Episode 647: The Horrible History of Chimney Sweeps

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My name is Special Agent Rebecca Henderson. Thursday, January 8th on NBC.

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Thursday, January 8th on NBC.

There's no place to escape to this. This is the last podcast.
On the left.

That's when the cannibalism started.

What was that?

Oh,

yeah!

God, so many ways to kill a boy. They're really, you know, they're really, you can't even count them.
Jam him up. Set him on fire.
Beat him to death. Stomp them to death.
Starve them to death.

Sit on them. Freeze them to death.

There's just crazy. You just can't even imagine all the different ways.
It's like for every type of boy,

there's a way to kill them. You can kick out their eyes and shove them up their ass.
I I mean, they can live. They can live from that.
Then they can die of pneumonia. Yeah, that's the thing.

You never know what's actually going to take them out. But that is the difference between a boy and a chimney sweep, right? Is that a boy,

they get murdered. Yeah.
A boy falls off a building. A boy gets sick and dies.
A chimney sweep has to die of four things, right? It has to be all at once. All at once.

It has to be the cure kills you as well. Like to fix you, it has to be like, oh, we're going to have to to turn this life around.

Like, that's the only way to fix it. I can't wait to find out what these four things are.
Let me see if I can guess.

Falling off the roof. Sure.
It seems like one. One of them's stuck.

If you fell into a bad chimney, got stuck, you already had scrotal cancer, and then you died of the cold. It's really cool.

Fucking the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Sparks.
I'm here with the, I think, it seems like you're very excited for this episode. This is one of my favorite.

The excitable Henry Zabrowski. We very rarely do an episode about an occupation.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that's why I like this.

Yeah, because most of the time, like, yeah, Dirty Jobs is a great show and everything, but very rarely are occupations themselves inherently horrifying in every way.

And it seems like they were designed by someone with a psychopathic mind. It's incredible.
Did Dirty Jobs ever cover chimney sweeps? I don't think so because it had to be a job that he could do.

And since Mike Rowe was not a small boy, he could not be a chimney sweep. That was a big, broad-shouldered man.

You know, he was supposed to be the host of the Daily Show instead of Jon Stewart. Really? It would have been a horrible decision.
It really would have been. Yes.

And the man with the show biz trivia galore is Ed Larson. Open the rooftop, stepping time.
Open the rooftop, stepping time.

Kick your knees up, stepping time. Kick your knees up, stepping time.

I could see Dick Van Dyke would be an amazing, like, master sweep now.

Like if you covered him in sweat and you have him being like, he goes up the chummy, oh, you get the knife. Like I can see him doing that, up the chummy now.
Oh, the chummy before I cut off your bits.

I'm going to cut off the head of your dick. And you know, like, you know, like old Dick Van Dyke just said, just like that.
Laughing, laughing his way to the bank.

I wonder if, like, halfway through filming Mary Poppins, someone's like, you know, chimney sweeps actually died quite often. He's like, oh, that ain't no fun, is it now?

that ain't no fun, any no.

Shut your fucking mouth, Julie, and get me a goddamn scotch.

Shut up. Speaking of Mary Poppins, I think we need to bust this open.
Rob, clean Julie Zandrews' pipes, man. Yeah, but not sexually.
Worked on her toilet in the Hamptons.

Fucking clean your house, dude.

No, no, no.

What's your

chance? What's up? No, no, no, no, no.

What street is she on?

I can't say. It was plumber patient confidentiality.
Understandable. Understandable.

Solid or

not.

I can't say.

He can't say. He can't say.
I tell you what,

those classy chicks, you'd be surprised. Huge fucking dudes.

The reason why we're talking Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, all of these wonderful things is that today we're going to be talking about the horrible history of chimney sweeps. Yay!

Can't disappear into no cartoon now, can you, little boy?

You up to chovina.

And this is a Christmas episode.

There are few objects in the Christmas canon as iconic as the chimney.

In Western tradition, Santa Claus pops up and down chimneys across the world to bring presents to all the good little boys and girls every Christmas Eve. Not the Jews,

but anybody Or the Buddhists. No, but you

don't get anything. But they don't want anything.
Suck it, Buddhists.

No, it must suck to be a Jehovah's Witness because, like, you believe in God, but you still don't get presents. You get nothing.

Jehovah's Witnesses live their life in fear, and technically, just like the Mormons, they're lying in wait to destroy us all. We will eventually cover them.

Now, the idea of Santa Claus coming down the chimney surprisingly goes back to, of all places, the Malleus Maleficarium.

This anti-grimoir, the infamous hammer of witches, was responsible for hundreds of executions and witch hunts throughout the centuries.

But the Malleus Maleficarium introduced the idea that witches entered houses through chimneys, which planted the idea that magical beings enter one's house through the chimney.

In fact, Italy has the legend of a kind Christmas witch named Bifana, who delivers sweets through the chimney. I'll make a chocolate with the mabrese.

I bring a US weeder. Oh, yeah, down a chimney.
Get down to chimney, fell army. I guess it makes sense why they're always like wearing black outfits and riding brooms.
Sure, soot.

Oh, I thought they were just being my fucking bitch grandma.

But in today's episode, the only thing that we're going to be delivering through the chimney is dead little boys.

See, chimneys, especially in merry old England, have an incredibly dark history when it comes to the people the Brits tasked with clearing out their flus for for hundreds of years.

So we figured for this Christmas season, we would explore the horrible history of chimneys, specifically British chimneys, and the thousands upon thousands of horrific deaths attached to the profession of chimney sweeping.

Oh, you know, I heard that back in the day a flu shot was when they shot a chimney sweep.

We were stuck in the

air. She's an easy target when you get in there.

When it comes to chimney sweeps, the number one word is soot. When the fire dies and the flue cools, cold air rushes in and the smoke fumes thicken and congeal.

This forms soot, a tar-like crust that not only interferes with the function of the chimney, but is itself very flammable. Therefore, it must be cleaned.

Context. Yeah, exactly.

It has to be cleaned. This is why we clean the chimney.
Soot, however, was also valuable.

In the earliest days, one could make extra money by sticking a long-handled broom up your flue to knock down soot, that could then be sold as fertilizer, shoe polish, die for leather, or ink.

In some cases, brewers even mixed soot with wine and ale as a preservative.

Common folk also erroneously believed that soot could be used to whiten teeth because the folk who spent all their time with soot, the chimney sweeps, appeared to have the shiniest teeth in all the British Isles.

It definitely did not.

They absolutely did not.

This was merely an optical illusion because chimney sweeps only looked like they had whiter teeth than everyone else because they were constantly covered in filthy, black, cancer-causing soot.

And I like it!

You know what I like about it? Put my finger in your mouth and rub your calms. It's good for you, little boy.

You know what I was thinking about with chimney sweeps? And I'm wondering. Please, sir, I only charge you two pence to put your fa my finger in your mouth.

You're on a date, sir. I can make you date nice and clean.
Out of my way, sweet arch, and I'm on my way to the executioner's home.

I'm having lunch with the executioner.

I was also thinking with chimney sweeps, I wonder if the time period is it very much like having sex with a sous chef? Like, they're super kind of, like, mysterious and gnarly.

Like, I wonder if chimney sweeps were considered, like, kind of sexy almost. They were children.
Like, literal children. So they're children.

And from what it seems like, the people of the British Isles had a bit of a thing for making chimney sweeping as cruel as possible from the get-go.

In Ireland, for example, before the days of chimney sweeps, people would use geese and turkeys to sweep their chimneys.

