Obsolete jobs

If you think your current 9-to-5 is a bit of a drag, spare a thought for the poor souls who had to do these foul-smelling, back-breaking and often downright dangerous jobs. Whether through technology, health and safety or social enlightenment, these professions are, thankfully, now a thing of the past.

Image: Mudlarks of Victorian London (The Headington Magazine, 1871)

gong farmer

In Tudor times, gong farmers had the delightful task of emptying cess pits and privies of human excrement – or ‘night soil’ – and transporting it outside the city. They only worked at night and had to live a fair distance away from others so as to minimise the chances of spreading any nasty diseases they may have picked up. And because, frankly, they stank.

herb strewer

Before there were sewers, there were herb strewers. But they only worked for royalty. Dating back to the 17th century, the strewer’s job was to scatter sweet-smelling herbs and plants throughout the royal apartments to disguise the stench emanating from the Thames. When trod underfoot, the herbs would release their aromas to ensure royal noses remained unsullied.

mudlark

A mudlark was someone, usually a child, who scraped a paltry living by scavenging in the mud along the low tide line of the RiverThames. Working among raw sewage, excrement and the occasional corpse, they’d gather up bits of iron, rope, copper and coal that had fallen into the river – although the more daring would also pilfer from passing barges. 

knocker-upper

During the Industrial Revolution, early shifts were the norm at factories and mills, but most people couldn’t afford alarm clocks to get them up in the morning.To ensure the workforce arrived on time for their daily toil, a knocker-up was employed to tap, tap, tap on the bedroom windows of the sleeping workers using a long stick, until they were roused from their slumber.

legger

Early canal tunnels were narrow and didn’t have towpaths.The legger’s job was to walk or ‘leg’ the vessel through the cold, dark tunnels.Working in pairs, lying on planks attached to either side of a boat, they navigated through tunnels up to a mile long. Physically demanding and highly dangerous, it was common for leggers to come to grief and be crushed between the hull and the tunnel wall. 

Words: Brian Chapman. Originally published in issue 5 of Ernest Journal.

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The wonders of birch fungus

A common sight growing on the bark of living and dead birch trees all year round, the birch polypore has many surprising uses. Use it for dressing a wound or starting a campfire.

Illustration: Ruth Allen/Blue Eggs & Tea

Make a plaster

If you cut your finger in the woods and find yourself without a first aid kit, birch polypore is the next best thing as it is porous and has anti-bacterial properties. The younger the fungus the better, so look for a creamy white or pale-brown topped fungus and cut a plaster-sized strip into the underside. Peel off the strip – it should be thin and stretchy like micropore tape. Wrap around the wounded finger, stretching as you apply, and you’ll find it binds to itself. Marvellous! 

Sharpen your knife

Birch polypore’s nickname is ‘razor strop fungus’ as it was historically used to sharpen cut-throat razors. Again, using a youngish fungus, cut a strip, leave to dry then glue it onto a piece of wood, or use as is. Run your knife back and forth along the strip as you would on a normal strop for a finely honed blade.

Ward off insects

Simply cut a thick block of the fungus, apply a spark and leave to smoulder on a dish. The tar-rich smoke should keep pesky flying insects away from your camp. 

Start a fire

This only works with fungus that is dead but not too rotten – it should be dark brown, firm and not fall apart when you handle it. Apply a spark and allow to smoulder – you’ll see the flame very slowly working its way up the spore tubes. Wrap in dry leaves, cover with twigs and small branches and hey presto, you’ve got yourself a fire. 

Illustration by Ruth Allen of Blue Eggs and Tea. This originally featured in issue 5 of Ernest Journal, on sale now.

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The Odditorium x Buxton Festival

The Odditorium – the bestselling book by David Bramwell and the makers of Ernest Journal – is going on tour! Our first stop is the wonderful Buxton Festival Book Weekend this coming Saturday 19 November. Come along for an evening of engaging and surprising talks – an inspiring medley of Antarctic exploration, literary hoaxes, wild avant-garde art, time travel and the world’s largest underground temple. Here's what to expect from the evening...

