If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  To say that bathing fell out of fashion, though, is not to say that people positively enjoyed being dirty or that they had no concept of cleanliness. It was simply different in scope. Another Tudor health writer recommended that people should dress of a morning but then wash their faces with extreme care, even opening their eyes under water to remove ‘the gum and foulness of the eyelids that do there stick’. An unpleasant personal odour was still worthy of mention and disparagement. The ‘evil smells’ and ‘displeasant airs’ of Anne of Cleves caused Henry VIII to be unable to consummate his fourth marriage.

  In the Tudor or Stuart concept of hygiene, clean underwear played an important part. The wearing of clean linen next to the skin was considered essential in the ‘dirty’ centuries. People thought it was dangerous to immerse their bodies in water but perfectly safe to use linen to absorb the body’s juices, and then to wash the linen regularly.

  In fact, a show of brilliant white linen at the collar and cuffs was important to publicise the cleanliness of your body – and, by implication, the purity of your mind. To the Elizabethan George Whetstone, in his Heptameron of Civil Discourses (1582), a woman with dirty linen ‘shall neither be praised of strangers, nor delight her husband’. Spotlessness of the visible outer clothes was extremely important, as proved by the list of linen possessed by the seventeenth-century headmaster of Westminster School. He had only two shirts but fifteen pairs of cuffs. Natural linen is a grey colour, and a great deal of effort is involved in bleaching it to a sparkling white. So, as well as attesting to virtue, to wear white also signified status and wealth.

  How did the Tudors wash their underclothes? The first job was to make ‘lye’, or caustic soda, the main detergent. This was done by dribbling water through ash from a fire that had been collected in a wooden tub with a hole in the bottom. The water was passed through the ash again and again, absorbing its chemicals and growing stronger each time. Dirty linen was then soaked in the lye to loosen the dirt, a stage analogous to the pre-wash in a modern washing machine. The receptacle used for soaking, a big wooden tub, was called the ‘buck’. (Hence the name for the laundry tub’s smaller sibling, the ‘bucket’.)

  A more concentrated stainremover was to be found in the form of urine. Hannah Woolley in 1677 gave these instructions ‘to get Spots of Ink out of Linen Cloth’:

  Lay it all night in urine, the next day rub all the spots in the urine as if you were washing in water; then lay it in more urine another night and then rub it again, and so do till you find they be quite out.

  Urine remained a prized stainremover right into the twentieth century. In country houses where a heavy and muddy programme of fox-hunting caused the gentlemen’s scarlet coats to need urgent and nightly attention from the valets, a butler named Ernest King remembered that when coats were truly filthy,

  … we would ask the housemaid to save us the contents of the chamber pots, at least a bucketful. It was truly miraculous in getting the dirt out.

  One suspects that the gentlemen were not told how their coats had been cleaned.

  Next on Tudor laundry day came a vigorous stage of scrubbing the linen with soap and beating the dirt out of it with a wooden bat called a ‘beetle’ (i.e. a tool for ‘beating’). As I discovered when I attempted this, it’s very tempting to thwack the balls of soap about with the bats, and there’s a theory that it was the children of laundresses who invented the sport of cricket. This stage of scrubbing and beating was like the main washing cycle in your own machine at home today.

  Henry VIII paid his laundress Anne Harris £10 a year to wash his tablecloths and towels, but out of that sum she had to provide her own soap. The soap used in the laundry involved even more lye, or caustic soda. To make it, lye is boiled with animal fat, a process which makes a truly ghastly smell. In seventeenth-century London, the noxious fumes created by soap-makers formed ‘an impure and thick mist, accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour’ over the city. Soap would often come like jelly in a barrel, though it was also formed into hard balls or blocks.

  The soaped linen needed a good rinse and then to be squeezed out (today’s spin cycle). Here a cross-shaped post in the ground was a useful anchor for twisting a rope of linen round and round to wring out the drips. Finally, instead of the tumble drier, clothes and sheets were then laid out on bushes to dry in the sun. Rosemary is ideal, for its sweet smell, and hawthorn is also extremely effective as its prickles act like little clothes pegs to hold the fabric in place.

  All this effort was worth it, not just to wear clean clothes, but to have a clean body, and underclothes performed part of the function of the still non-existent bathroom. A clean shirt ‘today serves to keep the body clean’, wrote a French architect in 1626, ‘more conveniently than could the steam-baths and baths of the ancients, who were denied the use and convenience of linen’.

  But he was writing just a few decades before bathing began, in advanced circles, to return to favour once more.

  16 – … and Its Resurrection

  Slovenliness is no part of religion … cleanliness is indeed next to godliness.

  John Wesley, in a sermon on dress, 1786

  Why did bathing inch its way back into fashion in the eighteenth century?

  There had been people bold enough to brave the dangers of bathing throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but they’d usually been undergoing some kind of medicinal treatment bath under the orders of their doctors. Henry VIII, for example, was prescribed herbal baths for the treatment of his suppurating leg ulcer. A seventeenth-century aristocrat was sometimes prescribed a mineral bath, although his doctor’s instructions give a good idea of the precautions thought necessary:

  let the liquor be as warm as you can suffer it when you first go into the bath & have hot ready to pour in as it first cools … drink a draught of warm broth or caudle, keeping yourself from cold for some times after.

