Bogs, Baths and Basins E-Book

David J Eveleigh

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 413

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Beschreibung

Covers the early primitive sanitation devices such as cesspits and urban dung heaps. From Roman times up to modern-day luxury, this book leads us chronologically through the story of sanitation. It also describes the advances that came with the onslaught of technology from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. With first hand accounts and evidence from diaries and contemporary records, David Eveleigh traces the history of inventions that have affected everyone throughout history, told with a lively combination of human interest and drama.

Leseprobe

BOGS, BATHS& BASINS

Cast-iron lavatory stand with mirror and tile back by Morrison, Ingram and Co., c. 1893. The D-shaped washbasin is supplied with the company’s noiseless and steamless taps and a lift-up waste. (Thomas Crapper and Co. Ltd)

BOGS, BATHS& BASINS

THE STORYOFDOMESTIC SANITATION

DAVID J. EVELEIGH

Half-title and title pages: Twyford’s Cliffe Vale ‘porcelain’-enamelled fireclay bath, 1898.

First published in 2002

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© David J. Eveleigh, 2011, 2013

The right of David J. Eveleigh to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9580 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

To my parents

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

ONE

Loathsomeness and Indecency

TWO

Down the Pan

THREE

Perfectly Sweet and Wholesome

FOUR

Cleanliness and Godliness

FIVE

Recalling Pompeii

SIX

Essential Fittings and Expensive Fads

SEVEN

Absolute Perfection!

EIGHT

Flushes of Water

NINE

‘A Bath in Every Home’

Appendix 1: Select List of Water-Closet Trade Names 1870–1914

Appendix 2: Places to Visit

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

One of the great pleasures of writing this book has been the extraordinary level of enthusiasm and kindness I have received from so many people. I must start, however, by expressing my deep gratitude to Simon Kirby of Thomas Crapper and Co. and to Terry Wooliscroft at Twyford Bathrooms. Simon and Terry both made valuable comments on the draft text and generously supplied transparencies and photographs from their trade archives. Having the benefit of their profound knowledge of the industry was invaluable. It was also a pleasure to meet Geoffrey Pidgeon who very kindly supplied material and made some valuable observations. It was fascinating talking to Geoffrey, the great-nephew of Frederick Humpherson, who as a young man knew a very elderly George Jennings, the son of Josiah George Jennings – perhaps the greatest sanitary engineer of the nineteenth century.

I am also extremely grateful to Dr Sally Sheard of the Department of Public Health and School of History, at the University of Liverpool, who kindly read some of the text at a busy time and provided details of sanitary conditions in nineteenth-century Liverpool.

I have also received considerable help from colleagues in the museum world. A very big thank you is extended to Roy Brigden and his colleagues, John Creasey, Caroline Benson and Jill Betts at the Rural History Centre, the University of Reading. Roy and John provided access to The Ironmonger and other journals while Caroline dealt patiently with my exacting photograph orders. I am also indebted to Ann Eatwell, Assistant Curator in the Metalwork, Silver and Jewellery Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum and her husband Alex Werner, Deputy Head of Later London History and Collections at the Museum of London. They drew many important references to my attention and also provided very comfortable overnight hospitality during some of my research trips to London. At the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, I found a most enthusiastic correspondent in Shaun Garner who provided vital information concerning George Jennings and kindly arranged the photography of the original ‘Closet of the Century’ in the museum. At the time of writing, a new major gallery of domestic sanitaryware was being created at the Gladstone Pottery Museum, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, and the Museums Officer, Angela Lee, allowed me to study and photograph some of the exhibits before they went on display. Thanks are also due to Dave Woodcock, Associate Curator of Domestic Technology and Lighting, the Science Museum, Steve Blake, Keeper of Collections, Cheltenham Museum and Art Gallery and to Pam Wooliscroft, Curator of the Spode Museum, Stoke-on-Trent, who very kindly made available some beautiful transparencies of Spode sanitaryware. I would also like to thank Janet Dugdale, Museum of Liverpool Life, Kathy Haslam, Geffrye Museum, Hannah Maddox, Beamish, and Richard de Peyer, Dorset County Museum, for their help.

Elsewhere, I received invaluable assistance from Philip Heath, Heritage Officer for South Derbyshire District Council, concerning the development of sanitaryware manufacture in Swadlincote. Sharpe’s Heritage and Arts Trust is currently converting the derelict Sharpe’s pottery in Swadlincote into a Heritage and Arts Resource Centre and trust member, Janet Spavold, kindly made available her Master’s thesis on the South Derbyshire sanitaryware industry. I am also grateful to James Whitaker of Sharpe Brothers and Co. Ltd who generously allowed me to use illustrations from the company’s catalogues. Thanks are also due to Graham Damant, Wimpole Hall, and to the staff of the National Trust Picture Library. I am also grateful to the staff of the British Library, the Public Record Office, the Patent Office, the Science Museum Library, the Wellcome Institute, the Prints and Drawings Department of the British Museum, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Brighton Library, Doncaster Library, Manchester Central Library, the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, West Yorkshire Archive Service and the Worshipful Company of Plumbers. I also received fast and efficient service from the National Portrait Gallery’s Picture Library, the Bridgeman Art Library and the Mary Evans Picture Library. I am also grateful to the Head of Archives, Staffordshire Record Office. I am also grateful for information supplied by Jo-Ann Buck, John Carnaby, Linda Hall, Helen Hogarth, Nigel Hollingdale, Henry and Joy Moule and Sue Teale. I would also like to thank Michael and Lynn Browning, Steve Hoare and Mary Jane Angell-James for allowing me to photograph their old privies and toilets.