They'd tie a rope around the bird's neck, then drop the bird into the chimney from the roof. The bird's ensuing freak out would knock the soot away as it struggled.

And the rule of thumb was the blacker the bird, the cleaner the chimney. It's true.

It's absolutely true. It'd be amazing when you throw a couple of dogs in there.

In the early days, people in the British Isles and Western Europe at large didn't need much more than a broom to sweep their chimneys because most homes were single-story.

But when multi-story homes became more common in the 16th century, chimney sweeping emerged as a profession.

Once it became clear that there was money to be made, it didn't take long for someone to get the idea that if a bird could knock away soot just by freaking out, imagine what a bird-sized human with an actual brain could do

and thus the child chimney sweep was born

i think they're looking for something that might not be there because in my mind yeah sure a literally a miniature person like a lilliput would be great for this yeah yeah or even just a little person right like someone's truly stall small of stature

like a little person like a like a capital l capital push little person yeah yes but many of many of those did not survive back in those days. Also, they can't climb like a child.
We never know.

You never see them.

We never see them climb.

I think there might be a reason why we never see them climb. I showed, let me look at it.

Yeah, go ahead and keep it real quick. But I think, you know, they wanted, they switched to children mostly because you can't eat children and you don't want to ruin your food.

That is true. You don't want a sooty turkey.
Yeah. Now, here in America, chimneys are pretty simple setups.

In most homes, the flu runs straight up from the fireplace out to the roof above with minimal bends along the way. Sure, you know.

You might have a bend here or there, but for the most part, straight up.

But in England, and particularly in London during the Industrial Revolution, chimney flues were slender, twisted, and torturous, pitch-black, zigzaggy mazes of soot and heat, almost tailor-made for trapping and suffocating small boys.

Look at this little person doing parkour.

Doing karate. A little person doing doing parkour.
This little person is just doing a karate and stuff.

See, Rob found a chimney sweep little person

just watching him do karate.

I didn't jump and stuff. This guy jumped to the top of this grocery store aisle like

wow. Yeah, he could have really done something in there.

Okay. All right, so I guess they can climb.
Some can climb. Yeah, yeah.
And then they can just chop away at the soot when they get in there.

If they are karate choppers, yes.

Now the Brits get some Asian little people in.

Now, the Brits did not make chimneys into death traps on purpose.

There are specific reasons why British chimneys in particular were dangerous, and much of it begins with the Great London Fire of 1666. Wow, 1666.
Good year for a fire. Yeah, yeah, great.

Over five days in September of that year, a massive fire demolished a large portion of London after a baker failed to properly put out a fire at his shop, located on the adorably named Pudding Lane.

He never calls his asshole.

I don't feel good.

Can imagine that it's like something so destructive starting somewhere so huge.

It's horrible. The entire fire started on dewdrop street.
Not on

dessert avenue. I can see this also being like a giant gingerbread concentration camp.

From Pudding Lane, the fire spread to other homes, and due to high winds and a drought, the blaze destroyed over 13,000 houses.

The fire, however, wasn't the only thing that brought homes to the ground. A politician named Samuel Pepys coordinated with the Admiral of the British Navy on a plan to stop the fire.

But the best the two could come up with was to create a firebreak by preemptively blowing up houses in the blaze's pack. Just a fucking awesome idea.

Great idea.

But as dumb as that sounds, the plan actually worked. It's what saved London.
And only a few smaller fires continued into the fifth and final day.

But one of the big consequences of the Great Fire of 1666 was that while many buildings had lost their top floors, the foundations and bases of many homes were undamaged.

So when those buildings were hastily restored in the coming weeks and months so London could carry on, the chimneys were rebuilt as twisted abominations of haphazard engineering, at least from a cleaning and efficiency standpoint.

That, however, was just in London. As far as why English chimneys at large were so dangerous, it mostly came down to avoiding taxes.

In 1662, Parliament passed the hearth tax, which charged a homeowner for how many fireplaces a home had.

So, to get around the tax, architects began installing more flues connected to a single fireplace. Furthermore, wealthy homeowners insisted on a fireplace in every room.

These two things together meant that a system of flues and chimneys would zigzag through the walls, sometimes at 90-degree angles, which made these flues both torturous to climb through and susceptible to the buildup of soot.

And speaking of soot, the final factor here was the primacy of coal over wood or peat as a fuel source as the Industrial Revolution marked on.

By 1850, London alone burned 3.5 million tons of coal every year, and soot was a natural byproduct of the improper chimney construction that had been going on in England for centuries.

As a result, nearly every home in England had a chimney covered in soot that had to be regularly scraped.

And since the flus were all small, on average, 9 inches by 4 inches, children were chosen as the natural labor force. They called them chimney sweeps or climbing boys.

And while most were between the ages of six and 14, many accounts exist of children as young as four years old scrambling into the soot-filled flues of merry old England.

I mean, look how cool that little boy looks with his tools.

They can't see him, Henry. It's an audio podcast.
I'm watching you brought a video of this little boy. He's obviously four or five years old.
He's got all the tools, honestly. I think he looks badass.

He's three years old, apparently. Wow, just working, right? That's a real working man right now.
Wow.

That toddler's work.

Oh, yeah, that toddler's fucking done harder work than I've ever done in my life. God,

it's weird because, like, the American in me is like, look at that hard-working child. Good for him.
Good for them. Get for him.

Get out there. Get down that chimney.
Making something of himself. You know what I mean? Not sitting around playing with blocks.
Not sitting around doing his stupid little game. You need an iPad.

That's a child that's worth a goddamn.

Yeah, he's in there developing cancer from a young age. He's not waiting until he's in his 20s to get occupational cancer.
Hey, we did that our own way with our fathers smoking above us as children.

Sure. His make-a-wish was for Sundays off.

My make-a-wish is for old Deborah to be fired. You know, like that's sad.
That's a sad thing.

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Now, the term chimney sweep is a bit of a misnomer because most sweeps cleared out the soot with their bare hands. Wow.
Even though soot flakes could become sharp enough to tear skin.

While the sweeps did carry a broom into the chimney, the broom was only used occasionally.

Usually, the mostly male sweeps would bring down the soot with their hands, feet, and shoulders, meaning that it really was the same principle as throwing throwing a big bird down there with a rope tied around its neck.

But this one's got a brain. Yeah, this one's got a brain, and it can climb out, and you can yell at it and insult it, and it knows what you're saying.

A bird doesn't know when you call it a cocksucker. It just keeps going.

But a small child, they feel it, and that gives you a satisfaction in your job. Yeah, yeah, you know it.
It feels it.

But since chimney sweeps were all children, and since so many of them died doing it, it begs the question of who was forcing these children up and down the chimneys of England, and who was managing these small gangs of urchins?

Well, those men who were seen in England as the most degraded and depraved of all tradesmen were known as master sweeps. Marcus, don't be so hard on them.

It's funny because everybody, the way that they are positioned too, because a lot of this information even came out of the, the, when they were trying to fix all this, right?

Like when they were like a lot of this comes from court testimony now we know and it's just like Fagin after Fagin after Fagin come into these courts.

Each one has like a top hat with the top, you know, with that thing where the top circle

goes up. Each one, they're like, oh, yes.

Ah, the little one.

Yes, we did pull them to work, didn't we?

Talk those children. What children am I supposed to do? And they all are.

Like, you have like real people talking to them being like, well, you're a scum of the earth. Tell us how you operate it.
And they're like, yes, right. Yes, it's not how it's been done.

That's style bust has always made it its way.

The worst man you'll ever meet, and I love him.

