Back in October I looked at how researching your ancestors’ occupations can help you gain a better understanding of their daily lives, and asked readers to send details of some of the more interesting occupations that you have discovered on your family tree. Carol Bailey’s ancestor, William Samuel Colman, was employed as an ‘asphyxiator’, and Carol’s question literally sent me down a rabbit hole, or was it maybe a mouse hole? On the 1911 Census, William gave his occupation as ‘asphyxiator’ employed by Bristol Corporation, and Carol wondered what the role might have entailed.
We all think we know what an asphyxiator might do, but what did he actually asphyxiate? After consulting with Dr Sophie Kay, to ‘local authority drainage and sanitary services.’ The occupational term ‘asphyxiator’ didn’t make it into the revised Dictionary of Occupational Terms for the later census of 1921, but my conclusion would be that William Samuel Coleman was a public health worker (i.e. vermin destroyer and sanitary worker) employed by what nowadays would be Bristol City Council.
The term ‘asphyxiator’ doesn’t appear to have been in common use for this role, but you’ll find newspapers and patents from the period that highlight a general pest control apparatus known as the ‘patent vermin asphyxiator’. It worked by burning materials such as sulphur and custommade ‘smoke papers’ to form noxious smoke, which was then channelled into tubes that could be put down warrens or into any places where pests were hiding.
our resident ‘occupations expert’, we have come up with what we believe is a pretty
