If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  It took a long battle by the heroic Dr John Snow to get anyone to appreciate what he had understood from 1854 onwards: that cholera was spread through water, and that better drains and sewers would help, not hinder, health. Snow’s surgery was in Broadwick Street, Soho, and he noticed that many local cholera victims had been using a pump fed by a well in his street. This well was in close proximity to a sewer. Certain that water from the well was causing deaths, Dr Snow persuaded the parish council to remove the handle from the pump so that people couldn’t use it. Deaths consequently fell. But he had great difficulty in persuading his colleagues of his findings, because the water that actually contained the cholera bacilli looked perfectly clean and wholesome.

  Yet everybody became persuaded of the need to invest in a proper sewerage system by the Great Stink of July 1858. A particularly hot spell of weather caused the Thames to give off a terrifically dreadful smell. It even penetrated the Palace of Westminster, giving the country’s legislators a graphic and timely reminder that London lacked proper sewers. They had to hang sheets soaked in lime across their windows as a barrier to the stench.

  In fact, improvements were already in hand. London’s Metropolitan Board of Works had been established in 1856, with Joseph Bazalgette as its chief engineer. Bazalgette was in the process of creating a network of sewers beneath London which would not take waste directly to the Thames but eastwards instead, so that sewage would enter the river downstream of the city and its water supplies. It was noticeable, in the fourth cholera bout of 1866, that only the East End was affected – the sole area yet to be connected to the not-quite-yet-complete sewerage system.

  Bazalgette’s work was one of the true marvels of the Victorian age. He would eventually use 318 million bricks to construct over a thousand miles of sewer, and his works to drains, embankments and bridges cost more than twice as much as Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Most remain in use today, underground cathedrals of brick and water.

  Bazalgette’s sewer revolution would allow the water closet to become standard in most homes. The Great Exhibition of 1851 had also helped to popularise the flush, through the public toilets provided for its visitors. (Those for ladies were a late addition to the project: initially only men’s needs were considered.) Some 14 per cent of the six million visitors to the exhibition used the facilities, many of them experiencing the flush for the first time. This was despite the fact that they cost a penny to use – hence the expression ‘spending a penny’.

  So flushing toilets entered many homes, and now Thomas Crapper became a household name. The famous motto for his toilets, produced from 1861, was ‘a certain flush with every pull’. His is the best-known name in the history of sanitary innovation, but this was really because he became a figurehead for the new industry of sanitaryware rather than because of any particular technological breakthrough he made. His genius was in sales and promotion. He was a self-made man who walked from his native Doncaster to London, at the age of eleven, to find employment with a plumber in Chelsea. Perhaps the apogee of his career was his royal warrant, won after installing toilets at Sandringham House for the Prince of Wales, and his company survived until 1966.

  An advertisement for Thomas Crapper’s products … but, contrary to popular opinion, he did not invent the flushing toilet

  Despite the suggestions made in his company’s advertising, none of his nine plumbing patents were actually for the marvellous flushing siphon cistern. The credit for inventing this new and thunderous flush, produced by a pivoted arm balanced by a counterweight, must go to Joseph Adamson of Leeds, who took out his patent in 1853. Crapper did not even manufacture his own toilets: the products which bore his name were made by various other firms, mainly in Staffordshire, and he merely sold them on. (It was not unusual for one firm to stamp another’s name on its bathroom wares.) Stoke-on-Trent, with its good local supplies of coal for firing the kilns, was becoming the toilet capital of the world.

  Contrary to popular opinion, the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the verb ‘to crap’ was in use long before Crapper’s company became widely known. ‘Crap’ was an old English word for rubbish, taken by the Pilgrim Fathers to America and used over there as a slang expression for ‘faeces’. When American soldiers came over to Britain in 1917 to help fight the First World War, they were highly amused to encounter toilets with cisterns marked ‘CRAPPER’. But this was just a coincidence.

  Unfortunately not every toilet was a Crapper cracker. The obsolete D-bend remained in use in many places, despite the condemnation of professionals. At the Sanitary Exhibition in Croydon in 1879, an engineer called William Eassie still felt it necessary to insist that he ‘should above all like to see abolished the filthy D trap with its furrings of faecal matter’.