Here in Bristol, I have received help from many quarters. I am extremely grateful to Sir George White for providing photographs of his great-grandfather’s luxurious bathroom, of 1900, and also, in his capacity as Curator of The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, going to some considerable trouble to photograph a portrait of Alexander Cummings in the possession of the company. I also received help and enthusiastic encouragement from Bob Chambers at Bristol Water. Thanks are also due to Jonathan Erskine, Avon Archaeological Unit, and the staff of the Central Reference Library, Bristol, and in particular, Anthony Beeson. I also received friendly help from John Williams, the City Archivist, and his colleagues, particularly Richard Burley and Alison Brown. I am also grateful to Melissa Barnett for lending me her precious original copy of Mayhew. I must thank Ray Barnett, the Collections Manager, at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery, for his quiet support, without which this book might not have been possible. Many colleagues have chipped in with help and advice including Gail Boyle, Roger Clark, Andy Cotton, Jeremy Dixon, Sue Giles, Kate Newnham, Sarah Riddle, Gareth Salway, Sheena Stoddard and Karin Walton. Finally, special thanks are due to Alison Crawford, the Assistant Curator of Social History, at Blaise Castle House Museum, who read much of the text and made many suggestions to ensure it was intelligible. Moreover, she has put up with me talking virtually non-stop about toilets and other sanitary appliances for the last eighteen months with amazing patience!

Many others have written to me over the past few years with their recollections of old privies and lecturing around the country for the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts and other organisations; I have met many people who have taken the trouble to pass information on to me. To all of you, I am most grateful.

David J. EveleighBristol, March 2002

Introduction

Walk around any historic house open to the public and on a busy day you will see visitors impressed by the scale and grandeur of the furnishings – the state beds, the large gilt mirrors and chandeliers. But the question that is often on their lips as they file through the rooms is, how did the former occupants of the house go to the toilet? Or, did they wash, and if so, how? As a museum curator specialising in domestic history, I am frequently quizzed about the ‘invention’ of the modern toilet and sometimes, people take me to one side and with a nod and wink begin to tell me about Thomas Crapper.

These are not easily answered questions. The development of our present-day sanitary appliances – the water closet or toilet, the bath and the washbasin – and of the bathroom itself – has received surprisingly little attention. With a few commendable exceptions, books on domestic architecture and interiors generally have little to say on the subject. A few specialist studies have appeared, such as Lawrence Wright’s Clean and Decent first published in 1960. Then in 1978, Lucinda Lambton brought the genius of the art of the late Victorian sanitaryware potter to a wider audience in a beautifully illustrated book, Temples of Convenience. More recently, the television presenter Adam Hart-Davis has produced an informative and entertaining A to Z of toilet facts, Thunder, Flush and Thomas Crapper. Thanks to him, we now know how an astronaut deals with those unavoidable ‘calls of nature’ in zero gravity. Yet much of the detail of how and when particular types of fittings were introduced has remained virgin territory for the researcher.

The paradox is that fascination with the subject has long been tempered by a natural reluctance to probe the details of such a private and personal subject. The taboo which surrounds the act of defecation – and to a lesser extent, urination – has extended to the equipment, and thus limited our understanding of this important area of domestic history. Victorian ladies were, by all accounts, capable of blushing at the sight of water closets on display in a sanitary engineer’s showroom. Today, the public is less likely to offer a toilet to a museum than a disused mangle, gas cooker or sewing machine. After all, it is difficult to be proud of a dirty old toilet!

Similarly, literary references to personal habits and matters of hygiene are hard to come by. There are exceptions, of course: Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century diarist is obligingly frank on the subject, but then he is on most things. A few autobiographical accounts of Victorian country life briefly describe the simple sanitary arrangements which generally prevailed. Edwin Grey (b. c. 1860), who spent his childhood in rural Hertfordshire in the late 1860s and 1870s, describes the shared privies in his village, and Flora Thompson (1876–1947), writing of life in a north Oxfordshire hamlet in the 1880s, unusually describes how cottage families washed. But one searches in vain for references in novels. The characters who populate the works of Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy, for example, light fires, fill kettles, cook, smoke pipes and extinguish lamps and candles, but never go to the toilet, wash or take a bath. The same reticence on such matters also restricts the visual record. While beautiful women, reclining dreamily in baths, have made socially acceptable subjects for the artist, representations of people sitting on closets are confined to the ribald and satirical cartoon. So we have ‘Sawney’, the unsophisticated High-lander, jumping feet first into a London bog in 1745 and ‘Milord Plumpudding’ staring stupidly at us as he sits on a commode after gorging himself on a huge meal of meat, pies and red wine.

