If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley

  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.

  Even in aristocratic circles something of a lingering suspicion of plumbing and hot water persisted into the twentieth century. To keep too clean seemed somehow degenerate. ‘There is in the taste for sitting down in a bathtub a certain indolence and softness that ill suits a woman,’ wrote Countess Drohojowska in 1860, and the Manual of Hygiene of 1844 recommended that the private parts be washed no more than once a day. ‘We will content ourselves with observing that everything which goes beyond the boundaries of a healthy and necessary hygiene leads imperceptibly to unfortunate results,’ was all its authors had to add. James Lees-Milne stayed in a house without plumbing in 1947. Each day, an ‘old retainer brought into the room a red blanket which he spread before the empty hearth-grate. Then he brought a brass can of tepid water, enough to cover the bottom of the bath. The room must have been several degrees below zero. He might have been a ghost performing the customary function of a hundred years ago.’

  This conservatism caused a culture clash when visitors from across the Atlantic arrived in Britain with much higher expectations of bathroom technology. The ‘dollar princesses’, American heiresses sent over to find themselves English noblemen for husbands in the 1890s, were horrified by the primitive bathing conditions they encountered in English country houses. But they were even more horrified by the prospect of failing to snag a duke. Afraid to return to America empty-handed, one of Edith Wharton’s characters said she’d ‘rather starve and freeze here than go back to all the warm houses and the hot baths’ at home.

  The en-suite bathroom was first seen in the New World, and from the 1920s onwards hotels in America often had a bathroom for each bedroom. The ascetic British were slow to follow and en suites were at first only to be found in the luxury hotels where an international clientele required them. The art deco bathrooms added to Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair in the 1920s, with their marble surfaces, eau de Nil colour schemes, mirrors, separate showers at head and at shoulder height (so as not to get your hair wet) and bells for maid or valet, are perfect examples. One can imagine a Hollywood star frolicking in a bubble bath in such a room, perhaps to the disapproval of the English dowagers next door.

  The other innovation from America was the stand-up shower to be taken separately from, and in preference to, the bath (plate 20). Even within the US, the shower was a West Coast idea that worked its way east over time. Over-bath showerheads had appeared in Britain in Victorian plumbing catalogues (Charles Dickens favoured a model called ‘The Demon’), but in Europe such devices were seen as rather treacherous: certainly a pregnant woman should avoid their use, as ‘a shower bath gives too great a shock, and may induce miscarriage’. The European modernist houses of the 1930s, designed as rational ‘machines for living’, still had bathtubs in preference to showers, and even today few British flats are built without baths, despite their heavy claim upon ever-dwindling supplies of water.

  So long was the en suite considered a little bit racy that bathrooms entered through the bedroom only became common in British homes in the 1980s. Terence Conran was a little ahead of the game as usual when he wrote in 1974 that ‘along with central heating and a good fitted kitchen, there is nothing like a bedroom/bathroom suite to bump up the value of your property’. But even then he s
till felt it necessary to justify spending money on a room used merely for washing oneself:

  attitudes to bathrooms have been changing. These rooms are no longer limited by Puritan traditions according to which you used them only for ablutions, if not cold baths, or groped your way through clouds of rolling steam and yards of pipes.

  It was in this continued Puritan spirit that my mother took me, only a few years after Conran was writing, on a day out to marvel – but also to scoff a little – at the luxurious bathrooms for sale in Harrods.

  So this vital room has a much shorter history than you might assume: a matter of decades, not centuries. The bathroom’s decorative journey from Victorian Pompeiian pomp via art-deco glitter reached an endpoint in the stripped-down, minimalist, designer bathrooms of the 1990s, where function and aesthetics were as one. ‘The best contemporary bathrooms are those that cloak fitness for purpose in a Spartan simplicity,’ proclaimed a guide to the most desirable trends of the 1990s. The bathrooms designed by John Pawson look like temples to serenity, while Philippe Starck transformed familiar bathroom fittings into sleek and eye-catching alien shapes. Their simplicity of form, though, did not preclude endless supplies of hot water and piped music, and an atmosphere of luxury.

