if he wanted to take their scrap or not. Whilst scavenging for anything of value is by no means a new idea we've been doing it since the dawn of time , the term - or variations of it, seems to have been commonly used in the early to mids. Rag and bone men would travel through city streets on foot, usually carrying a large bag over their shoulder. They rarely had any form of transport and were generally very poor people trying to eke out a living from collecting anything that they thought might have a resale value such as old rags, cloth, bones and metal.
In today's world, it may astonish some to think that rags and bones had any value at all. We throw so many things away that back in the s would fetch a decent secondhand price. A rag-and-bone man is a collector of discarded clothes, bones and other low-value items that can be re-sold to merchants. Cloth was recycled to make shoddy and bones were used to make glue.
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