The subject can indeed be amusing, but it does, nevertheless, merit serious attention, and this book is intended to provide a detailed account of how our modern bathroom fittings have evolved. Making fittings that made homes cleaner, healthier and more comfortable was clearly the chief impulse behind the development of sanitaryware, and so this book is chiefly concerned with progress in the home. The book also explains how the creation of fitted baths and washbasins led to the widespread adoption of bathrooms from the late nineteenth century. For most people, this was an entirely new room which raised new questions concerning its furnishing and decorative treatment. Public facilities – in the street, in public buildings such as the Crystal Palace and in institutions – raised different issues, some of which influenced the mainstream development of sanitaryware. But this book is not concerned with the detail of the provision of public toilets and urinals, or the design of toilet facilities for ships or railway coaches. Equally, it has to be acknowledged that the field of sanitaryware technology is wider than domestic fittings alone. Some of the leading manufacturers – notably Doulton made drainpipes and a wide range of hardware connected with house and street and drainage. But this is primarily a book about domestic appliances, although even within the confines of the home it is not a story for the faint hearted.

Notwithstanding the elusive and private nature of the subject, there are still, many sources available which enable us to build up a picture of how domestic sanitary appliances evolved. Technical information from the inventors and manufacturers exists in the form of patents and trade literature. In the late nineteenth century lavishly illustrated trade catalogues were published by a wide range of manufacturers. Sanitary engineers were no exception, and some of the colour plates in catalogues of the 1880s and 1890s – a few are reproduced here in colour – emphasise the beauty of many domestic sanitary fittings of this period. The catalogues also provide vital clues concerning the introduction of new models and their claimed advantages. Reviews of new inventions and advertisements also appear in professional and trade journals such as The Builder and The Ironmonger. Builders’ manuals and encyclopaedias of domestic economy provide useful surveys and appraisals of the range of sanitary appliances available, and from the 1870s, an increasing number of specialist books concerning sanitation and hygiene appeared. Many of these also contain comprehensive reviews of the equipment.

Edwin Chadwick (1800–90).

There is also a huge body of evidence about sanitary arrangements contained in the official reports, in particular those concerned with public health. The public health movement and the spread of the sanitary idea provided the impetus for the revolution in standards of domestic sanitation which occurred in the nineteenth century. Edwin Chadwick (1800–90) stands as a colossus over the movement. In the 1830s from the reports he received as Secretary to the Poor Law Commission, he came to see that insanitary conditions bred disease. But he was no sentimentalist. He wanted to end the waste and expense that fevers and other diseases caused. His Report into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, published in 1842, revealed the extent of the insanitary and overcrowded conditions of the poor districts in large towns across the country. Further reports compiled by the Health of Towns Commission and the Board of Health, which Chadwick chaired, only served to show how widespread the problem was. The laissezfaire – or do nothing – approach of previous governments which had allowed these problems to expand in direct proportion to the expansion of the urban population, was overturned by a realisation that legislation had to be introduced if physical conditions for the labouring population were to improve. Chadwick appreciated, above all, that the health and comfort of civilised society in towns depended on establishing arrangements for bringing water in and wastes out: that is, providing constant piped water, mains sewers and house drains. Without the solutions to these problems which were created, largely as a direct consequence of public-health reform, the general adoption of the bathroom and its fittings could never have taken place.

There was, therefore, an obvious social dimension to public-health reform. The scarcity of adequate sanitary arrangements in the poorer districts of towns pointed to the absence of law and order among the inhabitants. If cleanliness was next to Godliness, filth and dirt suggested moral depravity and perhaps even represented a threat to the social order. This undercurrent to public-health reform shaped the measures devised by public-health reformers – a loose alliance of politicians, medical doctors and clergymen, engineers, progressive architects and the growing band of sanitary manufacturers. Their investigations convinced them of the inability of the poor to keep themselves clean and so they introduced sanitary reforms – and new sanitary appliances – which only served to underline class divisions.

Disposing of human excrement safely and economically was the overriding concern from the 1840s. In some towns, the solution was to effectively restrict the use of water closets to a privileged few, while various kinds of dry closets involving the use of ash, earth and buckets were introduced for use by the poor. Where the use of water closets was adopted more generally, class distinctions were still only too apparent. Working-class water closets were usually placed outside houses in backyards or in back lanes and were of distinct types. There were simple and cheap closets for use by servants and cottage dwellers and in the crowded courts of some northern towns, communal trough closets were installed. Many sanitary appliances intended for use by the working classes were designed upon the assumption that they were incapable of flushing their own closets! The result was a plethora of inventions for self-acting or automatic devices. The dictum of many sanitary reformers could well have been ‘simple closets for simple folk’.

As Victorian legislation placed much of the responsibility – and authority – for sanitary reform in the hands of local authorities, the result was the development of a staggering variety of sanitary appliances. While many middle-class villas and large houses across the country had their expensive valve closets, most industrial towns in the Midlands and the north devised their own distinctive systems. In the 1870s, a visitor to the poorer parts of Leeds, Liverpool and Birkenhead would have found trough or tumbler closets in general use, while parts of Manchester and Salford were provided with semi-automatic ash closets. Rochdale had its tubs and Halifax its padded pails. There were also striking contrasts to be found in the countryside – between well-ordered estates where well-maintained earth closets were supplied for the tenants and the squalor which prevailed, for example, in parts of west Cornwall. Such diversity of arrangements disappeared in the twentieth century, and at the beginning of the twenty-first is hard to imagine. But one of the strange twists in the technological development outlined in this book is that the modern ‘loo’ was developed out of some of the simpler water closets intended for use by people in humble circumstances – and not the expensive and sophisticated closets used by the well-to-do.

