Men of Steel

A 'journeyman': a worker or player who is "reliable but not outstanding", says the dictionary. How did it come to mean that, I now wonder, as I have learned at least one of the word's origins, thanks to the Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet, south of Sheffield. This is the site of a former manufacturing business, where steel blades were made from start to finish for several hundred years - primarily scythes, sickles and billhooks, though swords are also referred to, and a blacksmith showed us the techniques for making the arrowheads used at Agincourt!

Every worker in the factory had a job title (as a modern organogram would call it) - the man who tended the fires, the man who weighed out the secret mix of ingredients for the steel, the man who lifted the crucible out of the fire, the man who tipped the molten steel into the mould, and so on and on. I didn't try to remember all the unfamiliar names, but the last name on the list was the 'journeyman', who took the 'blacked' (another job), straw-rope-wrapped (and another - this one for women) product from the factory to the customer, or port, and returned with raw materials to keep the factory supplied

So it's clear that he had to be reliable, but it also sounds to me like a job that demands skill and competence. Perhaps, compared to the high-wire risk of sharpening blades or the ice-cool nerve needed to pour 1500 degree fluids into a mould it was regarded as a bit pedestrian

The museum is a photographer's paradise, full of curves and lines, textures and colours, rusting metal and rotting timber, invading vegetation and wildlife. Everywhere are the ghosts of lives spent in heat and sweat and grime - their tools, it seems, still propped or hanging when the last day's work was done and the wheels stopped turning forever 

I've chosen a picture to illustrate another job: the crucibles in which the steel was fired were made on site. The China clay had to be puddled by human feet for seven hours, before being hammered into a mould and baked. A crucible would last for two of three firings before being discarded. An iron-hard life