Archive image kindly supplied by Daisy Campbell

Literary hoaxes: from the playwright incarcerated for “crimes against library books” to the ‘seeker’ who tried to rebrand the Royal Shakespeare Company

David Bramwell shares stories of our most daring literary tricksters: W. Reginald Bray, a Victorian postal prankster who mailed over 30,000 singular objects (including himself, half-smoked cigarettes, a letter ‘to the nearest residents’ of the Old Man of Hoy and an Irish terrier named Bob). Playwright Joe Orton, who was jailed for “crimes against library books”. Theatre director and ‘seeker’ Ken Campbell, who pulled off one of the greatest pranks in British history by re-branding the RSC as The Royal Dickens Society. And Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, a West Country plumber who reinvented himself as a Tibetan lama and went on to become the best-selling author of books on Tibet. 

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: the woman who was the future

John Higgs introduces us to the Baroness Elsa, a wild avant-garde artist who wore cakes for hats, postage stamps for makeup and a bra made from two tomato cans and green string. Over a 100 years before Lady Gaga turned up wearing a meat dress, the Baroness was genuinely shocking. John argues that the Baroness, a previously overlooked character in history, should not only be recognised as the first American Dada artist and first New York punk, but also the originator of Duchamp’s Fountain, voted the most influential work of art in the twentieth century. 

Eyewitness Accounts with Scott in the Antarctic by Herbert Ponting

The worst journey in the world: the life and aspirations of Apsley Cherry-Garrard

James Burt explores the life and times of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of three explorers on Captain Scott’s fatal Antarctic expedition who was tasked with “the weirdest bird’s-nesting expedition that has ever been or will be.” Facing brutal blizzards (their tent was blown away, followed by the top of their igloo) in conditions so cold that Cherry’s teeth shattered, the trio returned with their requested emperor penguin’s egg only for it be treated with complete indifference by the Natural History Museum (“this ain’t an egg shop,” the custodian says as Cherry is left in a corridor, waiting to be given a receipt.) This an inspiring tale of failure, endurance and redemption and, although most of us will never venture into such inhospitable places, James Burt argues that Cherry’s experience has great significance in our everyday adventures. As Shackleton once wrote: “We all have our own White South.” 

Photo kindly supplied by Federation of Damanhur

Damanhur: singing plants and the world’s largest underground temple

In the foothills of the Alps, an hour’s drive north of Turin, lies the eighth wonder of the world: The Temples of Humankind. A vast underground network, equivalent in size to St Paul’s Cathedral, it boasts nine chambers, secret stairways, a labyrinth, glass music hall... oh, and a fully functioning time machine. In this illuminating talk, David Bramwell digs into the life of Falco Tarassaco (aka Oberto Airaudi) who led a spiritual community in building this genuinely astonishing architectural wonder, exploring ideas of obsession, singular ambition and what it means to create a living myth. 

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Meet the speakers

David Bramwell
David is co-author of The Odditorium, creator of the bestselling Cheeky Guides and author of travel memoir The No9 Bus to Utopia, which evolved into a one man show, radio documentary and TEDx talk. David is also a Sony Award-winning presenter on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. “A remarkable storyteller.” (Radio Times). 

John Higgs
John specialises in finding unsuspected narratives hidden in obscure corners of our history and culture. His books include The KLF (“By far the best book this year, brilliant, discursive and wise,” Ben Goldacre) and Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century (“An illuminating work of massive insight.” Alan Moore). 

James Burt
James is a computer programmer who researches odd subjects in his spare time. He is currently looking into ley lines and writing a book on the history of the vindaloo. He speaks regularly at events such as Brighton Fringe, Melbourne Arts Festival, Miniclick, Brighton’s Catalyst Club and Wilderness Festival. 

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Buy your tickets – or win a pair!

