If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home (18 page)

The slightly unpredictable nature of the system meant that basements sometimes received no water at all, or else were unexpectedly flooded. Charles Dickens found his arrangements annoyingly inadequate: while living in Tavistock Square in 1853, he complained that his ‘supply of water is often absurdly inefficient’. Even though he paid an extra charge for ‘a Bath Cistern’, he wrote that ‘I am usually left on a Monday morning as dry as if there was no New River Company in existence – which I sometimes devoutly wish were the case’.

The New River Company was London’s best-known concern, but it faced competition from the Hampstead Waterworks Company (providing its supplies from the ponds on Hampstead Heath), the Chelsea Waterworks Company and others. In the early days, there was a period of joyful guerrilla warfare between the rival companies, reminiscent of today’s war between rival mobile-phone suppliers. Each company would cheerfully steal another’s customers, or cut the pipes of competitors. Other dramas included the unexpected appearance of wildlife: the lack of filtering meant that sometimes fish got into the pipes, and once a dozen eels nearly two feet long were found in the vicinity of Pall Mall.

Once houses had piped water, even if only to a single tap in their basement, washing the body obviously began to require much less labour. Even during the ‘dirty’ centuries people had continued to wash their faces, hands and other body parts in basins, using linen towels as washcloths. The French word for a linen cloth, a
toile
, would give its name to the process called the
toilette
, or basin wash. In due course, it would morph into the modern word for a water closet, a ‘toilet’.

In Georgian times, the very beginnings of the bathroom – which would eventually become a separate room – appeared in the corners of bedrooms. Georgian
toilette
, or dressing, tables held brushes, mirrors, perfume bottles, jewels and make-up, and next to them stood a three-legged stand for the washbasin. Furniture catalogues containing such stands, or cabinets with basins set into their tops, are recording the beginnings of what would eventually become the washbasin and vanity unit in modern bathrooms.

It’s worth noting that even if a few top doctors were now recommending full bathing in addition to this bedroom-based lick and splash, society at large was exceedingly slow to catch up. A Georgian high-society ball in Bath still smelled awful, if one of Tobias Smollett’s characters is to be believed: ‘of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues’. In 1750, John Wilkes observed that ‘the nobler parts are never in this island washed by women’, and John Hervey even described the courtiers in the royal palace, crammed into a hot room, as ‘sweating and stinking in abundance as usual’.

It would be the involvement of religion that would help tip the scale towards Britons becoming bathers once again. The Methodist John Wesley promulgated the idea that cleanliness is next to godliness. He thought that ‘slovenliness is no part of religion’, and he would not even preach in a place where no
toilet was provided for his use. The ‘little house’ was essential, he said. ‘Wherever it is not, let none expect to see me.’

Others agreed. The leaders of various radical Protestant religious movements discovered that creating the urge to keep clean among their followers also encouraged them to become self-disciplined, self-motivated and increasingly devout. The poor little chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley’s Victorian children’s story
The Water Babies
learned that he could only go to heaven if he kept himself clean; he needed to ‘work very hard and wash very hard’ before he could be considered worthy. This nexus of religion, cleanliness and a Protestant work ethic lay behind the great nineteenth-century movement in favour of sewers, public toilets and drains. As the historian Keith Thomas puts it, public health became ‘a religious duty, a form of moral crusade’.

But even with divine endorsement, bathing was still not an accepted part of daily life by the turn of the nineteenth century. A
Family Cyclopaedia
published in 1821 had separate entries on ‘personal cleanliness’ and ‘bathing’ because they remained slightly different things. As late as 1857, hot baths still had a racy, somewhat dangerous reputation: by no means ‘to be trifled with, and in medical cases where there is time to obtain it, advice should be had recourse to before using them’.

The next stage in the general acceptance of bathing came about when taking a bath became a classy thing to do, one of the marks of a gentleman. Beau Brummell, a leader in Regency high society, and a hugely influential figure in men’s dress and grooming, advocated that men should no longer wear effeminate perfumes. A daily bath was therefore necessary if they were not to smell of sweat. In due course, the lower and middle classes would aspire to copy his upper-class lifestyle.

Now, at last, bathing was becoming not just a healthy or religious duty, it was a social one too. Victorian etiquette books began to spell it out: a clean body was the beginning of good
manners. By 1869,
Cassell’s Household Guide
had finally dropped the idea that baths had a medical aspect, and insisted instead on the importance of the ‘Saturday night wash’ for simple hygiene reasons.

Society was ready for the next step: the birth of the bathroom.

17 – The Bathroom Is Born

Although the bathroom has long been of exceptional importance in eastern cultures, it is the most recent addition to the accommodation of our northern houses.

Hermann Muthesius,
The English House
, 1904

In 1871, a French visitor to England described a stay in a particularly luxurious Victorian country-house bedroom. It had a dressing table holding three jugs of different sizes, one of which was for hot water. There were two porcelain basins, a dish for toothbrushes, two soap dishes and a water bottle with a glass. On the floor near by stood a ‘large shallow zinc bath for morning bathing’. Each morning, a servant came in, drew his curtains and delivered ‘a large can of hot water with a fluffy towel on which to place the feet’.