When it came to other aspects of personal hygiene – washing and taking a bath – the same class divisions were evident. While bathing became an established part of middle-class life in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the solution for the working classes was to provide public bath houses. The principle of including baths with running hot and cold water in working-class homes was only enshrined in legislation after 1918. And some older houses had to wait until the 1950s and 1960s before they acquired their first fitted bath.

Having the use of an indoor toilet and bathroom is now an essential component of civilised life across much of the English-speaking world. Civilisation and sanitation have been inseparable to publichealth reformers and sanitary engineers alike since the nineteenth century. The makers Shanks, in their catalogue for 1930, wrote, ‘one index of advancing civilisation is the importance that is now being attached to the installation of bathrooms’. Many writers looked back to a ‘golden age’ of the Romans who, as town dwellers, had been confronted by the same issues and had devised their own sanitary arrangements. They introduced main sewers in streets, organised the supply of water, built public baths and even devised closets supplied with water. The discovery of these facilities in well-preserved Roman towns such as Pompeii was contrasted with the virtual absence of any equivalent in mid-Victorian Britain. When bathroom suites were first made in the 1880s, some were dressed up in the ‘Roman’ or ‘Pompeian’ style. Sanitation, therefore, has ancient antecedents and even predates the Romans by several millennia. Remains of privies in the palace of the Sumerian king, Sargon – over 4,000 years old – have been uncovered, and closets connected to drains almost 5,000 years old have been found at Mohenjo-Daro in India.

Nevertheless, the book does not attempt a chronological account of sanitation from the world’s earliest civilisations to the present day. This story is chiefly concerned with the period of development which began slowly in the late eighteenth century and then gathered momentum during the nineteenth century. It reached a peak in the 1870s and 1880s when, in a matter of a few years, the basic principles governing the design of present-day water closets, baths and washbasins were established. This represented a major British technological achievement (the American sanitaryware industry only began to find its feet in the 1890s), and considering its importance to the quality of our lives today remains one that has been sadly neglected by historians. Whilst the engineers who produced the steam ship and the railway locomotive are known to us, those who perfected sanitary equipment have been lost in obscurity. How many people, for example, are familiar with the name of Josiah George Jennings, arguably the greatest sanitary engineer of the nineteenth century? Jennings was not alone: Henry Doulton, John Shanks and Thomas W. Twyford also played a major part in improving sanitary equipment after 1850. There were others, too, who made lasting contributions. Edmund Sharpe, for example, a Swadlincote potter – the first to patent a flushing rim for water closets – and Frederick Humpherson, who produced the first pedestal wash-down water closet, made in one piece of ceramicware; this was to become the most widely used water closet of the twentieth century. Humpherson had learned his trade as an apprentice of Thomas Crapper in Chelsea. Crapper has achieved almost mythical status as an inventor of water closets, but in reality, he is representative of the many self-made men who brought wealth to themselves and to the country by establishing an important manufacturing industry. And probably everyone who reads this book will be grateful that our lives came after and not before theirs.

CHAPTER ONE

Loathsomeness and Indecency

privy-middens, close stools and chamber pots

Recent excavations at Yorvik, the Viking settlement at York, uncovered a 1,000-year-old ‘toilet’ seat. It consists of a simple wooden board – forming a bench – with a round hole cut out.1 The seat would have once covered a void where human excrement would have piled up. Instantaneous removal of the waste, by gravity or running water, was rather the exception. This basic facility continued in use, little changed, into the twentieth century. Many still survive in situ, albeit mostly disused. They would be instantly recognisable to a tenth-century Norse settler – or anyone for that matter – living in Britain at the time. This simple arrangement, nevertheless, varied enormously in detail and went by many names. Parson Woodforde (1740–1803), the eighteenth-century diarist, called his the ‘jericho’. The ‘necessary’ was another common term, so was ‘closet’ and ‘privy’ – or ‘privy-midden’ – the midden being the pile of dung. And there was ‘bog’ but never ‘toilet’. The association of the words ‘toilet’ and ‘lavatory’ with a device for the removal of human waste is modern and appears to date from the early twentieth century. Formerly toilet meant the act of washing and dressing or it referred to a dressing table with a mirror. Toilet-ware denoted the utensils which went with it – sets of ewers or jugs and washbasins and the lavatory was properly the washbasin.

‘And so to bed, and in the night was mightely troubled by a looseness . . . and so I was forced in this strange house to rise and shit in the chimney . . .’Samuel Pepys, 1665.