  By the end of the twentieth century, the bathroom had become only secondarily a place for washing. ‘Thinking in the bath’, a form of meditation, is now one of the bathroom’s intimate activities. As the only room in the modern home in which the user can turn a key against his or her family, the bathroom has quite a lot in common with the Stuart closet.

  18 – Don’t Forget to Brush Your Teeth

  A few grains of gunpowder … will remove every blemish and give your teeth an inconceivable whiteness.

  The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1764

  Until the eighteenth century, there was no such thing as a dentist. The barber-surgeons of Tudor times did all the jobs about the body requiring blades, removing rotten teeth along with amputating limbs and cutting hair.

  Tudor and Stuart people did indeed clean their teeth: with water, with powdered cuttlefish, with salt or rosemary rubbed on with cloths, twigs or sponges. But they also had sugar, and therefore cavities. (The aged Elizabeth I was a fearsome figure with ‘nose a little hooked, her lips narrow and her teeth black’.) Popular sweet treats included fiendish dental challenges such as ‘subtleties’, fabulous gilded edible sculptures of fortresses, beasts or even (as once served by Cardinal Wolsey) a model of St Paul’s Cathedral. Crafted in sugar and almond paste, they provided a severe ‘assault for valiant teeth’. Once decay set in and teeth were yanked out, rudimentary false teeth of ivory or bone were worn.

  The late seventeenth century saw the development of a new branch of medicine: dentistry. Charles Allen’s book The Operator for the Teeth (1685) is the earliest dental treatise in English. He emphasises the need to have healthy teeth for chewing, and regrets the pain caused by toothache. His eighteenth-century successors agreed that strong teeth were useful for eating, but they also exhibited a new and more refined set of values. Additionally, the Georgians wanted a fine set of teeth in order to be able to talk genteelly, and they wanted their snappers to look good: ‘the ornament of the mouth’. This is the century in which toothy smiles begin to appear in portraits for the first time.

  There was still no sure way, though, of protecting your teeth from decay. One hardly believes in the powers of a ‘pleasant ODORIFEROUS TINCTURE’ advertised in the Weekly Journal in 1725, which promises to make even the ‘blackest and most foul teeth extremely white, clean and beautiful at one using’. A vinegar gargle against bad breath sounds rather more efficacious, less so a potion containing powdered cumin and white wine, said ‘to help a Stinking breath, which comes from the Stomach’.

  Salt remained an enduringly popular toothpowder, as did bicarbonate of soda. The twigs of earlier times were gradually replaced by pig or horsehair bristle brushes. In 1721, Sir John Philipps begged his wife not to use the new toothbrushes: ‘using a brush to your teeth and gums (as you constantly do) will certainly prove in time extremely injurious to them both … I beg of ye for the future to use a sponge in its room.’

  George Washington (1732–99), first president of the US, is celebrated for his false teeth made of hippopotamus ivory and cow tooth. During the Revolutionary Wars, the capture in 1781 of his letter requesting cleaning tools for his teeth alerted the British forces to his whereabouts – the tiniest details may determine the course of empires. And indeed most people requiring false teeth preferred not to advertise their need. Customers in search of the services of Mme Silvie, a Georgian dentist, were assured of her discretion: ‘Those who don’t choose to make their grievances known by asking for the Artificial Teeth-maker may ask for the Gold Snuff-box and Tweezer-case Maker’ instead. The Dental Journal of 1880 describes the sad case of a lady who complained of a pain in her throat. She was too embarrassed to tell her doctor what he soon discovered for himself: that she had swallowed her top set of false teeth.

