Hello Annie,
Without having more information on a census return, or on a certificate, or a family story etc. it can be difficult to find out where someone in a particular line of business was actually employed. Sometimes the information may crop up in a newspaper either in connection with his employment or his death or funeral.
Perhaps also the directories for his normal place of residence.
Stirling 1909
http://www.archive.org/stream/cookwylie ... 3/mode/2up
Glasgow 1911
http://www.archive.org/stream/postoffic ... 1/mode/2up
For someone who might appear to be self employed you could also try the Edinburgh Gazette. Quite often businesses go bust or partnerships are dissolved or whatever. You can get there via this link
http://www.gazettes-online.co.uk/
My image of a Travelling Salesman, or a Commercial Traveller or a Commercial Salesman is of someone working for a large company who travels about the countryside calling on retailers and taking orders, offering samples, promoting the product, and all that jazz. They were also reputed to have a woman in every town, that’s probably a myth, although the only one on my tree appears to have had.
Here’s an article from The Aberdeen Journal, Wednesday, January 3, 1866.
COMMERCIAL TRAVELLERS.
(From the Daily Telegraph.)
Few bodies of men enjoy or deserve more respect thee these emissaries of our great business houses. They are the scouts and skirmishers of the army of commerce. With every year the competition between England and other industrial countries grows keener and keener, and we should be outstripped in the race if we could not rely upon the vigilance with which these salesmen uphold the superiority of British manufactures, There is not a town in England, and scarcely a city in the civilised world, where these well-known visitors are not welcome. Their work is by no means light or easy. Every man with decent abilities and average application can perform the duties of a clerk. To post up figures, to check accounts, to draw out invoices and copy letters, requires no vast amount of intelligence or energy. Nor do even the higher branches of counting-house labour make a heavy call upon the mental resources. A man who keeps books or conducts a correspondence may get on by routine or by fixed instructions, without having to use much intelligence. But the vocation of a bagman—a term which we employ as one of honour—is of an entirely different order. No written rules, no precise instructions, can be laid down to teach how goods shall be sold, accounts collected, and orders obtained. The traveller finds himself landed with his samples in an unknown town, or in one where a score of competitors are working against him, and he can rely on nothing but his own business capacity. He has to determine what style of goods is most likely to attract customers; he has to study the character of each of his clients; he has to consider how far they can he trusted with safety; he has to watch the turn of the market; he has to cultivate, in short, a sort of commercial instinct which is really a gift of nature rather than the result of any specific training. Moreoyer, he is placed in a position of peculiar temptation. Large sums of money are constantly passing through his hands, and often remain for days or even weeks in his possession; yet he has to support himself and his family, to pay his travelling expenses, and keep up a decent appearance, on means which frequently bear no proportion to the magnitude of the funds for which he is held accountable. From time to time, no doubt, some of the class do yield to the temptations with which they are beset; but these exceptions are few and far between. As a rule, "bagmen" are singularly honest, and bear a character high even in the annals of British commerce.
Times have changed, and the commercial traveller has changed with them, he who drove from town to town in his gig; whose time of visit was known in every place of his circuit; who spent his life journeying from inn to inn; who was the king of the commercial-room, the habitue of the bar parlour, the favoured suitor of landladies and buxom barmaids, is fast vanishing from the face of England. The railroad is destroying the species. With each year London and the chief centres become more and more the abode of the travelling salesman. The train takes him to his place of business in the early morning, gives him the whole of the day to dispose of his goods, and carries him back at night to his home. Thus the old traditions of the commercial-room are gradually dying out. The glories of the circuit are on the wane. The complaint about the tariff charged for wine, which was recently the subject of much discussion in the public prints, indicated a deeper grievance them its authors probably imagined. In the days when the travellers formed a sort of club in every hotel throughout the country, nobody objected to a moderate outlay upon wine. Now-a-days, bagmen reasonably enough resent the necessity of paying a fixed suns for it, not so much because our generation is more abstemious than its predecessors, as because the close intimacy which constant intercourse with each other created amongst the craft, can hardly exist under the altered circumstances of the vocation. We have no doubt that, with the rapid increase in the facilities of locomotion, what may be called the retail branch of commercial travelling will become still more contracted; while, on the other hand, the wholesale department will assume greater importance. No doubt the trade will accommodate itself to the new conditions of society; but for the moment it is in a state of transition.
Hope that’s interesting,
Alan