It's amazing. Because they're all like, yeah, master sweeps are evil.
That's what they do. Cartoonishly evil.
Like, they really are. They are the most cartoonishly evil people I have ever read about.

And they're also very lazy. Because master sweeps usually began as sweeps themselves.
If a climbing boy survived to the age of 12, he could become a journeyman sweep.

And if he made it to adulthood, he could choose to continue the cycle of cruelty as a master sweep. And we always do, don't we? Yes, yes, we always do.
Always, always pushing them up the chummy.

Up the chummy, you go.

But while you'd think kids would want to get away from chimney sweeping as soon as they could, it seems like the profession locked these kids in.

Oftentimes, once a sweep reached journeyman age, they had already developed extreme deformities of the spine, legs, and arms after spending years bending and contorting themselves through the twisting flues of England.

So, in many cases, once a chimney sweep, always a chimney sweep. Now, if a boy died in a chimney, could you reuse him?

Like, could you like just like

bring him to the next chimney and just shove him down there and put a rope on him and like take him up and down?

Yeah, you could. Yeah, actually, a great master sweep.

You would be a great.

You would be very good. I could never be an eye.
Oh, pick up. Up you go.

God, you'd be ready.

No, don't throw a boy away.

Bring him in an exit juice. If we remove the skin, we cut yours's bones.

No,

he's a rogue.

As far as how a master sweep obtained his workforce, he could either pick up orphans from workhouses, kidnap urchins off the street, and force them to work, or most often, he would purchase small children from poor families for a life of indentured servitude.

Called pricing your child is what they called it. Yeah.
Sometimes middle and upper-class families would even sell their extra bastards to a master sweep. Thank you very much.

I've got too many of these goddamn bastards hanging around. All right.

Chimney sweepy, come to get your bastards. Yeah, it's just the idea.
I'll take your child.

Make good use of them. We will won't we yes.
Seems very, very fortuitous that you're here. I've made four bastards this year, and they are ruining my estate.

My love is tiny arms, love his spiderly legs. Take them.

Those bastards, of course, would spend their lives in a special kind of hell until they died, worked long enough to leave, or lived long enough to become a master. That's the dream.
Yep.

Now, there were very few rules amongst master sweeps, but to give you an idea of how awful climbing boys retreated, it had to be said out loud that climbing boys were to never climb into any chimney that was actively on fire.

Yeah, it hurts the fire.

There's no reason to put out a perfectly good fire with the bottom

of a boy. Yeah, you can't just pretend there's rules.
You got to say them. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because there's not rules.
I've never technically spoken out loud. Yeah, but it's the sort of rule where it's like, the rule is don't walk into traffic.

Like, you don't, I don't have to say that really out loud. To a child, you do.
That is true. To a moron, you do.

This rule, however, about not putting a child into an active fire, was often bent or ignored by master sweeps who treated their workforce as utterly disposable.

For example, in 1817, a master sweep named John Hall, a caricature of evil, as many master sweeps were, received a contract to sweep a baker's chimney on a Wednesday.

But Master Sweep Hall was told to wait until Saturday before starting the job so the ovens in the chimney could cool down. Hall, however, wanted to get on with it as soon as possible.

So he ignored the baker's warning and sent a 14-year-old orphan named Robert Dowland to. Yeah, I'll go.
My pants, Dick.

My name's Down Land. I can go Down Land whenever I want.

He sent him into the chimney on that very same day, just after the fires were put out.

Now, Hall was technically following the no-fires rule, but after just 15 minutes of scraping, Downland complained that his arms were getting burnt, and he thus exited the chimney.

The baker's wife offered the orphan water to cool the burns, but Hall wouldn't allow it. Don't make him wake.

That is how they felt about that. Oh, yeah.
No, you couldn't give the chimney sweep anything. Also, the water doesn't really help.
Not really.

Yeah, it kind of makes it worse. Yeah.
No, that's why, yeah. Just milk.
Yeah. Yep.
Just cover them in milk. Oh, God.
They had so much milk back then. They consumed too much milk.
They did.

But that wasn't really Master Sweep's Hall's point. What he wanted to do instead was beat the chimney sweep for complaining.

Then, I suppose, as a compromise, he sent the sweep up a different chimney whose fire had been shut off a few hours before, because that one might be a little bit cooler.

Like, fawn, if a baby wants to complain, go up the other chimney. Go up the other one.
It's on medium.

It's easier to scrape it off when it's already hot.

Get up there, boy.

Now, again, the orphan said that this other flu was still hot enough to, quote, bake a joint of meat.

But Master Sweet Paul insisted. So instead of suffering through another beating, the orphan climbed up the chimney and began scraping.

After an hour, though, the baker's wife heard the orphan boy crying. She again offered to help, but again, Master Sweet Paul said, don't help him.
Nope.

And eventually, the crying stopped, which was always a bad sign in the chimney sweep world. If the child was crying, at the very least, you knew he was still alive.

When the silence came, another climbing boy joined in and tried coaxing the orphan down with beer. There was, of course, no answer and no movement.

This caused extreme distress to the baker and his wife, who were starting to realize that it was probably the corpse of a teenage boy stuck in their walls.

Master Sweep Hall, however, kept insisting that the orphan was fine, just a lazy sod, probably taking a nap in there. You know how boars are in cramped spice and standing so relaxed.

I don't know how many times I've had a boy fall asleep in a chimney. My dude, and the opportunity to miss work.

Just like a nice baker who loves his family.

He just wants the chimney clean.

Just sit there and watch this guy murder kids in his own house. And

not clean the chimney. So it's like, it's both.
You set it up there. He He fucked it up by trying to do it early.
They did it as all. Also, the chimney could even get clean, bro.
Now, that's true.

This guy did have to get the chimney cleaned eventually. Yeah.
Yeah. And now you got to clean it even double because it's buoyant.

Yeah, he's making food there. Yeah.

Well, after much arguing, the baker finally grabbed a poker himself and began chipping away at the brick to try and rescue the sweep.

By the time he broke through, the orphan was, of course, long dead. As it turned out, the heat had been so great in the flu that the orphan's skin had stuck to the sides.
Gotta clean that now, too.

And the body was so tightly stuck that the original builder of the chimney had to be called out to properly deconstruct it just so they could remove the body. Just leave it there.

Just leave it. It's empty there.
Yeah, for a second, I thought the boy changed his name to Long Dead.

But while you'd hope this would have been a rare occurrence, the deconstruction of chimneys to remove the dead body of a chimney sweep was unfortunately a fairly common occurrence in the world of chimneys and chimney sweeps.

I actually, I don't know if it was. I just, I really wonder at this moment, I wonder if that was like part of the service list for a bricklayer.

It costs 20 shillings to remove a boy. I just feel like it's one of those where you're just fucking up the chimney.
Well, they are because they have, well, they can't pull the boy out.

They have to, they have to. It happens again.
Like, I read so many stories of them having to dismantle the chimney just to get the corpse out.

And then they rebuild the chimney, and I guess that makes a new customer. Yeah, it does.
Imagine this happened so many times that this goes from depressing to annoying.

You'll build

often. Yeah.
Now, chimney sweeps held a paradoxical position in British society.

While they were reviled as filthy, disease-ridden members of the lowest rung of society, it was also considered good luck to have a chimney sweep at your wedding.

Because there was a legend where a a chimney sweep had saved the king,

saved his horse. It's a whole thing.
But yeah,

for a while, you always want to have a chimney sweep at the wedding. But you don't want to talk to him.
No.

