If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  The next generation, coming of age in 1920, found nothing at all disreputable about lipstick, and it finally became universal and classless. Cinema and television had a great effect on makeup styles; what showed up well on screen was also copied on the street. Greta Garbo was responsible for the pencil-thin eyebrows of the 1930s, and set every cinema-going girl a-plucking. ‘Never take out lip-salve, mirror and powder-puff at the dinner table’ an etiquette guide of the 1920s had to counsel the over-enthusiastic face-painter.

  Nurses in hospitals between the wars complained vociferously when they weren’t allowed to wear lipstick, and the princesses Elizabeth (b.1926) and Margaret Rose (b.1930) were brought up to wear make-up as a matter of course. It was now perfectly respectable. It is surprising and a little touching to learn that in 1953 the new queen, quite adept enough, did her own make-up for her televised coronation.

  21 – The Whole World Is a Toilet

  The sideboard is furnished with a number of chamber pots and it is a common practice to relieve oneself while the rest are drinking; one has no kind of concealment and the practice strikes me as most indecent.

  François de La Rochefoucauld on

  English table habits, 1784

  Having once had occasion to visit the ladies’ at the Goldman Sachs investment bank, I was not entirely surprised to see free tampons provided. What did impress me was the provision of three different brands. And it’s always been true that the conditions in which you relieve yourself reveal a huge amount about your social and economic status.

  Many people in the Middle Ages simply used nature itself. After all, as the Bible said, every man could use a spade, and ‘it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee’.

  Settlements, however, required more formal arrangements. The Anglo-Saxons under King Alfred began to organise their towns into ‘burghs’, fortified rectangles with a grid system of streets that can still be seen today in places like Winchester and Wallingford. Now communal cesspits were created for the disposal of waste. I have had the privilege of handling the human excrement from one such pit, excavated in Winchester and kept in the freezer in the town’s museum. Occasionally it is defrosted and lucky visitors are allowed to handle it, and even to pick out the cherry pips which have been proven by archaeologists to have passed right through a Saxon stomach.

  But it was the Normans who introduced the first fixed-position indoor toilets to be seen in Britain since Roman times. The Norman White Tower at the Tower of London, built just after the Conquest, has garderobe shafts in the thickness of its walls, all positioned on the north or east elevations of the building. These sides faced away from the city of London, so its newly subjugated residents wouldn’t be able see the stains left by their conquerors’ faeces.

  The little closets called garderobes were also literally places to ‘guard robes’ (keep clothes), because hanging your robe in an ammonia-rich environment like over the loo would kill the fleas. In fact, a well-brought-up person might still ask the way to the ‘cloakroom’ instead of the toilet when visiting a strange house today. The well-appointed garderobe could be quite a pleasant place: the ninth-century author of The Life of St Gregory recommends it for uninterrupted reading.

  A velvet-covered seatless ‘close stool’ like William III’s model at Hampton Court Palace

  At the Tudor court there were three main ranks of toilet. Royal and noble people used the close stool, a padded, seatless chair placed over a pewter or ceramic chamber pot, often placed in a dedicated ‘stool room’. Henry VIII possessed several close stools, stuffed with swansdown, covered with velvet and decorated with gilt nails and fringes. The stool room had two doors, one leading to the owner’s bedroom and one to the outdoors for servants to remove the waste. (This easy access made the stool room a favoured place for trysts between Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, and her alleged lover Thomas Culpepper. Charles I also planned to sneak his lady friend Jane Whorwood into ‘the stool room which is within my bedchamber’ during his imprisonment on the Isle of Wight, in order to ‘smother’ her with embraces.)

  The next rank down, courtiers senior enough to have their own rooms, also possessed their own personal chamber pots. The physician Andrew Boorde decried the smell of these ‘piss pots’ and thought them unhygienic. The Tudor ‘piss pot’ excavated in the Privy Garden which remains on display at Hampton Court has been scientifically proved still to contain traces of genuine Tudor urine.

  But the lowest servants at Hampton Court used the great communal toilet capable of seating fourteen people at once named the ‘Common Jakes’ or the ‘Great House of Easement’. This giant facility discharged into a tank which was washed clean by the waters of the moat. Even so, the tank emitted a dreadful smell and frequently had to be scrubbed clean. The unfortunate servants who performed this role were known as the ‘gong scourers’ (‘gong’ was another euphemism for toilet).

  Rather than walk to the Great House of Easement, though, people at court still insisted upon relieving themselves in the fireplaces and passages. There were hundreds of male servants, and not enough official toilets. In occasional vain attempts to improve hygiene, the palace management would have crosses chalked onto the walls in the hope that people would be reluctant to desecrate a religious symbol. Urinating into the kitchen fireplaces was also made the subject of a special prohibition, implying that it had previously been a common practice.

  Bizarre as the Great House of Easement sounds, the vast communal toilet had been a feature well known in the ancient and medieval worlds. In Britain, twenty Roman soldiers at once could have used the latrine at Housesteads Fort on Hadrian’s Wall. And medieval London contained no less than thirteen shared public toilets, the best known among them being the gigantic, fifteenth-century, eighty-four-seater in Greenwich Street named ‘Whittington’s Longhouse’ after Dick Whittington, mayor of London. It was situated on the street now called Walbrook (then still literally a brook) and was flushed out by the Thames at high tide.