  The best form of toilet pan would eventually turn out to be nothing like the complicated valve-based system installed in the houses of rich early adopters. An alternative, robust and cheap model had begun to emerge in the 1840s, consisting of a crude ceramic bowl placed over an S-bend pipe. All across the country, the ‘Bristol Closet’, the ‘Liverpool Cottage Basin’ and the ‘Reading Pan’ were developed by local manufacturers. These simple devices were the direct forerunners of the modern toilet bowl sold today.

  What about the terminology? The word ‘lavatory’ really means a place for washing, i.e. a washbasin, and its use to signify a water closet is a polite euphemism. There’s an argument that the word ‘toilet’, another euphemism, owes its existence to the railways. One’s toilette was originally nothing to do with defecation; it meant washing and dressing. Early train carriages had two separate rooms involving water: the ‘toilet’, for washing, and the ‘WC’ or water closet. When, in the early twentieth century, the washbasin and lavatory joined together into just one little room, the more discreet ‘toilet’ was the only word that remained on the single door.

  Here’s George Jennings, the Victorian toilet impresario, using yet another, rather charming euphemism for the loo:

  although my proposition may be startling I am convinced the day will come when Halting Stations replete with every convenience will be constructed in all localities.

  He was writing with considerable prescience. Once the social and technical glitches had been ironed out, nothing could stop the triumphant progress of the flushing toilet. Two hundred and fifty years after its invention, it became an integral part of the British home.

  23 – A History of Toilet Paper

  See the privy-house for easement be fair, soot and clean;

  And that the boards thereupon be covered with cloth fair and green …

  Look there be blanket, cotton, or linen to wipe the nether end,

  And ever he clepith [calls], wait ready and entend [prompt].

  John Russell, Book of Nurture, c. 1452

  A research study in 1994 revealed that the average person flushes their toilet 3.48 times a day and uses 11.5 sheets of toilet paper. Quite a variety of materials have done duty over the centuries before paper became the material of choice.

  The superior Roman option was a sponge on a twig, possibly providing the origin of the phrase ‘to get hold of the wrong end of the stick’. Once the Romans had left Britain, standards declined, and ‘arsewisp’, a handful of straw, was quite acceptable in the Middle Ages. However, there were much fancier options available for the medieval super-rich. A fifteenth-century instruction manual addressed to a medieval squire or body servant explains that the servant must make sure that his master’s garderobe was fresh, clean and neat, and well provided with toilet paper. The ‘paper’, though, was actually a cloth: ‘Look there be blanket, cotton, or linen to wipe the nether end.’

  And so linen was the chosen material for wiping the bottoms of royalty and the aristocracy. It sounds rather repellent, but these linen cloths would be boiled and reused. William III had his own personal laundress who washed his shirts and also his ‘stool ducketts’, items which appear alongside sheets and napkins on the royal laundry list. Probably
looking rather like napkins, the stool ducketts would have been laid out ready for use on the table in the stool room. Royal stool rooms were actually quite spacious: Mary II’s at Kensington Palace, for example, contained a painted portrait of herself and her husband.

  This practice of laying out the napkins on a table handy for the close stool had a lingering echo in a very conservative household of the late twentieth century. Only twenty years ago, the housekeepers of Grimesthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire, home of the De Eresby family, maintained a tradition of arranging sheets of toilet paper in a fan upon a table in the toilet. This must have been an echo of how the linen ducketts were presented before they were replaced with pieces of paper.

  Paper was initially too valuable a commodity to be sacrificed to the once-only use of bottom-wiping. By 1751, though, one William Wyndham had clearly moved onto the more modern material. In making plans for a new privy at his house, Felbrigg, in Norfolk, he mentioned the need to have it ‘as light as possible. There must be a good broad place to set a candle on, and a place to keep paper.’