A further confusion is the use of some names to describe both the actual device, with its wooden seat and the room or space where it was located. Sometimes a distinction was made by adding the word ‘house’, as in ‘bog house’ and ‘necessary house’. Many were separate from the dwelling although in larger houses it was common for them to be incorporated within the main building. Medieval castles were often provided with garderobes in upper floors which conveyed the waste by stone chutes built in the thickness of the walls to the surrounding moat or ditch. At Conway Castle in North Wales, built between 1283 and 1293, some of the privies consist of corbelled projections overhanging the rock below.2 A south wing added to Little Moreton Hall, near Congleton in Cheshire, between 1570 and 1580 includes a garderobe tower containing two first-floor closets which emptied through holes in the bottom of the cess chamber into the moat.3 Similar projecting turrets connecting with firstfloor chambers were frequently built into the walls of substantial farmhouses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A draft specification of 1724 for a 50 ft wide town house alongside the quay in the centre of Bristol includes four chambers on the ‘Best Chamber Floor’. Three of them had closets which, ‘will be of great convenience for the holding of close stools and many other family necessaries’.4

Close stools were essentially portable privies with a soil pan enclosed in a box-like stool. A hinged lid covered the seat which contained a round hole. Surviving examples are rare, although two sumptuous examples with padded seats and covered in red velvet survive at Hampton Court and Knole near Sevenoaks – the latter was apparently used by James II (1633–1701, r. 1685–88).5 Close stools were also covered in leather and are occasionally listed in household inventories dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An inventory of the furnishings of Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, attached to the will of Arabella Stuart (1575–1615), made in 1601, lists several leather close stools in the chambers or in adjoining closets. Within her own bed chamber there was an inner room containing ‘a close stoole covered with blewe cloth stitcht with white, with red and black silk frenge’. There were three pewter basins so that a fresh one was always in place while the others were being emptied.6 They were also used lower down the social scale: John Durrell, a carpenter of Dawley in Shropshire, left a ‘close stool and pan in the chamber over the parlour’ when he died in 1728.7

A silver chamber pot by the London silversmith, Daniel Piers, 1747, from Dunham Massey, Cheshire. (National Trust)

Chamber pots were also widely used. They are listed in 24 out of 248 farm-house and cottage inventories covering the period 1635 to 1749 from Writtle in mid-Essex.8 Archaeological excavations of sixteenth and seventeenth-century sites confirm that many were made of brown earthenware, although more valuable – and durable – pewter chamber pots were also common: 11 of those listed in the Writtle inventories were made of pewter. The 1682 inventory of Thomas Hitchen, a farmer in Wellington, Shropshire records two pewter chamber pots valued together at 1s.9 More rarely they were made of sheet brass, and for a small elite of royal or aristocratic users, there were chamber pots of silver. In the eighteenth century, chamber pots were also made of tin-glazed earthenware (delftware) and porcelain, and by the later part of the century in white earthenware. In the nineteenth century, a vast range of decorated earthenware chamber pots was produced. Humour entered the chamber pot. Some contained a portrait of Napoleon and others humorous verses: thus, ‘use me well and keep me clean and I’ll not tell what I’ve seen’.

Nineteenth-century tinplate slop bucket, from Clevedon Court, Somerset.

At Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, in 1601, chamber pots were found beside the close stool, suggesting they were used primarily for urine, although owing to the candour of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) we know that this was not always the case. In September 1665 he wrote, ‘. . . and so to bed and in the night was mightely troubled with a looseness (I suppose from some fresh damp linen that I put on this night) and feeling for a chamber pot, there was none, I having called the mayde up out of her bed, she had forgot I suppose to put one there; so I was forced in this strange house to rise and shit in the chimney twice; and so to bed and was very well again.’10 It was important for some that the chamber pot was not only to hand but also clean. Travelling through Germany in the summer of 1767, Lady Mary Coke (1726–1811) wrote, ‘I have bought more china and among other things a chamber pot. I have found such dirty ones upon the road that it will be of use to me all my journey.’11

‘I have bought more china and among other things a chamber pot. I have found such dirty ones upon the road that it will be of use to me all my journey.’Lady Mary Coke in Frankfurt, 1767.

In larger houses servants would deal with the chamber pots, delivering them to bed chambers in the evening and emptying them in the morning. In the nineteenth century, specially made slop buckets were used by servants to carry away the contents. These tinplate vessels had funnel-like lids with a central hole covered by a small dome. Chamber pots, of course, were often placed under the bed, although eighteenth-century cabinet makers, such as Thomas Chippendale (1718–79) and George Hepplewhite (d. 1786), supplied designs for fashionable night tables or pot cupboards for the storage of chamber pots. Among eighteenth-century ‘polite’ society, chamber pots were also available in dining rooms where they were kept in sideboards made with a pot cupboard at the back or side. The chamber pot could then be used by men once the ladies had withdrawn. Foreign visitors were disgusted at the open and casual manner in which the chamber pot was used in view of the company. As a guest of an English family in Suffolk in 1784, François de la Rochefoucauld (1765–1848), a young Frenchman, described how ‘the sideboard is garnished also with chamber pots in line with the common practice of going over to the sideboard to pee, while the others are drinking. Nothing is hidden. I find that very indecent’.12 Built-in privies were often placed at ground or even basement level where they were sited directly over a midden – a pit or cesspool – where the waste was allowed to accumulate. In the mid-1840s, Henry Austin, the secretary to the Health of Towns Association, visited Worcester where he found houses in the High Street with ‘necessaries’ in the cellars. The consequences were appalling. They were difficult to empty and, moreover, ‘offensive effluvium’ was, according to Austin, ‘perpetually poisoning the atmosphere in the houses’.13 Privies were better placed at the far end of houses where the emptying caused less disruption to the household. In large houses they were sometimes added to the end of a ground-floor service wing. Plans for a service block at Kings Weston House, south Gloucestershire, from about 1720 attributed to Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) show a ‘necessary house’, a small structure behind the brewhouse and next to the pig sty.14 Large, well-appointed farmhouses illustrated in J. Bailey Denton’s The Farm Homesteads of England, from 1855, in most cases show a similar arrangement with privies housed in a single-storeyed extension at the rear of the service wing or behind livestock sheds and reached by a separate external door.

