Tosher

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A tosher is someone who scavenges in the sewers, especially in London during the Victorian period. This activity began around the time of the construction of the London sewerage system, designed by Joseph Bazalgette.

The toshers decided to cut out the middle man and it was a common sight in 19th Century Wapping for whole families to whip off a manhole cover and go down into the sewers, where they would find rich pickings.

As most toshers would reek of the sewers, they were not popular with the neighbours. The word tosher was also used to describe the thieves who stripped valuable copper from the hulls of ships moored along the Thames.

One unexpected side-effect of the sewer work was that toshers - or, at least, those toshers who survived - built up a strong tolerance to typhus and the other diseases that swept the ghettos.

The word “tosh” for rubbish entered the language, though toshing – and the other dirty jobs of the era – have long since gone.

There is another similar sounding term from the same period : tosheroon which has been applied to a tosher in error but it in fact it originally denotes a piece of pre-decimal British currency : the half-crown. Whether the two words are related is not known.

[edit] See also

mudlark - someone who scavenges in river mud

tosher -Undergraduiates' slang: 1839 "An unattached or non-collegeiate student at a university having residential colleges." The Oxford Universal Dictionary Illustrated, Little, William; Fowler, H.W; Coulson, J; Rev. and Ed. Onions, C.T. OUP., 1965