  And it was also under doctors’ orders that bathing began to make a return to everyday experience. The seventeenth century saw the beginning of a huge upheaval in contemporary medical understanding. With the Enlightenment, the Galenic concept that the human body was made up of the four humours would gradually become discredited. The perceived risks which went with bathing were much reduced once people stopped believing that water could throw their bodies out of equilibrium.

  A Tudor tap from Hampton Court Palace. Did it once fill Henry VIII’s bath?

  Additionally, there was a new understanding about the nature of sweat. That a large but largely invisible volume of perspiration comes out of our skins every day was proved by the measurements of the physician Sanctorius, whose works became increasingly widely disseminated. By 1724, an English physician could write that it was ‘now known by everybody’ that washing the body freed the pores of ‘that glutinous foulness that is continually falling upon them’. But hot water was still seen as rather risky. It was cold water which returned to favour first.

  So a chilly dip began to be considered beneficial for health. It provided a useful jolt to a sluggish system. A cold bath ‘excites the drowsy spirits’, as Sir John Floyer, author of The History of Cold Bathing, put it, and ‘the stupid mind is powerfully excited’. But Floyer had an ulterior motive behind his promotion of cold bathing on medical grounds: he thought that the ceremony of baptism ought to involve complete immersion of the body, as in ancient times, and wished the church would restore the practice.

  Immersion in cold water, suggested Joseph Browne’s Account of the Wonderful Cures Perform’d by the Cold Baths (1707), could cure a multitude of ills: scrofula, rickets, ‘weakness of Erection, and a general disorder of the whole Codpiece Economy’. Browne was not alone in thinking that a cold bath would have a welcome effect on a limp libido:

  Cold bathing has this Good alone

  It makes Old John to hug Old Joan

  And gives a sort of Resurrection

  To buried Joys, through lost Erection.

  Dr Richard Russell, author of a Dis
sertation on the Use of Seawater, thought seawater should be drunk for its properties as an excellent laxative – ‘a pint is commonly sufficient in grown persons, to give three or four sharp stools’ – while his colleague Dr Awsiter revealed that ‘in cases of barrenness I look upon seawater to stand before all other remedies’. Bathing in the sea became a popular Georgian holiday activity, and contributed to the growth of the seaside resorts springing up along England’s south coast.

  Given the amazing health benefits supposedly to be found in cold water, the next step for enthusiasts was to bathe in their very own homes. At Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, the Curzon family created a private plunge pool down by their lake (plate 15). It formed the lower storey of a fishing pavilion (you stuck your rod out of an open upper window). The less plutocratic took a mini-cold-water plunge in a simple bucket. Horace Walpole, afflicted by gout in his face, relied upon the remedy of dipping his head ‘into a pail of cold water, which always cures it’.

  Bathing for everyone did genuinely become less dangerous as water supplies grew cleaner. In the Georgian city, houses of the middling sort began for the first time to receive supplies of uncontaminated piped water. Back in 1582, the Dutchman Peter Morritz had noted the existence of a waterwheel at London Bridge. When the tide was right, it would lift river water to supply people’s houses. But the river was also Elizabethan London’s sewer, and its citizens’ own faeces were being recycled back to them.

  Wooden pipelines bringing water to Georgian London ran along roads like strings of sausages

  One of the most impressive engineering achievements in the history of London was the seventeenth-century New River. This artificial waterway, a wiggly forty miles in length, brought fresh water from a Hertfordshire spring into the heart of Islington. A statue of its builder, Sir Hugh Myddleton, still stands proudly in the middle of Upper Street in Islington today. As an engineering achievement, the New River ranks with the Channel Tunnel and the Great Western Railway. The feat of seventeenth-century surveying involved in getting the waterway to follow the correct contours is quite staggering.

  From the New River’s head, great rafts of elm pipes were buried beneath the Georgian city’s roads. Sometimes they even ran along the surface, looking like strings of enormous sausages. This was because the pointed end of each hollow trunk slotted into a larger hole at the end of its neighbour. In winter, these surface pipes would be heaped with manure to protect them from frost. Elm was the preferred wood because of its durability in wet conditions, and only in the nineteenth century was it replaced by iron. These great pipelines marching down London’s roads were tapped at intervals with lead ‘quills’, smaller pipes that ran into the basement kitchens of individual houses.

  The whole system worked through gravity, so water pressure was low and often even failed. During the Great Fire of London in 1666, panicking people dug up and punctured the pipes in the streets, ruining the pressure so that the supply quickly fizzled away. In Georgian London, the water supply might be turned on once a week – the ‘water day’ for a particular street – and would run only for a couple of hours. Householders would diligently fill up their cisterns, pots and pans for just as long as the flow lasted. They’d have to purchase extra water from a water-seller roving the streets if they ran out during the week.

  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!