For the White Stripes song, see Rag and Bone. 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 satirised 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.

Collectors and recycling

The rag-and-bone men were an important component of society before automotive transport. 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. The increasingly widespread use of cars made these dealers unneeded in many areas.

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 one's 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 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 mechanised, some 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 operate only 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 basis to collect an old appliance such as a fridge, sometimes for a small charge.

In the North East of England the rag and bone man's horse often had balloons fastened to it. If a child gave what the rag and bone man considered a reasonable amount of rags for example, then they would be given a balloon as a reward.

Literary References

William Butler Yeats' poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion" refers to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart."^[1]

Popular culture

• The popular comedy television series Steptoe and Son (remade as Sanford and Son on American television) centred around family run rag and bone business.

• In music, The White Stripes wrote a song titled "Rag and Bone" on their album Icky Thump in which Jack and Meg White sing about being rag and bone men and collecting junk. The single cover for the song had a goldfish on it because of the rag and bone men's practice of giving goldfish to children who gave them rags or other material. The Radiohead song "Go To Sleep" begins with the line "Something for the rag and bone man". The 10th studio album by And Also The Trees is entitled The Rag and Bone Man (2007, also listed as "(listen for) The Rag and Bone Man"). British band XTC released an album in 1990 containing "Rare Cuts and Leftovers" titled "Rag & Bone Buffet". The Libertines song "Skag & Bone Man" is a play on the term rag and bone man. In the Bob Dylan song Stuck Inside The Mobile With The Menphis Blues Again the line "The Rag Man draws circles up and down the block, i asked him what the matter is but i know that he don't talk" may be a reference to Rag and Bone men.
• The "rag man" was also a figure in American culture, as mentioned in the 1903 Arthur Collins recording, "Any Rags?" and a joking reference by Groucho Marx in the 1932 film, Horse Feathers.

See also

• Karang guni
• Waste picker
• Dumpster diving

References

• See generally This article in The Guardian

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