No. Social reformers also saw sweeps as the purest symbols of the suffering of the lower classes.
And some chimney sweeps had even become romantic figures of legend in British history.

Amongst sweeps, the most famous was the notorious highwayman and adventurer John Coddington.

Born in 1604, John John Coddington was the youngest of 19 children. Jesus Christ.
Born to an alcoholic haberdasher. Yep.

When Coddington's father drank himself to death when John was just eight years old, his family apprenticed him, which means sold him, to become a chimney sweep.

Now, Coddington was quite good at chimney sweeping, and by the age of 13, he'd even started his own chimney sweep business. He'd also inherited his father's alcoholism.

It had come to be known by the name of Mold Sack, after his favorite drink. Sack is wine, by the way, but wine sold by the sackful, hence sack.
Yeah, they used to drink wine out of leather. Yeah.

Oh, yes.

It's interesting. Yeah.

You know, I find I was like the idea of like there were so many chimney sweeps that did get good at it that when they got good at it, that's got to be a whole other level of game

within it because then it's all like, oh, I don't know how I'm doing it. That's how you become a master sweep.
It is how you become a master sweep. It's the only way.

You got to have that sort of a, I think you have to have a fearlessness. And there there is, it's that sort of thing.
Nihilism. Like, well, like, you know how

they say, like, a lot of firefighters and surgeons are sociopaths because they're able to turn it off.

I think it's the same thing with chimney sweeps: is that in order to not freak out while you're in there, you do have to be able to, you just have to have nothing going on inside.

Now, were they paid or were they just like they were paid? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. They were, they were paid.
Would they sleep in their homes or would they sleep with the other chimney sweeps? With the usually the master sweep would kind of of take care of the sweeps

to the best of his abilities.

Usually he's not very good at it. That's a nice way to say it.

Throw him in a barn is another way to say it.

Now as the years went by, John Coddington was allegedly drawn into a life of crime by what a book says was a quote well-known hermaphrodite. Now I guess intersex is the name today that we would use.

Okay, good. Named Aniseed Water Robin, because I suppose everyone in the 17th century was named after their favorite drink.
Oh, well.

But once John became notorious as a criminal, he lost his chimney contracts and devoted himself fully to becoming a highwayman, robbing wealthy Brits as they traveled from estate to estate.

Before long, John Coddington was the most successful and wealthy highwayman of his era, which I'm sure was a great inspiration to all the chimney sweeps who came after him.

It's like people who work background in movies and think that one day they'll give me a line and I'm going to get out there. And it does happen every once in a while.
Every once in a while, yeah.

Eventually, though, Coddington fell in love love with a wealthy woman and murdered her husband four years into the affair.

But what got him in the end was when he stole a silver plate worth over $250,000 in today's money from King Charles II.

Laura, the former chimney sweep, had previously bribed every jury who'd tried him for crimes in the past.

Stealing from the king was apparently worse than murder, and it was for the theft of the plate that the most famous chimney sweep of his time was hanged at the age of 55. Damn!

Old for a chimney sweep. Very old for a chimney sweep.

A chimney sweep and criminal. Yeah.
Do you think chimney sweeps from back then are kind of like our modern-day pool boys?

Well, that's what I'm saying.

That's what I say. The idea of like ARA, there's something about them, maybe.
Maybe. I mean, they're out there.
They're plunging holes. They're working hard.
Yeah.

Now, like John Coddington, most climbing boys in 18th and 19th century England were children of the working class, kids either sold into indentured servitude or merely given away to master sweeps for a so-called apprenticeship.

One master sweep, Master Sweep Rough of Nottingham, declared that the best age for a climbing boy was six because six-year-olds were easily trained and small enough to climb into any British flu.

There's always more six-year-olds out there. Oh, yeah, see, they're easy to make.
Yeah, size was, of course, extremely important. The smaller the child, the better.
No fatties.

And even shape became a factor. Master Sweeps actually had a crew of kids with a variety of head shapes to fit different sized flutes.
I want to do this.

So the big-headed kids and the fat kids lived. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly.

Just eat yourself out to safety. Or the kids with the big head might also starve to death in a workhouse.
Oh, okay. Yeah.
Then the fat kids. You don't want to know what happened to fat kids.

Yeah, sometimes. Comedy, you know, you throw fruit at them.
Oh, yeah.

Honestly, I think most people saw a fat little child and they assumed it it was a full-grown man. Yeah.

But since a master sweep needed a variety in his band of child slaves, some master sweeps would regularly travel from village to village to collect children that were small enough to fit into the flus.

One, Johann Keisler, was so notorious for collecting children that he was said to be the inspiration for the Pied Piper of Hamlin story. Oh, God.

Yeah, God.

They're all doing it because they also, they'll just steal them, too. They will just steal them.

Yeah, but most of them, but I think they didn't want the heat of stealing children as much because the kid might run back. You never know.

They did like to usually get them through, you know, legal means. Or bribery.
Yeah, bribery. What was it? The one thing they said, beware of sweets? Yeah.

That was the other thing that, because I did not know that we always had, you know, we grew up with Stranger Danger. Yeah.

But in this time period, there was a common, I forgot what the actual refrain was, but the idea of be careful of candy from strangers because sometimes it turns into you're going to be a fucking climbing boy that's pretty cool you know the pied piper guy you know i'm thinking about this a bag of rats could really do the same job as a chimney sweep honestly

and probably harder to catch though yeah yeah and then if you've let one get away then you've introduced a rat into but if you partner with the exterminator but then plague plague

yeah

you know no one wants to be around rats now since chimney sweeps were kids it's only natural that climbing boys developed their own slang throughout the centuries.

Large chimneys were called wide holes, while small flus were either notchy holes or bare nines because they were only nine inches wide.

In the chimney sweep world, shoes were stamps, clothes were tuggery, toilets were jakes, scuffed was a name for the police, sting-o was strong ale, and to mizzle meant to run away.

So if one were to travel back in time to hear a sweep tell a story, you might hear them say, After some stinghouse, I lost my stamps and taggery on the jikes when the skata showed up and all we all had the measles.

That's cute as fucking chat. I love sweep shit.

I love that shit, dude. Sweep talking is really, really fun.
I've just, I've been saying that over and over again the last couple of days. The skata showed up, we all had the measles.

It's so much fun to do.

Yeah, we all had the measle. Snoop Dogg would have been a great chimney sweep.

So thin,

always saying miszel or something. He's a fucking serpent-shaped man.

He's got a thin head, too. Love smoke.
Yeah. Ah, he'd be great.
He missed his calling. Yeah.

He should have died in a chimney.

Now, being a climbing boy meant that one had to have considerable strength and agility because these kids were forced to climb up and down flues with their elbows and legs spread out with their feet pressing up against the sides.

This, of course, was without any gear or equipment.

So, to get the boys ready to climb, Master Sweeps developed intense and torturous training regimens to essentially make the climbing boy's body a tool unto itself.

See, while the more humane Master might give their sweeps knee and ankle pads, most Master Sweeps trained their children by turning their bodies into pads themselves.

Master Sweeps would vigorously rub elbows and knees with the strongest brine until they were skinned and would continue rubbing these areas until calluses were formed.

All right there now we're seeing your bones. All right, now we're making them nice and odd, getting their passes soft.
See that? You could hit that boy's knee with a hammer.

And sometimes this skin-hardening process would continue for years.

Oh, yeah. But to give the climbing boys real-life experience, before their first sweep, sweeps would be forced to climb up and down the same chimney multiple times.

times with no other purpose but to induce more friction on their already bleeding elbows and knees. Gotta get them calluses up, gotta get them used to being in the hole.