  Obviously Londoners used chamber pots in their own homes, and the emptying of the pot out of a house’s upper window gives one of the rival explanations of the word ‘loo’, meaning toilet. ‘Gardez l’eau!’ was the call to warn passers-by. Alternatively, and to my mind more convincingly, the ‘loo’ may be the ‘lieu’, the French name for the ‘place’ of easement. Some houses had garderobe closets suspended over streams at the back. It was a constant struggle to keep the city clean, and by 1300, Sherbourne Lane, once adjacent to ‘a long bourne of sweet water’, had been renamed by the locals as ‘Shiteburn Lane’.

  And many town dwellers simply used the open street to excrete. This wasn’t just a medieval problem. In the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys’s wife suffered from some kind of bowel complaint, and once he ‘was forced to go out of the house with her to Lincoln’s Inn walks, and there in a corner she did her business’. A century later, when Casanova visited London, he was surprised to see the ‘hinder parts of persons relieving nature in the bushes’ even in St James’s Park.

  We know most about toilet habits at the highest levels, because until 1700 the king himself was constantly accompanied, even when relieving himself. At Henry VIII’s court, one courtier apologises for not attending a meeting because he simply couldn’t get away from toilet duty, there being ‘none here but Master Norris & I to give attendance upon the king’s highness when he goes to make water in his bed chamber’. It was understood that his most intimate servants would ask Henry VIII for favours ‘in the evening, when he was comfortably filled with wine, or when he had gone to the stool, for then he used to be very pleasant’.

  ‘Gardez l’eau!’ The call warning pedestrians that a chamber pot was about to be emptied may provide the explanation for our word ‘loo’

  So royals and indeed many other important aristocrats were accustomed to relieving themselves before others. Instructions for the late-seventeenth-century household
of William III reveal that enormous efforts were made to ensure that the king never had to go to the loo alone. During visits to the ‘Secret or Privy Room, when we go to ease ourself’, he ordered that he should be accompanied by the ‘Groom of the Stool (if present) and in his absence the Gentleman of our Bedchamber in waiting, & in his absence the Groom of our Bedchamber in waiting’. At the Palace of Versailles in eighteenth-century France, the homosexual Duc de Vendôme gave audiences while sitting upon his close stool, and fawning guests would call out that he had the ‘culo d’angelo’ as he wiped his bottom. Even Samuel Pepys, much lower down the social scale, did not seem to consider that his own bowel movements were restricted to private moments: he kept his own ‘very fine closestool’ in his drawing room. (Probably he was proud of it.)

  The declining power of the monarchy might be traced through the decreasing levels of respect paid to royal toilets when the eighteenth century is compared to the sixteenth. One cannot imagine that anyone at court was bold enough to make free with Henry VIII’s close stools, or with Elizabeth I’s (her special ‘stool carriage’ transported them in her wake from palace to palace). Yet during the coronation of George III in 1761, the Duke of Newcastle was spotted using the queen’s own appointed toilet behind the altar: he was caught ‘perk’d up & in the very act upon the anointed velvet closestool’.

  There’s a quotation from the witty Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that’s often used to suggest that grand court ladies too didn’t mind urinating in the presence of other people. The French ambassador’s wife, for example, was notorious for the ‘frequency and quantity of her pissing which she does not fail to do at least ten times a day amongst a cloud of witnesses’. But do note that the lady is from France. It was almost a given, in eighteenth-century England, that most French habits were immoral, dirty or both.

  However, the voluminous skirts of eighteenth-century ladies did allow them to make use of the gravy-boat-like jugs known as ‘bourdaloues’, or ‘carriage pots’. They take their name, we’re told, from a fêted French preacher. He was so popular that hordes of ladies would arrive hours before his sermons began, and therefore needed discreet relief while waiting.

  The great advantage of the chamber pot or close stool was that you could use it in the privacy of your bedchamber, in a closet or ante-room, or anywhere else you pleased. It remained in use for so long because it was exceedingly convenient. Its only disadvantage was that someone had to empty it. This person, often female, was known as a ‘necessary woman’ (she emptied the ‘necessary’). A seventeenth-century servant-maid was required to see ‘that your close stools and chamber pots be duly emptied, and kept clean and sweet’. In the royal palaces, there were whole teams of ‘necessary women’ who emptied the chamber pots and cleaned the bedchambers, and were paid additionally for their mops, brooms and brushes on top of their wages.

  Remarkably, they went on performing their labours for at least two hundred years after you might think they could reasonably have stopped: at the invention of the flushing toilet.

  22 – The Wonders of Sewers

  The Civilization of a People can be measured by their Domestic and Sanitary appliances.

  George Jennings, installer of flushing public

  toilets at the Great Exhibition, 1851

  Britain’s first flushing toilet was built in late Elizabethan times, but the idea didn’t catch on until the nineteenth century.