  But no one wasted valuable new paper in going to the toilet. The term ‘bumf’ for junk mail actually comes from ‘bum-fodder’: one’s read newspaper or unwanted post would be torn into squares, skewered in the corner, tied up with string and hung in the privy. I’ve had a go at performing this task, which must have once been a regular chore for housewives, if not delegated to their children. It’s gentle and pleasantly therapeutic, but all too easy to get distracted into reading the stories.

  Purpose-made toilet paper first appeared in America from 1857, when Gayety’s Medicated Paper company was formed. The novelty spread to England, where the British Patent Perforated Paper Company, makers of market-leader Bronco, appeared in 1880. Hard and shiny Bronco was first sold from a barrow in London, but it would become dominant in the toilet-paper market until the 1950s; Izal was its main rival. At their offices, civil servants were provided with a special HMSO variety stamped with the baleful words: ‘GOVERNMENT PROPERTY NOW WASH YOUR HANDS’.

  Soft tissues were invented in 1936, but were at first marketed as being only for gentlemen’s noses and sold solely at Harrods. However, people soon realised that soft tissue was much more pleasant to use than Bronco, and rolls of it began to appear in bathrooms. Its colour was restricted to white until 1957. For a long time toilet-paper manufacturers made their paper thicker for the North American market, on the understanding that Europeans ‘folded’ (a legacy from linen-using days?) but Americans ‘scrunched’ the paper.

  Pastel colours, patterns, quilting and extra-strong paper all followed. Other cultures, especially in the East, manage without toilet paper and use a hose instead, and this certainly saves trees and waste. A hideous innovation of the 1990s was ‘moist’ toilet paper, fragranced, dermatologically tested and super-cleansing. It really does sound like something from the last decadent days of the Roman Empire.

  24 – Menstruation

  So many troubles are brought on by constipation, painful menstruation being no exception.

  Leona W. Chalmers, The Intimate

  Side of a Woman’s Life, 1937

  Leona W. Chalmers, writing in 1937, may have had some funny ideas about what causes painful periods, but she had a commendable urge to teach women about their reproductive organs. ‘Women should be given the opportunity of learning how these organs are constructed,’ she wrote, and ‘what their functions are’. And yet how could females be expected to acquire reliable facts, Chalmers asked, ‘when such knowledge has not been made available’?

  The Book of Leviticus shows that even in ancient times menstrual blood was already firmly taboo, something to be hidden away and not discussed:

  If a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart … and everything that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean … And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water.

  The Book of Isaiah describes a ‘menstruous cloth’ as a horrible thing, to be discarded as quickly as possible. Scraps of old cloth were the enduring means of dealing with the flow for many centuries, and the words for the shameful fact of menstruation remained vague and elliptical: it was the ‘French lady’s visit’, the ‘Redcoats’ were coming, or the ‘moon’ was full. Richard Mead wrote in 1704 that ‘everyone knows how great a share the moon has in forwarding those evacuations of the weaker sex’, and he thought that women living nearer the equator must have stronger periods.

  It’s hard to find out very much about how Victorian women viewed menstruation because they would rather have died than talk about it. ‘The first sign that leads a female to suspect that she is pregnant, is her ceasing to be unwell,’ is how the author of Advice to a Wife somewhat opaquely described a missed period in 1853.

  From a circular advertising the New Victoria Protector. ‘Astonishing Success! Enormous Sales!’ reads the accompanying text. ‘When on the person there is absolutely no chaffing sensation … as with the more common napkin or cloth’

  In 1896, the company of Johnson and Johnson began to manufacture ‘Lister’s Towels’, history’s first recorded disposable pads. But because they were unable to market their products – it was unacceptable to mention menstruation in public – the line failed and was withdrawn. It was during the First World War that nurses noticed that the cellulose bandages used for wounded soldiers on the battlefield soaked up blood far better than the cotton or linen cloths they had been using for themselves for so long. So, in 1921, the oldest surviving brand of sanitary product, Kotex, began to make its disposable pads. They were originally buttoned into or hooked onto a special pair of pants or a belt, until in the 1970s the adhesive strip was invented. The convenience and liberation that sanitary pads brought to women was not entirely welcome to men. The literary giant William Faulkner, jealous of the enormous commercial success of Margaret Mitchell’s ultra-romantic Gone with the Wind (1936), peevishly dismissed it as a trivial product of an over-feminised ‘Kotex Age’.

