Word: flues
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Apprenticed to a master chimneysweeper ; at the age of twelve years, Lawrence climbed flues for seven years before he turned from the unappealing work to butchering and then operating a gas plant, occupations which he found more suitable to his inclination to improve his position financially and socially. During his seven years as a "chummy," Lawrence had many surprising adventures as he scraped his way up one flue and down another, usually in the buff. As an old man he was especially fond of telling newspaper reporters how he frightened one maiden lady by emerging from the fireplace near...
...Wery Obstinit." Falls, the cruelty of masters, and the great weight of the soot-bags broke the limbs and bent the backs of almost all. The most dreaded hazard of the occupation was suffocation, if a fall of soot caught a boy at an awkward turning of a flue...
Just getting stuck in a flue was bad enough. Mr. Gamfield, the chimneysweeper in Oliver Twist, who labored under "the slight imputation of having bruised three or four boys to death," explained the attitude of masters to boys who got stuck: "Boys is wery obstinit, and wery lazy, gen'lmen, and there's nothink like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down vith a run . . . vereas smoke ain't o' no use at all in makin' a boy come down, for it only sinds him to sleep, and that...
Death in a Flue. Not all masters were so "humane." Phillips cites, among many others, the case of Master Joseph Rae who, after an eleven-year-old apprentice had tried for five hours to free himself from a narrow flue, "sent another apprentice up the flue to attach a cord to one of [his] legs. Despite the agonized shrieks of the tortured boy, Rae and another man hauled on their end of the rope with all their strength. Finally, when neither shrieks nor groans were heard, Rae, sensing that the boy was dead, drank a dram of whiskey and left...
...help make the cloud, a daily quota of 100 tons of metallic oxides goes up the flue. Factory smokestacks, city dumps, backyard trash fires, automobile exhausts and even coffee roasters unite in sending up an immense mess of aerial garbage-estimated altogether at 2,000 to 5,000 tons...