Rag and bone man
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Rag-and-bone man is a British phrase for a junk dealer. Historically the phrase referred to an individual who would travel the streets of a city with a horsedrawn cart, and would collect old rags, (for converting into fabric and paper), bones for making glue, scrap iron and other items, often trading them for other items of limited value.
They would use a distinctive call to alert householders, to their presence. The call was something similar to "rag-and-bone", delivered in a sing-song fashion. Long usage tended to simplify the words, for instance down to "raa-boh", even to the point of incomprehensibility, although the locals clearly could identify who could make the call. This was satirized by the comedian Marty Feldman in his "Ay-oh frye" sketch, where he played a rag-and-bone man who, when asked, had no idea what his call meant.
The rag-and-bone men were an important component of society before automotive transport, and especially personal automobiles, made them unnecessary. Householders had limited ability to travel to collection points, so the various customers for rags, bones, and such materials relied on the rag-and-bone men to supply some of their materials.
Just as the costermongers and other street-vendors formed the distributive part of the market, the rag-and-bone men supported recycling or remanufacturing, depending on your point of view. They outlasted costermongers, who became settled market vendors when transport improved to the point where the householders could come to the market. Boarding a bus carrying rags or bones was not something the average householder wanted to do, so the rag-and-bone man could still provide a valued service.
A remarkable BBC documentary, filmed in the 1950s, followed rag-and-bone men operating in London. One surprise revelation was that old clothes found a lucrative market in countries like India where they were re-sold for wearing.
Once the world became more mechanized, rag-and-bone men traded their horses for a lorry or pickup truck. Other social changes, such as the tendency for all members of a household to work outside the house, not to mention higher levels of traffic, made casual street-by-street pickup unworkable.
Today rag and bone men mostly just operate in very poor areas and in areas largely inhabited by the elderly (both groups of which are less likely to have their own transportation). They also often make heavy use of telephones being called on a case by case business to collect an old appliance such as a fridge- sometimes for a small charge.
The British sitcom Steptoe and Son was based on a pair of rag and bone men. The subsequent American sitcom, Sanford and Son was based on the same concept, though the phrase 'junk man' or 'junk dealer' was more typically used in the US.
In the North East of England the rag and bone man's horse often had ballooons fastened to it. If a child gave what the rag and bone man considered a reasonble amount of rags etc. then they would be given a balloon as a reward.
