Categories: Victorian London

London’s Ratcatchers

Back in Victorian times rats were a huge problem for Londoners. Rats could be found everywhere: in streets, homes, gardens, sewers. Londoners trained dogs and cats to catch them but still they kept coming so the job of Ratcatcher was introduced.

A City at War with Itself

By the mid-19th century, London had ballooned into a metropolis of filth and grandeur. The Thames was a sluggish soup of waste, the slums of St Giles and Whitechapel were crawling, and the rats — bold, plentiful, and unstoppable — were everywhere.

They slipped through drains, thrived in warehouses, and invaded even Buckingham Palace’s kitchens. The Norway rat, Rattus norvegicus, became the city’s most resilient resident. Disease followed, and the city, half in panic, half in disgust, demanded an army of exterminators.

Enter the ratcatcher: part tradesman, part street magician, part folk hero of the underworld.
But if you think their story ended with the Victorians, think again — today’s London has more rats than ever. They’ve merely swapped the slums for the suburbs, the sewers for the Tube.

Jack Black — The Royal Ratcatcher

No name shines brighter in the annals of filth than Jack Black, self-styled “rat and mole destroyer to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.”

Jack Black Ratcatcher

A born showman, Black dressed the part — green coat, scarlet waistcoat, and a leather sash hung with silver rat emblems (rumoured to be cut from his wife’s cooking pans). He’d gather a crowd, release live rats up his sleeves, let them scurry over him, and snatch them back with a grin — all to advertise his wares: poisons, traps, and his unerring instinct for vermin.

Black also bred “fancy rats” of unusual colours, selling them as novelty pets. Some historians even trace the lineage of modern lab rats back to his breeding cages — proof that science, too, owes a debt to the ratcatcher’s trade.

Tools of the Trade

A Victorian ratcatcher’s kit was a mix of cunning and cruelty:

Ferrets — sleek and relentless, used to flush rats from burrows.
Terriers — wiry, fearless dogs trained to dispatch dozens in minutes.
Poisons — arsenic blended with bacon fat, oatmeal, or toasted cheese (a recipe both diabolical and effective).
Traps — from elegant iron cages to spring-loaded devices that snapped shut like guillotines.

Henry Mayhew, London’s great chronicler of labourers, described the ratcatcher as part detective, part hunter — a man who could “read the rat’s mind” from droppings and gnaw marks alone.

Fact vs Folklore: The Myth of the Ratcatchers’ Guild

London’s Victorian ratcatchers were undoubtedly real — but their legend grew furrier and wilder with every retelling.

🧾 The Claim:
That ratcatching was a recognised profession with its own guild, and that these brave souls caught rats bare-handed, luring them with sweet-smelling oils rubbed onto their skin.

🐀 The Truth:

No guild: Ratcatchers were self-employed or worked for councils, but there was never a “Worshipful Company of Ratcatchers.”
Bare hands? Only in the stories. While showmen like Jack Black handled tame rats, most used traps, dogs, and gloves.
Sweet oils: Occasionally used to lure rats toward bait, not onto one’s hands. The perfumed-rat-charmers were creatures of penny dreadfuls, not parish records.

💬 Verdict:
A good story — but one that smells faintly of Victorian exaggeration.

The Children and Women of the Sewers

It wasn’t just burly men who took up the trade. Boys — some barely ten — were hired to crawl through tight spaces with ferrets or set traps for pennies per tail.

And then there were the women. The Jarvis sisters, Nell and Kitty, were famous in the East End for catching hundreds of rats a week. In a world that rarely granted women power, their mastery of the rodent underworld was an unlikely form of emancipation — though few saw it that way.

Rat-Baiting: Sport, Spectacle, and Sin

Not all rats met their end in the gutter. Many were sold alive to the blood-sport of rat-baiting, a favourite entertainment of Victorian taverns.

Picture it: a pit in the floor, hundreds of rats released, and a terrier — like the legendary Tiny the Wonder Dog — unleashed to slaughter them as crowds roared and bet on his time.

Tiny once killed 200 rats in under an hour at the Blue Anchor Tavern, near Bunhill Fields — now the Artillery Arms pub. For his efforts, he was immortalised in prints and pamphlets. The rats, of course, were not consulted.

A Trade in Shadows

For all their necessity, ratcatchers were viewed with suspicion. They dealt with filth, lived among sewers, and trafficked in life and death. Yet their posters shouted from brick walls:

“Rats! Rats!! Rats!!!
All engagements promptly attended to. Satisfaction guaranteed!”

In time, local councils began hiring official ratcatchers, and the trade moved from back alley to bureaucracy. The swagger faded. The spectacle went underground — quite literally.

Yet the rats themselves never left.

The Legacy in the Drains

Today’s London pest controllers are the quiet descendants of those Victorian exterminators. The poisons are modern, the gloves thicker, but the enemy remains the same.

In fact, experts estimate that there are now more rats than humans in London — perhaps 10 million of them, thriving in our bins, sewers, and rail tunnels. The pandemic, takeaway culture, and mild winters only helped them breed. TfL even runs its own “pest management” unit to keep the Underground from turning into a rodent rave.

So when you walk the city at night, past overflowing bins and the flicker of a back-alley light, remember: the war still goes on. Only the uniforms have changed.

Walk It: The Ratcatcher’s London Trail

Curious to follow their tracks? Try this macabre mini-trail through the capital’s rat-ridden past:

Bunhill Fields & The Artillery Arms (EC1) — site of Jimmy Shaw’s tavern, home to Tiny the Wonder Dog.
Smithfield Market — where rats once swarmed the slaughterhouses; a favourite haunt for working ratcatchers.
Fleet Ditch (near Farringdon) — once an open sewer where Mayhew interviewed London’s “rat-men.”
Southwark’s Clink Street — visit the Clink Prison Museum for a sense of the damp, gnawing world the ratcatchers knew.

Bring a torch, and maybe a terrier (just in case).