Page 15 - Pharmacy History 03 Sept 1997

street buyers of hare and rabbit skins; bone grubbers and rag gatherers; pure excrement finders; cigar end finders; dredgers or river finders; mud larks; dustmen and sewer scavengers.
There were also shops for this kind of stuff, which were known as ‘rag and bottle shops’ or “marine store shops” and the stench emanating from them was ‘positively sickening’.
Who can remember the marine dealers who traversed our streets in
the horse and cart days collecting bottles, which were sorted and recycled? Many pharmacists bought bottles by the sackful from these suppliers and the apprentice’s job was to wash them and add new caps and wads.
This advertisement for a rag, bone and metal merchant in London circa 1850, would pay for ‘Doctor’s Bott’ and good shaped wines, but also for broken flint glass as well.
Only when health scares touched
the richest in society did authorities start to take more notice of rubbish disposal and towards the middle of the 19th century local councils started
to instigate proper rubbish collection and they used any hole in the ground , whether it be brick works, gravel pits or excavations for canals to dispose
of it. To collectors of old bottles, this explains why with all the scavenging, very few bottles were buried before about 1870.
This picture shows old men women and little children clustering around like flies, searching the garbage thrown in the mud.
In the days when dispensaries, such as those operated by Friendly Societies or the large charity hospitals required patients or members to provide their own containers for any medicines they were prescribed, one can only wonder at the state of bottles that would be presented by ‘the great unwashed’!
Here we see rather genteel looking women selling clean bottles outside St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London.
In the colonies or more particularly the goldfields in California and Australia, many of the old town rubbish tips or deserted mine shafts have been the most fruitful for those keen collectors who physically dig these areas seeking lost ‘treasures’. The recycling of rubbish was unheard of and landfill was usually the only method of garbage disposal, and scavenging as an industry was unheard of.
Photos and some text reproduced by kind permission of BBR magazine, Elescar Heritage Centre, Nr.Barnsley, Sth Yorks. S74 8HJ UK.
volume 5 no 36 FEBRUARY 2009
Pharmacy History Australia 15