Buxton Festival Book Weekend 2016
7.30pm, Saturday 19 November
Pavilion Arts Centre, Buxton 

Tickets are £16 from the Buxton Festival website

We’re also giving away a pair of tickets together with a copy of the book. To enter, simply follow us on Twitter and retweet our Odditorium x Buxton Festival competition tweet. The winner will be announced on Monday 14 Nov.

Made to Soar

The Launch of the Wainwright X Millican Pack, inspired by legendary creator of the Lakeland guidebooks, sets hearts aflutter at Ernest HQ and has us longing for the rise and fall of the fells

The Wainwright X Millican Pack, Limited Edition, £195

“The fleeting hour of life of those who love the hills is quickly spent, but the hills are eternal. Always there will be the lonely ridge, the dancing beck, the silent forest; always there will be the exhilaration of the summits. These are for the seeking, and those who seek and find while there is still time will be blessed both in mind and body.” Alfred Wainwright

In A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells Alfred Wainwright detailed the hills and mountains of the Lake District, in Northwest England. From 1952, the guides were devotedly hand-produced in pen and ink over the space of 13 years. For his labour of love the 214 fells described in the seven volumes have, over time, become known as the Wainwrights.

Now, with a unique collaboration, Millican celebrates Alfred Wainwright's exceptional life. Handmade by craftsmen across the Great British Isles, the Wainwright X Millican is a rather alluring limited edition pack. Formed from an outer fabric of Halley Stevenson's 12 oz canvas, lined with a Harris Tweed from the Isle of Lewis and hand-finished with leather veg-tanned at Whitehouse Cox in Central England, it is stamped with a detailed Wainwright illustration.

It seems fitting that the hero of the fells, who caught the spirit of the land so completely - stitching together waypoints, mapping paths for a hundred generations to come and interpreting so beautifully what his footsteps absorbed - should be the inspiration for this hard-wearing, weatherproof pack, with such devoted attention to detail. With its classic ‘A’ shaped design and impressive list of features, it’s got us all affected in the Ernest office. 

• Sam Browne closure lid with a stamped leather tongue
• 2 external expansion pockets with storm closure, secured with a set of natural                     stained wood buttons
• Adjustable padded shoulder straps
• Branded metal buckles
• Leather yokeback patch - stamped with a detailed Wainwright illustration
• Internal padded laptop pocket (up-to 15” laptop)
• One external bottle pocket and two internal organiser pockets

Limited edition, each batch consists of 100 bags, hand-numbered under the leather grab handle. And, like Wainwright himself, it’s been built to withstand a life on the Fells, so we can be confident it will serve us well wherever our chosen stomping ground. 

If you are anything like us, a durable comfortable pack is paramount but the Wainwright X Millican Pack appeals also to our romantic rambling soul, with its seductive design. There's space both for essential kit and for all the treasure we might find along the trail, room enough for the hoarding of mementos, for all the golden precious moments of a Wainwright-life. 

“The precious moments of life are too rare, too valuable to be forgotten when they have passed; we should hoard them as a miser hoards his gold, and bring them to light and rejoice over them often. We should all of us have a treasury of happy memories to sustain us when life is unbearably cruel, to brighten the gloom a little, to be stars shining through the darkness.” Alfred Wainwright

Surely there's no better place to hoard those precious memories from the trail?

For more on the Wainwright X Millican Pack, including a link to the video Dedication to Craft, visit the site here.

For further inspiring Millican designs, including the Botanist X Millican Forager's Bag, Keith the Writer's Bag and Kelly Kettle, take a look at the rest of the online store.

Blueprints of space

We associate blueprints with architectural drawings but Los Angeles artist and astrophysics enthusiast Lia Halloran has used the cyanotype technique for her extraordinary series Your Body Is A Space That Sees. Her prints pay long overdue homage to female astronomers – depicting craters, comets, galaxies and constellations. Rosie Gailor talks to Lia Halloran about her stellar work.

Lia Halloran: Globular Cluster, 2015, cyanotype, painted negative

Cyanotype is a photographic process using iron compounds instead of silver (used in traditional black and white photography) to create the photo-sensitive emulsion. This produces a cyan-blue tint.