  Tampons were invented in 1933, and caught on despite concerns from the Catholic Church that they were a bit too much like a contraceptive device. There’s an interesting theory that applicator tampons are more popular in countries with a Protestant heritage – keener on aestheticism and purity, more afraid of getting bloody fingers – and that women in less squeamish Catholic countries prefer the type without the tube.

  Only in the 1970s, with the rise of outspoken feminism, did menstruation become something to be publicly talked about. In the novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1978) by Judy Blume, the narrator is shown a disappointing educational film at school: ‘The film told us about the ovaries … it didn’t really show a girl getting it. It just said how wonderful nature was and how we would soon become women and all that.’ Afterwards, one girl asked if she should use Tampax, a question then still bold enough to cause consternation. ‘We don’t advise internal protection until you are considerably older,’ was the pusillanimous answer. The dangers of toxic-shock syndrome from tampons were at first underestimated by their manufacturers: when its existence emerged in the early 1980s, some feminists came to believe that the products would have been better tested if intended for use by men.

  The disposal of sanitary towels has long been a vexing issue. For much of the twentieth century they were burnt, either at home or in the boiler of a college or office building, which created a foul smell. Since then, the legislation concerning the disposal of sanitary products has been heavy-handed: the bins provided in public toilets have to meet standards set by the Environment Act, and must be emptied by specialist clinical-waste contractors. In order to reduce the frequency of emptying, and therefore of cost, the bins are bigger than convenient, take up a large amount of a cubicle’s space, brush against users and transfer germs. Alternative, women-led designs for toilet cubicles tend to incorporate chutes in their walls to receive used sanitary products.

  In 1976, when the first cultural history of menstrua
tion, The Curse, was published, one of its authors spoke to a meeting of psychiatrists:

  During her talk Mary Jane deliberately mentioned that she was menstruating … afterwards, many of the participants expressed shock that she had so revealed herself. ‘Why, my own wife doesn’t tell me when she is menstruating,’ said one.

  The psychiatrist’s wife was well in line with an attitude which had persisted for millennia. In more recent years, it’s been interesting to compare the rhetoric about nappies and the environment, and sanitary pads. Ecologically minded parents are frequently extolled to consider the energy that goes into washing cloth nappies against the necessity of putting used disposables into landfill waste-disposal sites. The ecological option in terms of sanitary protection is much clearer: rubber devices like the Mooncup are completely reusable and produce no waste at all. And yet we hear very little about this very simple green step that many women could make. The taboo placed by Leviticus still holds its sway.

  PART THREE

  An Intimate History of the Living Room

  It’s time to enter the public areas of the house, where life is lived on display.

  Once, all rooms were living rooms. Like stage sets, they’d be quickly dressed or furnished for different activities. That’s why, up to the eighteenth century, the chairs in a room would be pushed back against the wall unless in use. Best behaviour and boredom were to be found in many living rooms when guests were present, as well as laughter and tears at great events like proposals, wedding breakfasts and funeral feasts. Intended to be seen by visitors as well as family, living rooms illustrate the art of putting on a show.

  Why did living rooms eventually develop their different specialisations – drawing room, parlour, morning room, smoking room and so on? One argument suggests that ideas about courtesy caused change: gradually it became unseemly to perform certain activities in front of other people. In the seventeenth century, for example, the word ‘disgust’ was coined to describe a new revulsion that people felt towards tainted food or unpleasant odours. They started to think that eating was inappropriate in a living room, and that dining should have its own separate space. Then there was the growing fondness for solitude. Renaissance gentlemen liked to read and study, activities requiring quiet and private spaces. Thirdly, there was the emergence of a consumer society. As people began making things instead of growing them for a living, a multiplicity of new products and gadgets for the home appeared. And as they bought more possessions, homeowners needed more rooms to put them in.