  George Washington’s false teeth. The lower denture was carved from hippopotamus ivory

  The new Georgian art of fixing up the mouth was part of the boom in unnecessary but charming additions to daily life designed to display your status, wealth and the fact that you had leisure time to squander – just like shopping trips, enormous feathered hats, ceramics and the other luxuries produced by the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately the wealthy eighteenth-century ladies who longed for a ‘fine mouth’ may well have rotted their own teeth through drinking the newly fashionable sugared tea. A country character in a book published in 1703 despises extravagant London ‘dames’: what ‘with drinking hot Liquors, and eating Sugar-Plums at Church, not one in ten has a Tooth left’. Another reason for the poor state of people’s teeth was the use of ‘vomits’ or emetics, an important component of medicine based on the concept of the four humours. A person making him-or herself sick on a regular basis will damage the teeth by introducing strong stomach acids into the mouth.

  One strange byway through the history of dentistry was a short-lived craze for live tooth transplantation, which took place in the comfort of your own home. The surgeon John Hunter (1728–93) was a pioneer of the new art of transplanting live organs from one body to another, and this included the teeth. A rich patient requiring teeth would buy from a pauper, and the transplantation from mouth to mouth would be carried out as quickly as possible with pliers and alcohol.

  The practice came to an end in the nineteenth century for three reasons. Firstly, there were moral concerns about poor people selling their healthy teeth (just like the concerns over the sale of livers and kidneys today). Second was the very reasonable fear that diseases could be transmitted along with the teeth. And finally, the new porcelain false teeth, once they had become available, were so lovely and white and durable. Gradually porcelain replaced all the earlier materials, which had included ivory, mother-of-pearl, silver, agate and the teeth of walruses. But even porcelain falsies must have been extremely uncomfortable: an 1846 dental textbook admits that they were usually ‘too insecure in the mouth to admit of any attempt at complete mastication of the food without displacement’. Only the discovery, importation and growing use of Indian rubber would make them comfortable to wear.

  Once false teeth that fitted reasonably snugly were available, they became an object of great desire. You could avoid pain and expensive dental treatments by having all your natural teeth whipped out at a young age. In 1918, T. S. Eliot overheard women in a pub discussing their teeth in connection with the return of their husbands from the First World War:

  Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

  He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

  To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

  You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set.

  Still, the practice of live tooth transplantation took a long time to die out completely. In 1919, the Royal College of Surgeons’ exami
ner in dentistry was still able to write a text describing how exactly how to perform this arcane art. But by then dentistry had moved out of the home and into the specialised surgery, and beyond the boundary of our intimate history of the home.

  19 – An Apology for Beards

  Long hair is one of the sinful customs and fashions of the wicked men of the world.

  Thomas Hall, 1630s

  ‘There’s more to life than hair, but it’s a good place to start,’ say the Aussie shampoo adverts, and it’s true that hair is a terrific indicator of status, wealth and aspirations to fashion. In fact, your hair provides you with a vast canvas for personal and political self-expression.

  Hair speaks especially stridently in the area of religious beliefs. The twelfth-century monk who wrote An Apology for Beards argues that the ‘marvellous mystery’ of matted, greasy facial hair indicates ‘interior cleanness’ and ‘divine virtue’. But five hundred years later, the strictly Puritan writer William Prynne found long hair on men to be ‘graceless’, ‘whorish’, ‘ungodly’ and ‘horrid’.

  Norman commentators seem to have alternated regularly between criticising dashing young knights who’d grown their hair too long and complaining that they’d cut it too short. A convincing explanation is the fear medieval people felt if other people looked like they were trying to escape from their allotted stations in life. Men whose job was fighting looked shamefully like women if they wore their hair long, while the same men with short hair were trespassing on a look reserved for the tonsured clergy.

  Throughout the medieval period, at least in Western Europe, there was a preference for blond hair which endures to this day. It can be seen in the names of the heroines of the French romances of the chivalric age: we have ‘Clarissant’ (clear), ‘Soredamor’ (golden) and ‘Lienor’ (bright). The thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman text Ornatus Mulierum has a positively modern ring in its promises to reveal an infallible method of turning white hair blond again. (Apply overnight a paste of ashes boiled for half a day in vinegar. Clearly it was a bleaching agent like ‘Sun-In’.) An Elizabethan recipe ‘to make hair as yellow as gold’ includes rhubarb and white wine among its ingredients.