Well, that's what they said, according to one master sweep, that the idea of padding, that's what they called it, padding them, was, you know, at the time, it was, they were all like, oh, sure, yeah, we pad them every once in a while, but they viewed it as a, uh, that it would kind of fucked with the actual ability of the chimney sweep.

Kind of like what we talked about with the big domes on top of the football helmets. Yeah.
Right? Like the idea that like it helps, but it only mitigates and it looks kind of stupid.

They viewed it as that. They're like, chimney sweeps don't need that shit.
What you need to do is they do their house. They have a house chimney that they have to go up at least 20 times.

And then when they go up and down, and then the blood, if they see blood on them, they specifically send them right back up because they're like, you got to call us over. Yeah.
That makes sense.

You burn it until you stop bleeding. And they ramble.
Yeah, they just scream and scream and scream and scream. Plus, if they're up there with the pads on their knees and their elbows.
They might slip.

Or they melt. Then you got to buy new pads.
New pads. You know? So you really are.
You're born to be a master sweep. You should have been.
You really have to be a master sweep.

You really should have been. You might have been in a lot in a past life.
I don't know. I could see it.
I could see that. Get on up there, boy.

Actually, Marcus, you look like you would be a good little sweep yourself. I would have been an incredible sweep.
Yeah.

I was such a tiny boy, and I loved climbing.

I was too chunky, man. I was out of the game, dog.

Oh, yeah. Now, part of the reason why the training was so rigorous was because chimney sweeping was indeed incredibly dangerous, and not just because of the obvious risk of falling to their death.

That, however, is not to say that falling deaths weren't common. Many sweeps died while cleaning the decorative chimney pots on the chimney top.

Those chimney pots would often fall from the stack with the climbing boy inside and create a sort of boy bomb that could also kill a passerby on the street.

Falling, however, was the quick death, a mercy, for the fate of the climbing boy was often far worse than that.

See, flus with sharp turns or flus that turned back on themselves due to bad engineering often became death traps for inexperienced climbing boys.

Soot accumulated heavily on the hidden ledges and crevices of these flues, and if a climbing boy didn't know what he was doing, he could compress the soot and get himself stuck.

Panic would then ensue, which would lead to the boy inhaling vast amounts of soot that would get dusted up from his struggle, eventually leading to suffocation.

But besides compressed soot, a boy could also get stuck if a flu changed width. A climbing boy might descend down into a chimney, but would have no idea how the flu changed in size as he went down.

Because remember, it's not, it's 17th century, 18th century. No flashlights, and sure as fuck, no fire, no candles.
They're going down there into the pitch black. They have no idea what's happening.

It's all by feel. And sometimes, this kid's legs would get wedged in a smaller section of the flue, making it impossible to climb back up.

And if that happened, the only thing to do was to send a second climbing boy down

with a rope in the hopes that the second boy could tie a rope around the stuck boy and pull him free.

Sometimes, however, the hours of vigorous tugging that came afterward would be the very thing that killed the climbing boy. It's hard.
Yeah. You know what I'm saying?

It's just because the neck is still a boy's neck. Yeah.
He's just got a man's arms and legs, I'm thinking it's more than four things can kill a boy. Go through so many things.

And so, if the boy could not be pulled from the chimney, the chimney itself, as I said, would have to be dismantled.

Although oftentimes, the boy was already long dead, and the whole thing was treated more like an exterminator fishing a dead cat out of a wall. Is that who you call? Yeah.
Oh, yeah. Exterminator?

Yeah. Anytime there's something dead in the wall, you call the exterminator.
They know how to get it out. They know how to get things out of walls.

And they know how to crawl under your house in a way that frightens me.

I wouldn't do that.

But to demonstrate how quickly a boy could die before the chimney could be dismantled, let's visit the story of Thomas Pitt. That's a great name for a chimney sweep.
Incredible. Tommy Pitt.
Yeah.

In 1813, Thomas Pitt, eight years old, was sent down the chimney of a brew house in London by his master. Another great name, Master Sweep Griggs.

Griggs and Pitt arrived at the brew house at 8 a.m., but the fire in the brewhouse's hearth was still burning and had been burning for about six hours.

Like the last story, Master Sweep Griggs figured, it'll be fine.

But since the chimney was smaller than typical, too small for even an eight-year-old boy, Griggs removed tiles from the roof and had Pitt descend into the chimney rather than climb up from the ground floor.

I ain't a bad guy.

When we started the top, we'd be kind of cooler.

And maybe you get towards the moment, we get towards the bottom, and maybe you won't be as bad. I don't care.
Fuck you.

Griggs does seem to be the sort of, like, there's some that are kind of in the middle that are still sending children into incredibly dangerous situations. But it's like, I don't want him to die.

He doesn't want him to die. Like, there's a couple.

There was one story you have talked about, a master sweep, where he, like, he'd acquired a boy, and he said that, like, somehow the master sweep was looking at the boy, and he's like, I think I'm going to adopt him instead.

Yeah. And they're like, I think he's got too much of a personality to be a chimney sweep.

Like, every once in a while, they'll see like a Shirley Temple,

like a Dick Van Dyke.

Hey, that governor, are you ready for a song from Penny? Like, and then they're like, Should we kill him?

Should we destroy that one? That saved chimney sweep became Jimmy Savage.

Well, since the fire here had only been extinguished just before Pitt and Griggs arrived, the chimney was still incredibly hot, and Pitt suffered the consequences.

After Griggs realized that something was wrong, he called down to this climbing boy, and in what I heard in my head is the voice of Dobby the House Health, he replied, I cannot come up, Master.

I must die here.

I must die here, Mr. Pot.
Master Potter, I'm sorry, I cannot come up. You're depressing me.

Go back to the silence of your death.

At least he remembered his last words. Oh, yeah, then I see.

No, because his last words were... Ah!

But as opposed to Master Sweep Hall, Master Sweep Griggs took Pitt's words seriously and called for a bricklayer to rush out to the brew house so he could break open the chimney wall to save the eight-year-old climbing boy.

He rushed. But once the chimney was open, Pitt Pitt was, of course, long dead.
The fleshy part of his legs and feet were scorched, while his elbows and knees had been burned to the bone.

We don't know what punishment, if any, Master Grigg suffered, but the most common charge in cases like this was manslaughter, which, unfortunately, usually only came with a small fine.

Well, it was a larger fine by their age, you know.

That was actually boy slaughter.

Getting stuck in the maze of narrow flues did seem to be the worst and most common way for a climbing boy to go.

Here's a quote from an unknown chimney sweep in what seems like the 18th century version of Softwhite Underbelly. I never got stuck myself, but many of them did, yes, and were taken out dead.

They were smothered for want of air and the fright

and staying so long in the flow.

You see the waistband of their trousers sometimes get turned down in the climbing, and the narrow flues would not be able to get up. And they stuck.

That last part of the quote alluded to another common death.

Once the sweep's clothes got stuck, the sweep would often die from either severe pressure being put on the spine or by strangulation when their own shirts would twist around their necks.

That's when your tuggery becomes a fluggery. Yeah, that's why they call it tuggery.
As such, many chimney sweeps were forced or chose to go up and down the chimneys completely new.

I arrived to the workplace, dude.

How you doing? Name's Tommy Johns. I'm four years old.
I'll be your chimney sweep. Yeah.

Don't be too scared, all right? You guys have all seen it before. You guys toddlers.

Okay, let's go. Let's go in there.

Quit looking at me. Yeah, you've seen a naked toddler before.
We've seen a naked toddler covered in grime.

