Stranger than fiction

[Ed]

I'm currently watching a documentary featuring Barbara Windsor, who is tracing the roots of the Deeks and Ellis families, from whom she's descended.  Anyway, I'm finding it very interesting for its trivia, such as the origin of the word 'slang' - it's short for 'secret language' = s-lang.

The Deeks were Costermongers (never heard the expression before).  Apparently, in Victorian times, if you were walking along the street and felt thirsty, you would buy and eat an apple - a costerd apple, which is an English variety of big cooking apple.  So the name costerd monger became 'costermonger' and eventually applied to barrow boys selling pretty much anything.

On the Ellis side of the family, one of her female ancestors was a matchbox maker.  They had to make 1000 boxes a day each to make ends meet, which wasn't quite as bad as making the matches.  The conditions the women worked in were appalling and they quite often got 'phossy jaw', which was white phosphate poisoning.  A horrendous affliction - read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phossy-jaw  Scary stuff

[Ed]

I particularly liked this bit -

The jawbones would gradually rot away and would actually glow a greenish-white color in the dark.