  Sir John Harrington was its pioneer, installing the first flusher at his home near Bath, and then another at the Palace of Richmond for Elizabeth I. (There’s a theory that Americans call the toilet ‘the john’ in honour of Sir John.) Harrington wrote a book about his achievements called A New Discourse on a Stale Subject: Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, published in 1596.

  The title was a joke. ‘Ajax’ in this case was not the hero of classical mythology, but ‘a jakes’, the common euphemism for a toilet. Harrington’s version had a cistern, seat and stool pot below. Opening a cock in the cistern caused water to rush down and flush the system out, and he claimed that this needed doing only once a day, even ‘though twenty persons should use it’. I’ve helped to make a reconstruction according to Harrington’s instructions, and the flush was impressively powerful – it successfully carried away a handful of cherry tomatoes.

  I’m less convinced you would only need to flush it once every twenty uses, and Harrington did admit that ‘the oftener it is used and opened the sweeter’. He suggested that pitch and wax, applied to the pot, would also help keep it fresh. But Harrington’s invention was a blip in the history of sanitation, and few people adopted his idea.

  Flushing water closets could be found here and there, usually in great houses or palaces, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Queen Anne’s husband George, for example, had ‘a little place with a seat of easement of marble with sluices of water to wash all down’, and at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire no fewer than ten water closets were installed during a remodelling in the 1690s, with fittings of brass and bowls of local marble. Yet these were oddities, frequently commented upon with wonder by those who saw them, and they remained remarkable.

  In the later eighteenth century, the design of the flushing toilet underwent several improvements which helped to make it more popular. Alexander Cumming in 1775 made the vital step of inventing the S-bend, the kinked waste pipe which stopped smells from coming back into the room. Previously water closets had featured the D-bend drain, but this design trapped stinking water in the system.

  In 1778, Joseph Bramah patented his own particular model of water closet which featured a fifteen-second flush timed by a brass air cylinder. (Bramah also invented the hydraulic press and a famously complicated lock: some northerners still refer to a particularly knotty problem as ‘a Bramah’.) He was born on a farm in Yorkshire in 1748, but an early accident put an end to his labouring life and he became apprenticed to a cabinet-maker instead. He was installing a water closet for a client when he realised that he could create a better one himself. His excellent design would lead the field for the next century.

  Bramah’s showmanship and his eagerness to promote and install his water closets made his a well-known name. He claimed to have fitted 6,000 closets across the country by 1797. Queen Victoria would order one of his models for Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where it still remains in working order. But even Bramah’s water closets were not perfect. They had a hinged valve at the bottom of the pan, and inevitably this leaked a little.

  Indeed, there were problems with all the various Georgian water-closet systems. They needed priming with water daily, and did not always flush successfully. The valves could malfunction, wood could splinter, and their iron pots retained smells and ‘ancient ordure’. Another difficulty with water closets was their position off corridors. As the eighteenth century wore on, sensibilities grew more refined. There was no more public pissing; people, especially ladies, did not want to be seen or heard leaving their bedrooms at night to use the facilities. So chamber pots continued to be used. Simple, tried-and-tested earth closets (just a wooden seat positioned over a midden) in the backyard also remained popular in rural areas.

  Another problem which delayed the widespread adoption of the flushing toilet was its requirement for a proper sewerage system. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, people’s faeces were collected in cesspits behind or beneath their houses. They were periodically emptied by ‘nightsoil men’, who in London took excrement to use as manure on market gardens to the north of the city. By 1800, the city’s million residents had 200,000 cesspits between them. But from each of them polluted water would leak through the soil into London’s rivers.

  Cesspits completely failed to cope with the arrival of the flushing toilet, which produced waste now mixed with a large amount of water. In 1815, it was made permissible for individual houses to link their drains into the London sewers intended to carry rainwater from the streets down to the river. By 1848, this became mandatory. There
was no longer any need for cesspits and nightsoil men, but the result was that raw sewage was being piped straight into the Thames. In 1827, a pamphleteer described the river as ‘saturated with the impurities of fifty thousand homes … offensive to the sight, disgusting to the imagination, and destructive to the health’. This was the very river that still supplied many people with their drinking water.

  The trade card of Richard Harper, one of the ‘nightmen’ who carted away London’s nightsoil

  Obviously, such a primitive means of sewage disposal presented a major public health hazard. London suffered from four major outbreaks of cholera during the nineteenth century, in 1831–2, 1848–9, 1853–4 and 1866. But the link between cholera and an infected supply of drinking water was not made for a considerable length of time. The scale of the problem was underestimated because of contemporary misunderstandings about the nature of disease.

  Rather than realising that cholera was water-borne, people still persisted in believing that a ‘miasma’ of disease moving unstoppably through the air made you ill. The idea that houses should be better ventilated took priority over drainage. Even Florence Nightingale, in her Notes on Nursing (1869), condemned the idea of connecting houses to drains, because she thought odours rising from the drains would bring with them scarlet fever and measles. She was not alone in her suspicions: when Linley Sambourne installed a plumbed-in wash basin in his wife’s bedroom at Stafford Terrace, Kensington, she kept the plug in the basin at all times as a guard against evil vapours.