Until the arrival of the plumbed-in bath in the 1860s, Victorians put their servants through incredible feats of water-heating and water-lugging – with possible spillages – in rooms not really intended for the purpose. The relatively low cost of domestic labour put people off installing upstairs plumbing.

A full-length bath, filled only 15 cm deep, requires 45 litres of water weighing 45 kg. In a townhouse this would typically have to be carried up from the basement by hand. Then the used bathwater had to be carried down afterwards. ‘Men will
do much for glory and vainglory,’ wrote Florence Caddy in 1877, ‘but then I never heard of a man who took the trouble to empty his bath after using it.’ Clearly, when it came to taking their own baths, the servants themselves cut corners. The six laundresses employed at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire in the 1920s bathed in half a wooden beer barrel on Saturday nights: ‘The head was first to get in, followed by her five helpers in order of seniority.’ Pity the most junior!

A bedroom suite with a washstand (left), forerunner of the modern bathroom’s washbasin and vanity unit

Emptying the contents of a washstand and chamber pot was called ‘slopping’, and it took place within individual bedrooms; chamber pots and basins were not carried down the stairs. It worked like this: the housemaid would bring two buckets into the room, one empty, the other full of clean water. The contents of the basin, chamber pot, used water glass and any other waste went into the empty one, and the vessels were rinsed out. Then the rest of the clean water was poured into a jug and left for the return of the bedroom’s occupant. Chamber pots were
only taken out of the bedroom twice a week to be scalded clean (though the slop bucket was scalded every day).

In larger establishments, the housemaids might have been aided by special ‘watermen’. At Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, recollected Diana Cooper, these were troll-like figures:

the biggest people I have ever seen … On their shoulders they carried a wooden yoke from which hung two gigantic cans of water. They moved on a perpetual round … they seemed of another element and never spoke but one word, ‘Water-man’.

From the 1860s, piped water to the first-floor bathroom began to make all this effort obsolete. The new bathrooms were at first pretty simple. The cartoonist Linley Sambourne had only a cold supply to his tub in his pioneering bathroom at Stafford Terrace in London (he introduced a clever folding shelf so he could develop pornographic photographs in his bath as well as washing himself). But what was originally a plain and functional room grew more decorative over time. Early fitted bathrooms of the 1880s were often described as ‘Roman’ or ‘Pompeiian’ in style, in deference to the Romans’ reputation for good plumbing.

From around 1800, the kitchen range had begun to creep into British kitchens, and with it houses gained a permanent supply of hot water. But the range was often left unlit in summer. Another innovation from around the middle of the nineteenth century was the self-heating bath. The ‘gas bath’ made use of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen’s breakthrough eponymous burner, which consumed gas enriched by oxygen. Models such as the ‘Prince Albert’, the ‘General Gordon’ and the ‘Prince of Wales’ were proudly installed in upper-middle-class homes.

But gas baths required a thirty-minute wait for the water to heat, and were not particularly reliable. ‘A call on the hot water supply … did not meet with an effusive or even a warm response,’ recollected Lord Ernest Hamilton of the baths of the 1860s.

A succession of sepulchral rumblings was succeeded by the appearance of a small geyser of rust-coloured water, heavily charged with dead earwigs and bluebottles … these huge enamelled iron tanks were not popular as instruments of cleanliness.

In due course, a quicker result could be achieved by Mr Maughan’s patent ‘Geyser’ boiler, which appeared in the trade journal
The Ironmonger
in 1874. The Geyser, a marvellous invention, would ultimately provide wonderful hot water for thousands of homes, but would always retain a reputation for fearsome and unpredictable behaviour. ‘At the head of the bath’, wrote a resident of Bath in the 1940s, ‘towered a dragon-like copper geyser with a gas meter below for shillings. When lit, the geyser burst into life with a deafening roar and spluttered out much steam and a little water.’

The plumbed-in bath and the hot-water Geyser represented an investment beyond the reach of working-class householders, and remained a novel sight to many. The Edwardian Duchess of Portland would invite local miners’ wives to sewing classes at her magnificent mansion, Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. These women would ‘form a queue to use the lavatory, and none of them missed the opportunity to see the lavish bathrooms, try the hot and cold running water, and use the luxurious soap’.

And cleanliness still remained a vital indicator of class. ‘The lower classes’, complained John Stuart Mill in 1874, ‘seem to be actually fond of dirt.’ George Orwell went ever further. ‘The real secret of class distinctions’, he said, ‘is summed up in four frightful words … bandied about quite freely in my childhood. These words were:
The lower classes smell
.’

No wonder. As Diana Athill wrote of her Edwardian grandmother, she expected her servants ‘to be ninnies, and to be dirty, and how they managed not to be the latter is hard to see, considering that it was years before anyone thought of putting in a bathroom on the attic floor where they lived’. Old habits prevailed, and into the 1900s bathrooms were still seen as optional
rather than necessary. Edward Lutyens, for example, built at least two mansions (Munstead Wood and Crooksbury) in the early twentieth century without bathrooms. New working-class homes were not expected to have baths with hot and cold water until legislation was passed in 1918, and of course many older houses remained without for decades after that date.