Men scraped a living from rags and bones

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Today we have recycling bags and wheelie bins. In days gone by, it was rag and bone men, as Alan Gifford (above) recalls.

SOME of us might still remember the visit of the rag and bone man with his loud cry of “Rag bone, rag bone” but of those that do only a few will know why, or how, he made a living from rags and bones.

The rag and bone man used to tour the streets of Derby and nearby villages with a horse-drawn wagon and shout as loud as he could to bring out people from their homes.

Children, on hearing the cry, would pester their mother for whatever she had, because the rag and bone man gave away balloons, goldfish and even a few coppers in exchange for a few old clothes or bones.

The earnings of these men were not great but they performed a useful service. In 1850, in London, it was reported that: “...for the white rags he gets from 2d to 3d per pound, according as they are clean or soiled.

“The white rags are very difficult to be found; they are mostly very dirty and are sold with the coloured ones, at the rate of about 2d for 5lbs.

“The bones are usually sold with the coloured rags at one and the same price. For fragments of canvas or sacking, he gets about ¾d for 1lb, while old brass, copper and pewter earns about 4d and old iron ¾d per lb”.

The bones and rags he collected were, in fact, recycled, much as they are now.

A famous pair of rag and bone men in recent times were, of course, the television characters Steptoe and Son, although they extended their scavenging well beyond these two items!

The rags were used in paper-making but, at a time when chemists had not discovered how to make artificial fertilizers, the processed bones were used to enhance the quality of the earth to increase the yield of crops.

Ground bones were also used for making glues and gelatine and for the production of very superior china pottery.

Sometimes whole bones, which contain large quantities of the mineral calcium, were scattered around.

But it was soon realised that the minerals entered the soil much more quickly if they were crushed and they were also not so easily stolen by carrion etc.

Ground bones were a major source of phosphates and large quantities of bones for crushing were, in fact, imported from Prussia and countries around the Mediterranean for this purpose; even whale bones were brought back to this country for processing.

There are even reports which suggest that old battlefields were scoured for this very saleable material!

John Farey, in 1807, in Vol. 1 of his View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire, commented that “whilst Middlesex farmers wonder why coal ashes are discarded in Derbyshire, considerable use is made in the county of bones.

“Shiploads of bones were regularly brought from London, some of which he believed were taken from churchyards and were ground by mills erected for this specific purpose and converted into a very valuable manure”.

One such mill he describes as being “moved by water and its operative parts consist of ratchet like iron wheels or rollers, between which the back bones of horses, with their adhering ribs, the core of ox horns etc pass with facility and are crushed into small pieces”.

The cost of such machinery was estimated, in 1824, to be between £100 and £200. Smaller, hand-powered versions of these machines were also available and were used on some farms.

Farey continued by listing sites in Derbyshire where the milling of bones took place.

These were at Ashford (later a bobbin mill), Beighton, Bonsall Dale (using the old lead slag mill rollers in the Via Gellia mill), Dunston (near Sheepbridge), Killamarsh, Makeney (Milford, at the old iron works before Strutt’s cotton mill was built), Shipley Colliery, Walton (on Brampton Moor, near Chesterfield) and at Whittington, in the north-east of the county.

Mill sites can be identified at most of the above locations, on both Burdett’s map of 1767 and Greenwood’s of 1825, but none are specifically identified as “bone mills”.

Farey then tells us: “...at the latter mill [Whittington], Mr Henry Bason was supplied with bones delivered by boats on the Chesterfield Canal and that he sold the ground bones at 2s 3d for a ‘heaped bushel’, six or seven quarters of which are used to an acre of land”.

Boiled bones could be bought for £3 10s a ton in 1845 and the grinding of bones could be a lucrative business.

For example, it was reported that a mill near Aberdeen, which cost £730 5s 1d to build and equip in 1840, made a profit of £778 2s 2d, over a period of seven years.

There was, however, at least one more bone mill in the county, in the Lumsdale Valley, near Matlock, which was powered by the Bentley Brook.

This was near the Top Dam in the steep valley, built in 1780, and was initially a lead smelting mill but was later used for grinding bones.

The mill is shown on the 1831-4 Ordnance Map and is named as such on the OS 6ins map of 1875-8, while the 1847-9 tithe award for Matlock shows the mill but does not identify the ownership.

This suggests the mill was in operation, at a minimum, for almost 50 years.

Some stone work from the mill remains on site and there is evidence of a wheel pit, some 16ft long by 5ft wide, which had been fed from a leat, driving a wheel which was probably back shot.

The use of bones as fertilizer was an important agricultural operation and it is of interest to note that employees of Strutt’s Mills, at Belper, at the beginning of the 18th century, were encouraged to save bones, collecting them in wheelbarrows and receiving 1s 6d per cwt. The bones were subsequently crushed by the hammers at the nearby water-powered Makeney Forge.

The product was then used to spread on and enrich Strutt’s pasture lands, of which he owned large areas near Belper.

In the 18th century, there was a water-powered bone and flint mill at Darley Abbey which was owned by John Heath, on a lease from Abraham Hurst, of Mickleover.

The ground, heated (calcined) flint was used to make porcelain, almost certainly for Crown Derby china.

Heath became bankrupt in 1782 and the mill was bought by Thomas Evans who, a year later, built the Boar’s Head cotton mill on the site.

There was a similar mill just outside Burton-on-Trent, on the road to Newton Solney, which received its power from the River Trent.

The powdered bone went from there to the Potteries. This was demolished early last century.

There were a number of circular wooden pans in the mills, each about 12 to 14 feet in diameter and two feet deep, which would have a base lined with chert stone.

They had three paddles attached to a central shaft which passed down to the floor below and were slowly rotated in the pans, turned by the waterwheel.

The paddles were heavy wooden beams which had strong wooden arms hanging down from them. These pushed round in the pans large boulders of Derbyshire chert stone which were lying on the stone base.

The pan was filled with bones (or flints) and water. Then the sweeping arms pushed the boulders over the bones and ground them to a thick slop.

After about eight hours, the pan was drained off into settling tanks where the now fine bone/flint powder settled down and the water was run off.

The slurry was drained off and the “mud” dried on a heated drying bed to produce bone meal, as it was known. Any larger pieces remaining were returned for further grinding.

It is of interest that until quite recently, in nearby Staffordshire, bones and flint were heated to a temperature in excess of 1,000C and then ground or crushed, with water subsequently added, to produce a white “slip” or slurry which was used to improve the whiteness of earthenware pottery (bone china).

So we can see that, not so many years ago, the bones of animals and fish and perhaps even humans, played an important role in agriculture and in other industries, providing a living of sorts for the rag and bone man and, no doubt, produced a good income for the owners of the factories which processed the materials.