Lia prints her huge cyanotypes from ‘cliché-verre’ negatives, which literally means ‘glass picture’. Nineteenth-century painters used this method by etching, painting or drawing onto a transparent surface, such as glass, to create a negative. This was one of the earliest forms of producing images before the advent of the camera. 

Where did the idea for this project originate?

I was interested in the scientific taxonomies that gave rise to the lineage of science as we know it. I first made a series using the periodic table of elements as a jumping point, another series about cabinets of curiosities and the science museum in Florence, Italy La Specola, then I turned my focus to create 110 paintings based on Charles Messier’s astronomical catalog of deep sky objects. He was a French astronomer in the 1700s who was looking for comets and accidentally found a blurry object he named M1 (now known as the Crab Nebula). He was frustrated to find this unknown object instead of a comet and started a catalog of 'things to be avoided when out looking for comets'.  These irritating objects he was accidentally discovering turned out to be nebulae and galaxies.

How amazing! So on your site it says you’ve always loved creating a crossover between art and science. When did you first discover your personal link to this theme?

The first time I used science as a bounding point in my work was when I was in graduate school at Yale as a painting student, and I read Kip S. Thorne’s book, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. I loved the way he described the experience of the stranger parts of the universe; it allowed me to approach the subject and make it personal. 

You’re a college professor who teaches not only art, but courses exploring the overlap between artwork and science. Have you found that your research into the history of female astronomers has given you a greater insight into this overlap? 

I feel lucky to be able to design courses that are interdisciplinary. Where I teach, Chapman University in Southern California, is extremely supportive in championing unique coursework. I like to think of the classes I develop and teach by asking myself: 'if I was 18 and took a class that would have changed the way I think about art while supporting my curious nature, what would it have been?'

In ‘The Intersection of Art and Science’ my students go to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and learn about current missions, and we do a night of observing on the famous 60-inch telescope up at Mt. Wilson Observatory. Last year we even did a sound bath out at the Integratron in Joshua Tree. All of these unique experiences (I hope!) make my students more inquisitive and invested in their own work. The first time I taught this class we were at Mt. Wilson and I had just looked through the telescope and viewed Saturn and it’s just so breathtaking. No matter how many times you’ve seen Saturn in pictures, it becomes all yours in the view finder. A private reminder that there are these giant spherical objects out there, going around the sun just like us. I turned to one of my students without thinking and exclaimed: 'I’m just so happy I’m in this class!' to which she replied: 'Lia… you’re teaching this class!'

Anytime I’m excited about a subject I’m researching, I try to bring that enthusiasm and information into my classes - and that includes my research on the history of female astronomers. I love sharing this history and hidden lineage, and hopefully it will challenge preconceived notions about the course of history and these important figures that we have left out.

I’m thinking of the astrologist Vera Rubin’s struggle to gain respect in her quest of astrological science, mirrored in her own daughter’s experience. Was there a feeling of honouring the powerful women who made the discoveries you’re re-envisaging in this series?

Absolutely. Your Body is a Space That Sees is a re-investigation of the lineage of astronomy, using discovery as a timeline. The project is all about honouring, celebrating and illuminating the rich and important work these astronomers did. When doing the research I focused on the group of Harvard Women in the late 1800’s, known at the 'Harvard Computers' or 'Pickering's Harem’ and I couldn’t help but think, sadly, that was a very different time. It’s upsetting that they were paid less than half the wages of men but it was, after all, the 1800s and this was 40 years before they got the right to vote. Then you look at the incredible work of Vera Rubin and Jocelyn Bell Burnell - who are making major breakthroughs NOW in the past couple of decades. Where is the Nobel Prize committee?

On your website your other artwork is featured beautifully, and you have a clear voice that shines through each one of your collections. How did you decide on using the Cyanotype technique?