This is presumably so as to lessen the risk of them getting a piece of clothing fatally caught. Now, it was estimated that there were several hundred master sweeps in 18th century London.

From what I could tell, the average master sweep had one or two teenage boys as journeyman sweeps and one or two climbing boys as young as four years old.

Although, you know, it's like seven to ten for a climbing boy, ten to fourteen for a journeyman.

Although the more successful sweeps, the ones who catered to the wealthy, they had far bigger crews than that. They might have anywhere between six and eight sweeps.

They probably had better chimneys, too. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, sure. They might even, I bet you at that point, you, there are regular chimney sweeps and there are quote-unquote good chimneys.

Well, those chimneys, actually, if it was a wealthy house, it was a far more dangerous job. Really?

Yes, because the wealthy houses had a fireplace in every single room, and these flues had to be built to all go out of like one chimney.

Uh, so the wealthier houses were actually the far more dangerous ones. Wow, yeah, I want to see a version of Christmas Carol where there's just like a boy dying in Scrooge's walls the whole time.

Hey, anybody

talking about there. I really don't want to be the close of Christmas present.

I know a really good way you could save yourself right now

is if you just, there's an active way for you to do something really nice

right now.

Yeah, I mean, now it's not.

Fuck me.

Absolutely no way. But I'm going to pay for a new tummy on Christmas.

Now, when a master sweep had no contracts, he would roam the streets streets calling out, quote, Sweep, sort, sweep for your sort.

And his younger climbing boys would, of course, follow, chirping, chimney sweep, chimney sweep, until someone stuck their head out of their window and said, Come on up and sweep, my soot.

Sweep, sort, sweep for your sort. Master sweeps, however, were not sacrificing children in such large numbers and in such brutal ways for any great sum of money.

Nor was there some corporation representing big chimney with a network of sweeps. Minus labor costs, an average master master sweep profited only a hundred pounds a year in the 18th century.

I'm a bad businessman.

Compared to today's wages, that meant that a master sweep would make about as much as a part-time Uber driver, but with the understanding that one would be directly responsible for the torturous deaths of many children over the course of one's Uber career.

You know, there's so many ways to get paid besides a salary.

I just love eliminating boys because I was one and I didn't like him then.

So these were the good old days. Yes, yes, yes.
When they say, like, make things great again, this is when we want to go back to it. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Make it to where all the children can just be killed whenever. Yeah.
And no one cares. And no one gets paid anything except for the very rich.
But you can be very rich.

Maybe. Maybe.

I just want to be a master sweep.

And you know what, Eddie? I think you can. I think you can bring it back.
I can chimney in my own.

Live from your blade.

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Now, master sweeps would often beat their climbing boys if they refused to climb a flue.

But if a sweep was already in the chimney but refused to go further, some master sweeps would bend the no-fire rule we mentioned earlier.

So while the rule said you couldn't send a kid into a burning chimney, there was no rule that said you couldn't light a fire after the kid was already inside.

And so if a climbing boy refused to continue upward, a master sweep would set a fire in the fireplace to force him further up. This no shit is the origin of the phrase to light a fire under someone.

Wow, fun.

Endless accounts exist of children falling into said fire where they were severely burned and sometimes died after several days of agony.

This, of course, was only one way in which a climbing boy could die after a fire was lit under him.

In 1827, a master sweep named Jay Holgate lit a fire when a climbing boy got his brush stuck in the flue. Holgate figured the boy was just lolligagging, so he lit a fire to scare him out.

And after the predictable silence came, another climbing boy was sent in where he discovered the charred corpse of his compatriot we got ourselves a marshmallow

another one

i pick him out

do you mind if i eat his feet first

i was listening to another like piece of court footage from master sweeps and i do find it interesting is that one of the big things when they were trying to fix all this is that they were asking one of these master sweeps like so the common practice of lighting fires under boys as they go up to how common was that And each sweep was like, I've never heard of such a practice.

Yeah. We would never, we would just really tell them, you better go up in there.

And that was that, that's all we needed to do.

They all were like, yeah, you give them a couple of racks, you give a couple of swaps in there, but mostly you just go to threaten to send them back to the workhouse. Yeah.

And then they go right up that chimney, don't they? They were like, they're like,

they were talking like that in this, in the in court. Yeah.

And they were like, every chimney sweep we've spoken to says that you stab them in the feet to go up the thing you set fire and you beat them and you think you're gonna kill them and then you and they're all like i have no idea what you're talking about prove it

oh they gone

i imagine if you light a fire under them too like wouldn't they suffocate uh yes

yeah well that's what actually what happened to this boy probably they didn't do an autopsy uh but he probably died from carbon monoxide poisoning first and then his body was charred by the fire.

Man, they must have waited a long time if he got charred. They did wait a long time, yeah.

Unless it's a high temperature, that's also sometimes, you know, because then you can get the proper myard effect.

Now, sending another climbing boy in after the first was a fairly common occurrence in the chimney sweep world, but it was not usually for encouragement.

Instead, older climbing boys used techniques just as cruel as their masters to get the younger ones to comply.

Many times, if a younger climbing boy got scared and stuck, a larger boy would be sent up after him to stick pins in his feet to get him to continue upward through the twisting, pitch-black maze ahead.

That, of course, meant that the climbing boys often weren't wearing shoes.

And since this was mostly a winter job, chimney sweeps also often died from hypothermia due to insufficiently warm clothing, as I mentioned earlier, also from sometimes doing the job naked.

That, however, did not mean that summer was a time of fun and frolic for the climbing boys either. No, Marcus, give them a break.
I would love to, but London didn't.

During the hot summer months, mini sweeps worked as nightmen. Nightmen emptied shit in piss-filled privies and chamber pots into the Thames River day after stinking day.

That's what happened to that river. Yeah, man.
It cleans it up now.

Yeah, well, the only reason why London has a sewage system is because in the 1830s, I think, maybe 1840s, sometime in the 19th century you know the Thames runs right by Parliament and you know the House of Lords and the House of Commons were getting quite sick of the entire government house smelling like shit and piss constantly from so much shit and piss being put into the Thames so they put in sewer systems we should try that yeah we should we really should

But in the nightman profession, two chimney sweeps, moonlighting, would enter a home at night carrying the two ends of a long pole with a large bucket attached to the center.

Feces and urine were emptied into the bucket from chamber pots, and the kids would haul bucket after bucket of human waste out of the same houses where they might possibly die when the next winter came.

It's a tough job, but it gets easier every day you do it. You know, you just get used to it.
And sometimes it's kind of nice knowing what your heaven's going to be.

It's going to be that chimney you look at two times a week.

As I mentioned earlier, chimney sweeps were often the cause celeb for social reformers during the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th century.

Yeah, that was like a, because they were a great symbol of that, right?

Yeah. Well, you always

saw chimney sweeps. And, you know, of course, if you're, if you are a social reformer, usually that meant you had a lot of money.

And if you had a lot of money, that meant that you had chimney sweeps in and out of your house all the time. Like jockeys.
Yeah.

Yeah, you know how I keep those guys.

Those three guys you keep around by waiting for a horse. Yeah.
Well, this is when chimney sweeps and child labor were at a high watermark in England.

As such, legislation was often passed trying to protect chimney sweeps, but that legislation was, for hundreds of years, either half-hearted, watered down, or unenforced.

For example, Parliament tried passing an act in 1788 that specified that the minimum age for apprentice sweeps should be eight years old. Now, that's a law.
Yeah.

