Mummy, what is a bus conductor?

By Anthony Reuben
Business reporter, BBC News

When today's children sing, "the conductor on the bus says 'move along please'", do they know what they are singing about?

What about "tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor"?

Our developing economy means that many of the jobs named in children's stories and nursery rhymes have died out.

Here are a few of them.

BUS CONDUCTOR

Anyone over 30 will find it shocking that most children singing "The Wheels on the Bus" have no idea what a bus conductor is.

Conductors have been abandoned as the old double-decker Routemaster buses with the entrance to the rear and the driver in a cabin have been replaced.

Now, passengers enter at the front of the bus and pay their fare to the driver - or they pay electronically by waving a card in front of a machine.

By the early eighties, conductors were a rare sight outside London, but it was not until late 2005 that the final full London route stopped using the Routemaster.

You can still find them running on two "heritage" routes in central London.

MAD HATTER

The mad hatter is one of the most familiar characters in children's literature as the host of the surreal tea party in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland".

While there are still hatters, it is to be hoped that fewer of them are mad.

Indeed, the notion of being "as mad as a hatter" pre-dates the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll's book and is a result of the mercury poisoning suffered by many hatters.

The top hats favoured by the mad hatter would have been made from animal furs.

Top quality hats were made from beaver fur, but inferior ones used cheaper furs such as rabbit.

The inferior furs had to be treated at an early stage of the process with a mercury compound, usually mercurous nitrate.

Mercury poisoning is now known to cause brain damage, as well as kidney damage.

The use of mercury in the felt industry was banned in the US in December 1941 while the European Union more recently banned the mercury from its most everyday use - in thermometers.

BAKER'S MAN

Traditionally, the baker's man was the chap in the bakery who did all the heavy work such as carrying around the bags of flour and kneading the dough.

No master baker would want to knead his own bread dough because it was very hard work.

As bakeries have become more automated, the number of menial tasks has reduced such that there are very few people in Britain who would refer to their job as being a "baker's man".

This does beg the question, however, of why one would ask the baker's man to bake a cake, rather than asking the baker himself.

TINKER

"Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief", is a rhyme used for counting pips or stones from fruit.

Most of the jobs are familiar, except for the tinker, although being a rich man or poor man is more the outcome of a job or a lack of one than a career in itself.

A tinker was a travelling mender of pots and pans and general metalworker.

Their job title is also preserved in the notion of something being worth as little as a "tinker's curse", or "tinker's damn".

Tinkers had a reputation for swearing a lot so it was felt that their profanity had little value.

There is some disagreement about whether the phrase should be a "tinker's dam", referring to the material placed around something to be soldered so that the molten metal would not spill.

The "tinker's dam" then had to be disposed of, making it worthless once it had been used.

PIEMAN

Street traders selling food from trays used to be a common sight, especially at fairs, which would have provided great opportunities for them.

So it would have been no surprise to Simple Simon that he found one of them selling his wares.

You are less likely to see the traditional pieman carrying his tray around a fair or outside a bakery nowadays, although the rise of farmers' markets means you might well find one manning a stall.

Nonetheless, if you do an online search for pieman you are as likely to find the Photonic Integrated Extended Metro and Access Network, a research project trying to achieve cheaper broadband bandwidth, as you are to find somebody actually making pies.

OTHERS

There are plenty of other jobs that children hear about but are either rare or no longer exist.

There are few people left with the lifestyle of the Miller of Dee (who cares for nobody if nobody cares for me).

Is there still a muffin man living on Drury Lane?

You would have little trouble finding a butcher or baker, but does anybody still have a business card describing themselves as a candlestick maker?

Has the father of Tom, Tom the piper's son now joined a beat combo?