There’s something about that blue that I find simultaneously represents both the darkness of the sky, and the vastness. Also for me, that colour is emotional and efficiently nostalgic. I’m hoping it will evoke a sense of blueprint in the viewer (although maybe young viewers don’t have the same relationship to printing). The process itself of making and painting to then use as a negative in the process was a specific decision to give a nod to the history of photographing the night sky using glass plates. My paintings are in essence, giant (painted) glass plates. But, in my case, it’s a painting used to make a print of images of stars by using our own star (the sun).

There’s a powerful book, written by Lauren Redniss, that tells Marie Curie’s life story through a mix of Cyanotype-printed artwork and typography. Do you think the use of this technique empowers the story of these women and their discoveries? How different would Your Body is a Space That Sees be if done in a different technique?

Thanks for the recommendation – I look forward to seeing that book! For my work, what I’d hope for is for the viewer to be drawn to the work and imagery of the cyanotype on its own. Regardless of what is known about the subject matter, the hope is that the scale and the imagery will compel the viewers to learn more, and share my fascination in the history and story of this group of women. History can tell the specific story but I’m interested in presenting the experience of that story. I’m thrilled that Dava Sobel has written the history of this group of women in an incredible book titled The Glass Universe, which comes out December 6th... go buy it!

Tell us – do you have a favourite piece?

‘The Magellanic Cloud’. This one was the first large work that was made (a bit over 6x6 ft) and when it went up on the wall, I felt like I was on a spaceship looking out a portal to this galaxy of stars. The Small and Large Magellanic clouds are nearby galaxies that can be seen from the Southern Hemisphere with the naked eye. When I was in graduate school and visited the major observatories on a grant, between my 1st and 2nd year of school in Chile, I just could not believe there were nearby galaxies right there. Why wasn’t everyone talking about this all the time? Seeing them for the first time parallels the spirit of the whole project: the experience of discovery. The glass plate I used as a reference is also one of the most spectacular examples in the collection at Harvard, with the initials ‘A.J.C.’ (for Annie Jump Cannon) on the sleeve.

I also loved reading about the process on your blog. I fell a little bit in love with Henrietta, your original printing machine.

Henrietta! My studio assistants and I spent a lot of time making this giant contraption, which we loving named Henrietta, to try to reproduce printing in the sun. Alas, her output light wasn’t as powerful as we needed and we had to take her apart. That sounds a bit macabre but we name everything in the studio after female astronomers. Saying, 'Grab Hypatia and Annie Jump Cannon and I’ll meet you with Herschel' actually translates as 'Grab the GoPro and external drive and I’ll see you in the car!'.

It is, of course, beautifully poetic that the sun gave the prints the ultraviolet light necessary for the final step of the process. Do you think there’s an equally unexplored crossover between other art forms – i.e. literature, film, music – and science?

Absolutely. I’m thrilled that the art science connection is being highlighted and celebrated and I look forward to seeing projects that straddle the boundary between disciplines.

Also, congratulations on the book you’re creating with Kip S. Thorne. This is a book that combines your scientifically-inspired artwork with his scientifically-inspired poetry; what do you hope to explore in this book? Have you already started to find prominent themes popping up?

The book is now quite far along - I’ve made over a hundred small paintings, about 70 percent of which will probably be cut out. It’s a different kind of science book featuring Kip’s poetry and my paintings, describing black holes, time travel, and wormholes. The space traveller I’ve painted is actually my wife Felicia, so it’s also a very intimate book.

Just before I go – wanted to say how much I loved looking at your ‘Elements’ collection, which is your reinterpretation of the periodic table. It is beautiful, as is all of your work. Have you any idea which fabulous bit of the scientific world you’re going to engage with next?

Last year I started something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid – flying. I am member of the JPL/Caltech Flight Club and have been taking lessons once or twice a week for the past year. It’s been one of the best things I’ve ever done. Being alone in a plane is like looking through the telescope at Saturn: unbelievable. It’s made me think about drawing and trajectories differently. I’m not sure what is there as a body of artwork, but I’ve started filming my flights hoping to make something with them someday.

Interview by Rosie Gailor

To see more of Lia Halloran's work, visit liahalloran.com or pick up a copy of issue five of Ernest Journal.