They also ruled that no master sweep should have more than six apprentices, and that a master sweep was responsible for the feeding and clothing of his climbing boys.

Master sweeps were to be licensed. It was actually written down that the children couldn't climb into a chimney that was actively on fire.

And chimney calling hours, where the sweeps could call for business in the street, were limited to 7 a.m. to noon in the winter and 5 a.m.
to noon in the summer.

Well, at least they get off after lunch. Yeah, they get more.
No, no, no, no. This is not them working.

This is them walking down the street going, chimney sweep, chimney sweep, salut, sweep, sort, sweep, soot. Yeah.
Because it is annoying for them to do it all day. That's what it is.

Well, that's the thing, is that once the bill passed through the hands of several legislators, most of the regulations protecting sweeps were removed, including the one saying that kids couldn't be sitting to a burning chimney.

The only resolution that passed out of all the protections was the one saying that they couldn't call out for business because it was super fucking annoying. Oh, there we go.
Yeah.

Which told you what Parliament was most interested in. But as more stories of climbing boys dying in horrible ways were printed in the papers, people began forming groups trying to protect them.

The most well-known, founded in 1803, was the terribly named Society for Superseding the Necessity of Climbing Boys, or the SSNCB.

I just hate it when this is like, this is why annoying people should not be in charge of

people with really great intentions with no ability.

The SSNCB encouraged master sweeps to switch to machine cleaning and as an incentive offered a reward of 50 pounds to the first master sweep who could prove that he cleaned 300 chimneys by purely mechanical means without using children.

But in the end, people simply preferred the labor of small boys because the mechanical systems didn't work quite as well as a child worked. Do you know anybody still with a fax machine?

It's kind of the same thing, but one involves living boys. Yeah, but we still have postal workers.
We do. Yeah.
Yeah.

But while there was no big chimney blocking legislation or killing the development of mechanical sweeps, there was a familiar villain keeping children in the flus.

That villain, of course, was the insurance companies.

They considered dirty flus to be a fire hazard, and since the insurance companies did not deem the mechanical methods to be satisfactory, England as a whole continued to decrease the surplus population by sending more boys to die while sweeping their chimneys.

They just

considering those a loss. Yeah.
Well, yeah, we'll make more boys. I mean, it's, are they not not workhouses? Oh, they're not workhouses.

I tell you what, you almost set me off when you said dirty flues.

In 1834, a 10-year-old chimney sweep named Valentine Gray, that's my favorite chimney sweep name, was beaten by his master and his master's daughter.

That's my favorite boy.

Beaten by his master and left for dead in an outhouse outside of a pub in the Isle of Wight. Valentine Gray had been killed by a massive blow to the head for failing to properly clean a chimney.

And like so many master sweeps before, Gray's master was found guilty of manslaughter. In this case, the master sweep was only fined one shilling, the modern equivalent of four

dollars, a symbolic amount, which totaled most, but not all, of the day's wages. The master sweep's daughter, meanwhile, spent a month in prison, but not for killing the boy.

Instead, the obviously unstable master sweep's daughter was put away for attacking a witness in court during the inquiry. That's fucking awesome.

That's her, man. She's got to be a fuck.
That's a crazy person, right? Tell me I can't kill a boy.

Well, it's because they been also for a while and they were trying to, because there would be some girls.

Every once in a while there would be a girl, but for the most part, they preferred boys.

And some of them actually were trying to say, like, it was just one of these funny things where, again, backwards good thinking where someone's like, maybe there should be more girls so it can be spread to the girls.

They're skinny, the girls can go up. And they're all and like, but some of them are all like, nah, we don't like the girls.

No one likes putting the girls up there. They complain.
No, it's harder to hit a little girl than it is a little boy.

Is it?

I don't know if it is. I'm not actually like physically harder, just emotionally.
Emotionally harder. I don't think it is for these guys.

Sometimes. I think that's the problem, though, with Trump.
That's the master sweep, I guarantee.

No little

or hit the little girls less than the boys. I hit them, but it's less.

I hate to say it, but I do think that sometimes, and this might be a jump, because I don't want to malign the characters on any of these master sweeps. Of course, yeah.

But I do feel like sometimes if a little girl gets involved, they become Mrs. Master Sweep.
That could also be a possibility. Yeah.
That's what I'd do if I was a master sweep. I bet you would.

Just to raise them up.

Get her knees hard.

But since the death of Valentine Gray had been so brutal and so cold, and since the punishment had been so paltry, Valentine Gray's death sparked a social movement.

Valentine Gray even became sort of the symbol of chimney sweeps in England.

He was immortalized in a wax museum centuries later in an exhibit that was said to give British children nightmares for decades on end. Could you please describe the wax figure for the people?

I gotta say, for a chimney sweep made out of wax, surprise is not melting.

I

look at this. The character looks like he looks like Andrew Garfield.
Yeah. He is too handsome to be a chimney sweep.
He's very handsome. And this is the no-chimney sweep look like this.

Yeah, and he's not, he's wearing clothes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That should be a naked, hunch-backed, no-toothed.

Yeah, his hair would be burnt off. Yeah, that would not be.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's not.

This should make kids feel good. good.
That's not my Valentine Gray.

But after Gray's death, Parliament passed the Chimney Sweeps and Climbing Boys Act of 1834, which mandated that a chimney sweep had to be at least 10 years old to do the job.

It wasn't a lot, but it was progress. Toddlers pulling up the fucking ladder.
Peter Dickler.

But what's incredible here is that despite the alarming frequency of climbing boy deaths, they actually died with the same frequency as most trades that used child labor in the Victorian era.

It just seems like chimney sweeps died the worst deaths. It wasn't like fall into a bunch of gears where you kind of die pretty quickly.
At least you die quickly.

If you fall into a vat of oil, you die pretty quickly. You fall headfirst.
Yeah, you actually get there. Yeah, you get eaten by pigs.
That's going to be pretty fast if you're a small child. Yeah.

Yeah.

Cute. Yeah.

But a chimney sweep, they might be stuck screaming for hours before they died, burning alive. It's a lot of really awful deaths.

And it wasn't just the chimney itself or even the wrath of their master sweep that could be fatal.

Even if a chimney sweep survived the years climbing through the twisting, narrow flues of London, they still had to contend with what came to be known as soot warts in their later years.

Soot warts were a sure sign of sweepers cancer, which was very unfortunately always located square in the scrotum. Yeah, man.
Oh, that sucks. And it's bad.

It was because, like, but also it's like one of those cancers, right, that you can cut out. Yeah.
Right. You can cut it out.
But then they would try to bring these chimney sweeps in.

I was reading about that. And they'd have these like giant tumors growing on their balls.
And they'd go in them to do the procedure. There's no anesthetic.
There's nothing. No.

And then just the liquor. They could handle a lot of surgeries, but when they start trying to go at your balls with it, they just like, they were like, I'll die.

I'd rather die yeah just fucking don't don't try it yeah i saw what you did to my teeth now

sweeper cancer sounds like a really like cute way to say sleeper cancer yeah but yeah but it's a sweeper cancer oh it just a sweepoo cancer it is a sweeper cancer just make you oh you know sometimes oh yeah that kid he's just so he's so tucked out he's talked about alpha multiplying these cancers week week it's wee-wee wheelie tired

this cancer was first identified by a surgeon named Sir Percival Pott, who was the first person to identify that a cancer could be caused by an environmental carcinogen that made Sweeper's cancer the first recorded occupational cancer in history.

Good work, guys. Yeah.

Three tasks for the Industrial Revolution. Hey! Was Ted Kaczynski right? Only time will tell.
We'll find out.

