Bogs, Baths and Basins: The Story of Domestic Sanitation

by David J Eveleigh

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752495804
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	11/15/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	12 Years

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Bogs, Baths & Basins

The Story of Domestic Sanitation

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By David J. Eveleigh

The History Press

Copyright © 2013 David J. Eveleigh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9580-4

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CHAPTER 1

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. 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. 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. Similar projecting turrets connecting with first-floor 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'.

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). 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. 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.

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. 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. 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'.

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.' 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.'

'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'. 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'. 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. 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.

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 London – 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 beehive-shaped 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. 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. 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'.

'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. 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. 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.'

Privies were mostly one-room structures. The walls were usually whitewashed 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.'

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 three-hole 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. 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'.

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. 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.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Bogs, Baths & Basins by David J. Eveleigh. Copyright © 2013 David J. Eveleigh. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents

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,