Archive for the ‘Forgotten Crafts’ Category
Forgotten Crafts: Milkman
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010
A Dutch milkman
Photograph Wikimedia Commons
Once he was a common sight in every town and city: the milkman with his dogcart filled with milk churns. He would call at each door and fill your cup or pan with fresh, non-pasteurized milk. During hot summers, a white blanket was put over the churns to keep most of the heat out. Nonetheless, the milk was not fit for drinking right out of the churn. It had to be cooked first to kill the germs. Choosing the right milkman was no easy task since many of them tended to dilute the milk with water. In the worst case with not-so-clean water.
In the mid 1900s, a bottle system was introduced. Housewives would leave the empty bottles at the door and the milkman would replace them with new filled ones. Once a week he would come by to collect his money. By the 1970s the bottles had been replaced with all kind of alternative packaging such as cartons and bags, which contained pasteurized milk fit for direct consumption. By then, the milk could also be bought at the supermarket and the occupation of milkman started to disappear: first in the larger cities and in the 1980s also in the countryside. Some managed to stay in business longer by transforming their milk vans into mini grocery stores. They were called “SRV-man”.
Nowadays the SRV-man has also all but disappeared: the Dutch buy everything at the supermarket. However, I still remember the sound of the SRV-van’s horn driving through the street and the excitement you felt as a kid in the summer, because maybe –just maybe– mommy would give you a guilder to go get yourself an ice cream.
Forgotten Crafts: Bridge Hauler
Tuesday, July 20th, 2010
Bridge in Amsterdam
Photograph Wikimedia Commons
Of course, Amsterdam is famous for its many canals. To get across these canals there are numerous small bridges. These bridges are typically very steep, to allow highly loaded cargo ships pass easily underneath them. However, these steep bridges used to be very annoying for any merchant with a cart. And there were a lot of those in past centuries: milkmen, bread sellers, vegetable sellers, you name it.
Pushing a heavily loaded cart up and down steep bridges numerous times a day was backbreaking. Luckily, most bridges had a bridge hauler. A sturdy man that would haul your cart over the bridge with a hooked rope for a small fee. Some of them even had songs to sell their services.
Unfortunately, in the 1900s, this colorful character disappeared from Amsterdam’s street life, his song replaced by the roaring sound of cars and motorcycles.
Forgotten Crafts: Ferryman
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
A Dutch ferryman.
Photograph Wikimedia Commons
The Netherlands is a country of water. It’s everywhere. Every city, town, and piece of land is crossed by a maze of canals, ditches, rivers, lakes and the like. It was very common that the shortest way from home to school, work, church, or the market crossed water somewhere. If you did not have a boat, you would have to take a considerable detour to the next bridge.
Therefore, at strategic points in rivers and canals people would row or haul you to the other side for a small fee. These ferrymen where still very common in the 1960s and my mother still remembers jumping on the ferry every morning to go to school. She often was expelled from the ferry because she would jump onto the ferry when it had already left the shore. Because this was dangerous, the ferryman would make her get off again and walk the two-kilometer detour to teach her a lesson. Somehow it did not have the desired effect, this to great frustration of the ferryman.
However, as infrastructure improved and more people bought themselves cars and motorcycles taking the detour instead of paying the ferryman became a viable alternative and by the 1980s the profession had mostly become extinct. Nowadays, only the big ferries remain, operated by large ferry companies.