Now, Sir Percival Pott, who also had a tumor named after him called Potts Puffy Tumor. Sounds like a disease from the Harry Potter world.

I don't think it is. Ron, I'm sorry, but your father is dying from Potts' puffy tumor.
Oh, thank God. Does that mean the little worms will come out of it?

Yeah.

He did try to make these boys. That's adorable.
He tried. He's very British.
Yeah. Well, often the scrotal warts that would appear, these sores, they would appear around puberty amongst climbing boys.

Once the sores appeared, the disease was progressive and severe, reaching the membranes of the scrotum and invading the testicle, causing it it to become enlarged, hardened, and severely diseased.

Horribly, the soot wart was often misdiagnosed as syphilis, because they didn't know what it was, but they sure as hell know what a syphilitic testicle looked like.

Back then, of course, syphilis was treated with mercury, and this would often result in chimney sweeps also developing a condition called mercurial mouth.

As if the scrotal cancer wasn't bad enough, the sweep's mouth would fall into a state of foul ulceration because of the mercury treatments.

The skin and flesh would begin to slough off, eventually resulting in the destruction of the entire jaw for no reason whatsoever. But they give you that little romantic kick of like when he

starts coming in, you can be like,

quick, kiss me quick, because my kisser ain't known for the world.

And like, how, like, that's kind of sexy and kind of like fun. Yeah, a little bit.
It's like you're going to war. So, how many times have you heard syphilis described as sexy and fun?

I'm just saying at the time, I feel like syphilis.

You feel like at the time, like, almost, I wonder, this is a question for people. Side stories, lpotl at gmail.com.

I actually wonder if sometimes those things were considered a badge of someone that was a Lothario and that they would go to burn them off when they would do the thing and it would become like a sign of someone that was a big fucker.

It was not. Syphilis was seen as a completely ostracizing type thing.

If you started showing syphilis, it didn't matter what level of society you were on, even if you were in high society, you would be shunned completely once you started showing any signs of syphilis.

It was seen as dirty and horrible. Tuberculosis, though, that's something different.
That was like sexy and mysterious.

Yeah, if you developed tuberculosis, it was seen as because it did make you look more attractive. They call it the poet's disease.
It was a consumption.

Very, yeah, tuberculosis is different, but syphilis, yeah, no one, no one romanticized that. Yeah, and gonorrhea was the second best area

after diarrhea. Thank you.
So diarrhea, so I guess diarrhea is the best. Okay, so Donorrhea is second best.

Just Rhea Rhea. No one wants that.
Yeah, Rhea Perlman. Give her Perlin.
She's fourth, unfortunately.

Sad. Can't believe Danny DeVito went back.

Well, as far as why chimney sweeps got specifically scrotal cancer, one doctor surmised that it was caused by the friction between the soot and the skin, and the scrotal region was more affected because it was much sweatier than the other areas of the body.

The fact that some of them also went up the flu nude only allowed more soot soot to gather in the scrotal area.

And of course, the soot would become impacted within the wounds, which greatly increased the risk of cancer.

As a result, former chimney sweeps between the ages of 30 and 40 had far higher rates of cancer than any other profession, especially in the scrotal area.

In one horrific case, a 35-year-old former chimney sweep claimed that he'd been cutting his own soot warts off his scrotum continuously since he was 15 years old.

Really, honestly, these are just gutter punks.

Like, this is just that stuff. These are the guys that lived with us

in Tallahassee. Like, they're just fucking insane people.
If I had

soot warts on my balls, I'd probably cut them off. Well, at this point,

you were as good as the guy doing it. I guess I'd already be long dead by now.
Yeah. You really would be.
Yeah, too old. Yeah, you'd aged out.
Yeah. Well, you might have made it.

Not for a master, though.

Who knows?

Well, finally, after the high-profile suffocation death of a chimney sweep named George Brewster in 1875, another chimney sweep act was passed trying to outlaw child chimney sweep labor altogether.

The 1875 law was the precedent for the laws of the 1880s, which mandated that British children had to be in school until the age of 10, which did quite a bit to lessen child labor.

And because of those laws, George Brewster was the last climbing boy to die on the job.

And ever since, Santa Claus has graciously agreed to clean the chimneys of good little boys and girls once a year, which is all that is needed, while bad children and childless couples are forced to risk certain death by accidental fire should we choose to use our chimneys this Christmas season.

Oh, what a wonderful

Ronnie Gene Simmons episode like this too? Yeah, it's the thing. This is all Christmas.
Yeah,

it's it's Christmas.

It's Christmas.

Honestly, I don't know how to use my chimney. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm afraid of my chimney. Yeah.
Yeah.

And you have to actually, in order to use my chimney, I have to call the fire department and have them like come like fix it. Yeah, that's like what I need to do.
You're supposed to go.

And it is now like, because it's the opposite. Now the chimney guy, because we met a chimney guy, they are extremely expensive.
Extremely expensive. And a lot of them are grifters.
Oh, very much so.

Yeah, very, because they don't, because because nobody knows anything about chimneys. So they just tell you anything.
Just some chimney guy. Who the won't we go back?

Exactly.

If only we could go back. That's why Pig Pen was so dirty.
Wow. Honestly.

Wow, we learned a lot. And we are going to do, we got one more week left till we all sleep for our two-week break.
We're going to do, but we have one more little episode coming up.

And then

we're going to give 2025 a big kiss. Good night.

Go to fuck to sleep.

Go to sleep. Suck out your ass, 2025.
But until then, patreon.com slash last podcast and left. You can give money to watch us do this shit.
You can also go and see us live like this coming Tuesday.

You can come see us live stream on the left at 6 p.m. PST.
You can see us through the Patreon do our little Christmas. Christmas send-off for the rest of the year this Tuesday.
Y'all.

Yes. Also, come see us on the road next year in 2026.
January 31st, we're going to be in Philadelphia at the Met.

February 28th, Austin, Texas at the Paramount Theater. March 13th, Indianapolis at the Egyptian Room.
April 25th, Cincinnati, Ohio Taft Theater.

May 29th, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Music Hall of Oakland.

June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, the GLC Live at 20 Monroe. July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Kane's Ballroom.

July 18th, Oklahoma City Oklahoma at the Tower Theater and then I'm also going to be in Oxstar California on January 4th with Julia Johns Carolina Hidelgo Holden McNeely and Jake Young that's going to be a bunch of fun so come see us out there at Levity live on January 4th I love you

And if you need some last-minute stocking stuffers, don't forget about Spring Heel Jack Coffee and buy some of the great coffee we got for sale over there, Butterfly Dudes Blue Eye Blend and Reptilian in the Morning.

Both very good. Both wonderful blends that I drink every day myself.
Very, I feel like they would have, if they had shoes, it would have been more productive for them. The children? Yeah.
Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think there's something about, there's like the toes where you can scrape with the toes.

Oh, yeah. That's the thing.
It's actually easier with toes. Yeah, and you got to be able to like grab on with the toes.

There's still like that little monkey thing left where you grab on with the toes.

Kids are so strong in weird ways. They really are.
And again, that's what I'm thinking, Eddie. Start our own little business.

We got Hero, we got Coda, we got Winnie. Yeah, these are great.
Yeah, actually, we do have

access. Actually, we have enough.
We just need an older one.

We need one journeyman sweep. I'll buy one.
All right.

Tear around. Hail Sit.
How can hail the chimney sweep? Hail the chimble chimney. And go to YouTube.

Go to our YouTube. Watch your new stuff on there.

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