A plan of a service wing of a large house showing the ‘necessary house’ next to the pigsties and alarmingly close to the water pump. From Sir John Vanbrugh’s designs for Kings Weston, Gloucestershire, c. 1720. (Bristol Record Office)

Plan and isometric drawing of a farm house, c. 1850, erected by W. Hans Sloane Stanley at Rollestone near Southampton. The service wing is at the back of the house and contains a privy in a single-storey extension at the far end beyond the wood and coal store. The six-bedroom house, of course, at this date had no bathroom. From J. Bailey Denton, The Homesteads of England, 1855.

The rear of cottages in Somerset, built on a narrow strip of land between the road and fields. There were no gardens front or back and no space, therefore, to build separate privies. Instead they were wedged in small sheds between the houses. They had formerly consisted of ‘offensive privies’, but by the time this photograph was taken, in about 1914, they had been converted to pail closets.

Many privies, however, consisted of separate structures, detached from the house. In towns they were often found in backyards – this was the ‘bog house’ of eighteenth-century London15 – and in the countryside, they were usually located in back gardens, as far from the house as possible. In her account of life in a north Oxfordshire hamlet in the 1880s, Flora Thompson describes the privy as a ‘little beehiveshaped building at the bottom of the garden or in a corner of the wood and tool shed known as the hovel’. She also recalled the irritation of having to walk half-way down the garden under an umbrella in wet weather to reach the closet.16 When the journey had to be made in the dark, lanterns (or in the twentieth century, torches) were carried to light the way. The structures varied considerably. Some were allwooden shacks. The making of these and their seats by a specialist carpenter is described in laconic style by Charles Sale in a book originally published in America in 1929.17 Many, of course, like the main house were built of stone which varied according to the local geology. Some were of brick. Roofs were sometimes double pitched which created a picturesque front to the structure with the door centred below a gable in miniature, but many had the simpler and cheaper single-pitched roof. In 1915, William Savage, a medical officer of health in Somerset, said, ‘often they are very deplorable structures’.18

‘There’s a lot of fine points to putting up a first class privy that the average man don’t think about.’‘Lem Putt’, The Specialist, 1929.

But sometimes there was no privy at all. Facilities had to be shared by several households. Describing life in a Hertfordshire village in the late 1860s and 1870s, Edwin Grey remarked how the privies were anything but private, some having to serve as many as six cottages.19 As late as 1912, it was reported that in the parish of Port Isaac, Cornwall, sixty-four houses out of ninety inspected had no closet accommodation of any kind.20 Heavily used and with no one taking responsibility for cleaning or emptying them, shared privies were usually the very worst. In Worcester, Henry Austin came across a necessary which was used by more than fifteen families. This, he wrote, ‘presented to me one of the most horrible examples of loathsomeness and indecency that it has ever been my lot, with some experiences of such matters to witness. I will not sicken you,’ he added, ‘with details of these horrible scenes.’21

Privies were mostly one-room structures. The walls were usually white-washed or painted in various pastel shades – yellow ochre, pink or blue – the latter frequently used in kitchens because it was believed to be repellent to flies. Simple wooden panelling sometimes lined the wall a foot or two above the seat. Printed material, verses or pictures sometimes decorated the walls. The London bog house visited by ‘Sawney’, the fictitious Highlander lampooned, it is believed, by William Hogarth (1697–1764) in 1745, is covered with various ballads and verses. The privies of the 1880s recalled by Flora Thompson were similarly adorned with pictures from periodicals: scenes such as the bombardment of Alexandria or the Tay Bridge Disaster, which showed the end of the train dangling from the broken bridge. Portraits of political leaders were also popular: Gladstone, Lord Salisbury or Lord Randolph Churchill depending, of course, on political allegiances. Sometimes health or sanitary maxims were chalked or pencilled on the walls. Otherwise, the interiors were plain with perhaps a simple recess in the wall to take a candle or lantern. Flora Thompson also recalled that ‘privies were as good an index as any to the characters of their owners. Some were horrible holes; others were fairly decent with the seat scrubbed to snow whiteness and the brick floor raddled.’22

Sawney in a London Bog House, 1745. This satirical print, attributed to Hogarth, pokes fun at Sawney, the primitive Highlander, who had never seen a privy or bog hole until he visited London. Upon being shown to the bog house he ‘thrusts his brawney thighs down the two holes, And squeezing, cry’d – “Sawney’s a Laird, I trow Neer did he naably disembaage ’till now”.’ Note the child’s seat to the left and the printed matter pinned to the wall. (British Museum)

A three-hole privy at Elm Tree Farm, Hallatrow, Somerset. The seat is 10 ft wide and contains three holes, graded in size. The smallest, seen here on the left, has a diameter of 7 in and was obviously for children. The centre one seen on the right is the largest with a diameter of 10 in, while the right-hand hole, out of view, has a diameter of 9½ in. The privy was last used by the Harrison family, consisting of John Harrison, his wife, Ann, and their fourteen children between 1850 and 1910.

