He wore a homemade uniform of white leather pants, a scarlet waistcoat, a green topcoat, a gold band around his hat, and a sash emblazoned with metal rat-shaped medallions, which he had made by secretly melting down his wife’s saucepans.Įver the showman, Black ambled around the city with a cart full of rats and peddled a homemade brew of varmint poison. (Literally: They had gnawed through the bridge drains.) His talent for catching rodents proved unmatchable, and he was eventually appointed by Queen Victoria to the post of supreme rat-catcher.īlack strolled around London with the swagger and audacity of royalty while maintaining the appearance of a court jester. The official “rat and mole destroyer to her Majesty,” Black got his start doing government work as a young man after he noticed London’s royal parks were spilling over with rats. The occupation even inspired a popular folktale: The Pied Piper was a rat-catcher.ĭuring the Victorian era, Jack Black was the king of the rat-catchers. The job was so common that rodent-chasers in England established their own professional rat-catcher guilds. According to author Barbara Tufty, a decent rat-catcher could earn “special privileges” if he caught at least 5000 rats a year, or about 13 rats a day. “Rat-catcher” may not be a job you see at Career Day anymore, but in Victorian England, it was a popular and sometimes lucrative career.
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