Surviving seats are often made of deal, although it is likely that before the nineteenth century many were made of elm. They often filled the entire back wall of the privy, and frequently contained more than one hole. Two-hole seats with one opening larger than the other were common, but occasionally three or more holes were provided. They were often spacious. The seat of a disused privy in the back garden of a house in Hallatrow, Somerset, is 10 ft wide and contains three holes. The smallest has just a diameter of 7 in, the largest in the centre is 10 in, while the right-hand one is just a ½ in smaller. Small holes were obviously for children and were sometimes set lower. Four- or even six-hole seats were rare but have been recorded, and some larger ones filled two walls. The holes were either round or oval and were usually covered with detachable lids which helped keep smells in and insects out. The lids were usually round themselves with turned wooden knobs, battens or finger holes. Most that survive are of deal or pine like the seat, but the lids of the threehole privy at Hallatrow are made of elm and are hexagonal in shape. The use of seats with two or more holes suggests that using a privy was not necessarily a solitary activity. Children, at least, would use them together and the three-hole privy at Hallatrow was used by a family of thirteen until 1910. Every evening the eleven children would walk across the back garden using a candle on dark evenings to use the privy before going to bed, the older children doubtless using the adult-sized holes.

The arrangement under the seat varied. While the majority of privies were placed over a pit some were located over running water in order that the waste would be washed away. Francis George Heath found cottages at Wrington, Somerset, in about 1880 where the closets were built over the village brook although, unfortunately, the villagers also drew some of their water supply from the same brook.23 A similar arrangement remained in use in the first half of the twentieth century at Highridge Farm, Dundry in north Somerset, where the privy consisted of a small limestone structure built over a brick-arched culvert supplied with water from an underground stream. The flow of water varied from a small trickle during a dry summer to a raging torrent after heavy rain. In towns, privies were found overhanging the rivers. Ramshackle wooden privies lined the open stretches of the River Fleet in London until covered over in the 1840s, and in Bristol similar structures overhung the muddy banks of the River Frome on its course through the centre of the city. The waste was only washed away at times of particularly high tides: in 1844, a local doctor, Dr William Budd (1811–80) reported, ‘the state of things in the interval is too loathsome and disgusting to describe’.24

The River Frome flowing under St John’s Bridge in the centre of Bristol looks attractive enough in this watercolour of 1821 by Hugh O’Neill, but in 1845 it was described as the city’s worst sewage nuisance. Raw sewage drained into the river and ramshackle privies that hung directly over the river deposited their filth on to the muddy banks of the river directly underneath. Perhaps, not surprisingly, O’Neill has painted the scene at high tide! These privies and most of the houses with them disappeared between 1857 and 1867 when the course of the Frome through the city was covered over. (Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery)

A diagram, published in 1892, representing a dilapidated and insanitary cottage built into a hillside. The privy-midden consists of a separate structure above the level of the ground floor with the seat directly above the pit which is dug into porous soil allowing the liquid sewage to contaminate the surrounding land.

The typical privy, however, possessed no means for disposing of waste and was, in effect, a storehouse of excrement: a pile of dung – the midden – being an essential component. Sometimes the catchment was simply the bare earth beneath the seat, but many privies were built over a large vault or deep pit that extended beyond the back of the structure. The pits or cesspools varied in depth, shape and the nature of the lining – if there was one – moreover, they varied from one part of the country to another. In early Victorian London, Henry Mayhew (1812–87), the author of London Labour and the London Poor, distinguished between two kinds of older cesspools found in the metropolis. Soil tanks were the ‘filth receptacles’ of larger houses. They varied in size, but according to Mayhew, some were deep and well made in solid masonry. ‘Bog holes’ consisted of a hole dug into the earth with less masonry than a soil tank and sometimes with none at all. Again they varied in shape and size: some were round, others oblong and on average contained a cubic yard of matter. Occasionally, two or more bog holes drained into a soil tank placed in ‘an obscure part of the garden or backyard’. Bog holes were rarely watertight and this was usually intentional – so that the liquid portion of the sewage could drain away – reducing its bulk and postponing the removal.25 In some towns – Northampton, Guildford, Leicester and Bridport, for example – the underlying strata was sufficiently porous for the cesspools to drain freely into the ground so that emptying was not required. At Steyning in Sussex, they drained into open ditches and at Penzance, after a heavy shower, into the gutters.26

Leaking and overflowing cesspools represented a major threat to health. Seeping liquid sewage running through porous soil could contaminate nearby wells, spreading diseases such as cholera, typhoid and diarrhoea. In such cases, according to George Wilson in 1873, the soil around wells was often sodden with soakage from privies. In consequence, people lived, ‘in an atmosphere charged with the . . . gases given off by the decomposition of their own excrement’ while they drank ‘water tainted by the foul liquid which oozes from the excremental mass’.27 Cholera was the new killer disease of mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It had first appeared in 1831 and over the next four decades, many thousands died in major epidemics in London and other large towns. Capable of killing victims within hours and spreading with deadly speed, the nature of the disease was the source of wild speculation among the medical profession, its causes a mystery. The ‘miasma’ or atmospheric theory – that disease was carried in bad air – was then the accepted orthodoxy. ‘All smell is disease,’ claimed Edwin Chadwick, the great sanitary reformer, in 1846, and two years earlier, one of his close associates, Dr Neil Arnott (1788–1874), had stated that the cause of many diseases was the ‘poison of atmospheric impurity’. Chadwick and his supporters were keen to see privies and cesspools removed – not because of the risk of contamination to water – but to the atmosphere. The danger posed by privy-middens to water supplies was only gradually recognised from the 1850s as the evidence for the water-borne nature of cholera increased.

Regular emptying of cesspools was often required, although it was sometimes neglected, as Samuel Pepys discovered in 1660. ‘Going down to my cellar,’ he wrote on 20 October, ‘I put my foot into a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr Turner’s house of office is full and comes into my cellar.’28 Clearly, the amount of emptying depended on the size of the pit, the frequency of its use and the quality of the lining. The cesspools in Flora Thompson’s north Oxfordshire hamlet were emptied twice yearly, while in London Mayhew said it was done once every two years. It was not a pleasant occurrence: the stench was intolerable and the doors and windows of neighbouring houses were kept firmly shut. Also, it was usually carried out after dark by nightmen who worked by lantern light. In early Victorian London, the legal hours for nightwork were between midnight and five in the morning.29 In large towns and cities, the removal of the waste was big business. Some contractors were men of capital – ‘well to do in the world’, according to Mayhew – owning a considerable number of horses and carts and employing a large workforce. Mayhew’s research in London revealed that nightwork was not a ‘distinct calling’. The master nightmen, he found, were ‘generally master chimney sweepers, scavengers, rubbish carters and builders’.30 The labourers were likewise drawn from other trades. ‘The generality of nightmen’, Mayhew said, ‘are scavengers, or dustmen, or chimney sweepers, or rubbish carters, or pipe layers, or ground workers or coal porters, carmen or stablemen, or men working for the market gardeners round London – all either in or out of employment.’31

Thanks to Mayhew’s investigative skills we have a vivid and detailed picture of how nightmen went about their work. Some cesspools were emptied by the ‘hydraulic method’, using pumps and hose to convey the waste to the nearest sewer but most were emptied manually using shovels, scoops and tubs. Late one evening, Mayhew went to see a gang at work. Large horn lanterns were placed at the edge of the cesspool to illuminate the scene and in the still of the night, the men began their work. A typical gang consisted of four labourers: one, the ‘holeman’, would stir the refuse to loosen it and fill the tub, using a ladder to descend into the pit when the level dropped. The tub which could weigh as much as a hundredweight when it was full, was hoisted up by the ‘ropeman’. Two ‘tubmen’ then raised the tub on a long pole and carried it on their shoulders to a covered cart where it was emptied. Very often the tub had to be carried through the house, ‘to the excessive annoyance of the inmates’, observed Mayhew. The work was hard and the men tough. Beer, bread and cheese were occasionally provided by the household: some gangs would drink a bottle of gin between them. Even though it was a frosty night, Mayhew found the smell, ‘literally sickening’; the men themselves, it appears, scarcely noticed it. Finally, when the work was done the wagon or cart was drawn away, doubtless to the profound relief of the household.32

London nightmen going about their work by lantern light. They are seen carrying away the sewage, which has been scooped out of the open cesspit using long-handled scoops. From Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, 1861.

Handbill for G. Hardy, chimney sweeper and nightman, Black Horse Yard, Rathbone Place, Oxford Street, London, c. 1800. At the bottom of the bill two nightmen are seen carrying a filled tub slung over a pole to the covered cart. (Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery)

The carts were driven to ‘nightyards’ where huge piles of refuse accumulated. According to Mayhew there were about sixty such yards in London until about 1848. One at Spitalfields, he reported, contained, ‘a heap of dung and refuse of every description . . . about the size of a tolerably large house’.33 Some of those Hector Gavin encountered during his rambles around Bethnal Green consisted of several heaps of ‘filth, dust, dirt and ashes mixed with decaying animal and vegetable remains and manure of all kinds’. Of another he said, ‘the odour given off from this place is beyond conception disgusting – it spreads to a great distance and is complained of by all as an intolerable nuisance’.34 The nightsoil was allowed to desiccate before being sold as manure to farmers and gardeners. Large quantities of nightsoil were transported by barge up the Grand Union Canal to farms in Hertfordshire and around the coast to Southampton Water where it was sold to farmers in Hampshire.35 However, the London nightyards were suppressed after the passing of sanitary measures in September 1848.36 There were several ‘scavengers yards’ in Bristol in 1850. One of three in Ashton, an untidy industrial area south of the city, was close to a group of cottages. It was the subject of many complaints: cholera was reported as being bad there.