by Tom Quinn
Crapper also invented the disconnecting trap – a device fitted in each soil pipe just below ground that prevented the smell of the drains coming back up into the house.
Crapper seems to have been almost the only Victorian not to have been squeamish and permanently embarrassed by matters lavatorial, but on one famous occasion in the early days of his success he put his loos and cisterns in the window of his shop in Chelsea and several lady passers-by fainted with shock!
Not all Crapper’s inventions were warmly greeted, however. He invented a loo that used a complicated system of pistons attached to the loo seat to flush the loo automatically. Having used the loo the user stood up and the loo seat automatically rose up – the rising movement automatically activating the flushing mechanism. However, it was discovered that within a few months of being fitted the loo seat began to stick – this meant that the unsuspecting user would begin to stand up only to find that the loo seat stuck until enough pressure had built up from the system to unstick it. The loo seat would then fly up at speed, hitting the user painfully on the bottom. The invention became known as the bottom slapper and was eventually discontinued.
Thomas Crapper died in 1910 but the firm he founded was still being run by his descendants in 1963, when it was finally sold to a rival company. Crapper was never honoured despite the fact that his flushing loo probably did far more to improve the health and happiness of humans worldwide than any number of politicians, businessmen, army generals and celebrities put together.
LAST OF THE GREAT LONDON COURTESANS
1861
English prostitutes probably suffered most in the nineteenth century, which not only criminalised them but also patronised them. Earlier centuries accepted the role of the honest whore with more equanimity. In the nineteenth century only one sort of prostitute could live within the vague bounds of respectability – the sort who slept with kings and princes. If the king insisted that his mistress be allowed to accompany him to country houses, the theatre and other social engagements then everyone had to be polite to her. Lower down the social scale a mistress would be completely ostracised in a society that expected respectable women to be so delicate that it was as much as they could do to lie on a sofa all day complaining about headaches.
But in the thick of all this hypocrisy we can still espy the mighty creature that is Catherine Walters (1839–1920), tales of whose extraordinary exploits filled the air of Victorian and Edwardian London. Mrs Walters – whose nickname was ‘Skittles’ – is also proof that the power of personality can overcome almost any obstacle.
She was known as Skittles for reasons no one can now discover – it may have been that she started work as a prostitute in Skittle Alley, Liverpool, but she was a great beauty in her youth as well as being the last in a line of professional courtesans stretching back to Nell Gwynn and beyond.
What is most remarkable about Skittles is that she lived through an age that was probably the most moralistic – even if hypocritically so – in British history. The Victorian obsession with purity and chastity except within marriage combined with the absolute rule of respectability meant that any middle- or working-class woman suspected of sexual irregularity (as the Victorian newspapers might have put it) would be shunned by everyone, but as always there was one rule for the majority and an entirely different rule for the elite.
Because Mrs Walters was the paid mistress of a number of members of the aristocracy and royalty she had to be received into society if her various partners insisted on it. But even without aristocratic patronage the decidedly eccentric Skittles would have survived anyway. She was in many respects immune to the rules that applied to most people simply because she didn’t give a fig about them. She was the mistress of the Duke of Devonshire and the Marquis of Hartington among others and insisted on the finest clothes and carriages – finer even it was said than the wives of her lovers. Stories about her are legion. She loved horses and hunting and once when out with the Quorn in Leicestershire she had kept up with the leaders of the field until the fox was caught. The master of hounds ventured to compliment her on the fine flushed colour of her cheeks. ‘That’s nothing,’ she replied. ‘You should see the colour of my ruddy arse!’
She reached the height of her fame in 1861 when any rumour that she might be driving in the park on a Sunday would lead to huge crowds assembling to catch a glimpse of her.
She lived for many years at No. 15 South Street, Mayfair – the house is still there – and in old age was pushed in her wheelchair through Hyde Park by none other than Lord Kitchener.
HOW TO MAKE A LIVING SELLING DOG POO
1861
Poverty in earlier centuries pushed tens of thousands of Londoners into very peculiar occupations – peculiar at least by modern standards. There was a huge market for live birds, for example, and this market was met by hundreds of live-bird sellers who might walk twenty miles out of London to catch a dozen or so birds before walking the twenty miles back again. They would then repeat this journey three or four times a week.
Or take the mudlarks who scoured the river foreshore at low tide. They went barefoot whatever the weather, searching for copper nails from the ships, for old bottles – anything in fact that they might be able to sell.
The toshers, on the other hand, were men who risked their lives searching for valuables in London’s vast, unmapped warren of sewers. Toshers tended to be from the same few families and they handed down their knowledge of the sewer network from generation to generation, but even generations of experience couldn’t always protect them and many died when sudden rainfall flooded the system or the lamps and candles they carried were blown out or they were overcome by gas.
But perhaps the strangest job of all was that of the pure finder – a job that existed, perhaps could only have existed, in Victorian London.
A pure finder was someone who spent his days searching for dog faeces to sell to leather tanners, particularly to those tanners engaged in producing leather for the bookbinding trade.
Henry Mayhew’s extraordinary book London Labour and the London Poor charts the lives of a number of pure finders. Mayhew explains that in the 1830s and 1840s only women seem to have been involved in the trade and they were known as ‘bunters’. By the 1850s, when Mayhew carried out his research, men, women and children were working as pure finders. Pure finders sold the dog faeces they collected for roughly ten old pence a bucketful. The tanners – mostly based in Bermondsey (where thirty tanneries are recorded in the 1860s) – preferred the dry sort of faeces as it contained more alkaline and it was the alkaline that worked its magic on the leather.
Curiously, Mayhew and others recorded that many of the pure finders were well-educated men and women who had fallen on hard times. His description of the trade is hugely evocative:
The pure-finder is often found in the open streets, as dogs wander where they like. The pure-finders always carry a handle basket, generally with a cover, to hide the contents, and have their right hand covered with a black leather glove; many of them, however, dispense with the glove, as they say it is much easier to wash their hands than to keep the glove fit for use. The women generally have a large pocket for the reception of such rags as they may chance to fall in with, but they pick up those only of the very best quality, and will not go out of their way to search even for them. Thus equipped they may be seen pursuing their avocation in almost every street in and about London, excepting such streets as are now cleansed by the street orderlies, of whom the pure-finders grievously complain, as being an unwarrantable interference with the privileges of their class.
The pure collected is used by leather-dressers and tanners, and more especially by those engaged in the manufacture of morocco and kid leather from the skins of old and young goats, of which skins great numbers are imported, and of the roans and lambskins which are the sham morocco and kids of the slop leather trade, and are used by the better class of shoemakers, book binders, and glovers, for the inferior requirements of their b
usiness. Pure is also used by tanners, as is pigeons’ dung, for the tanning of the thinner kinds of leather, such as calf-skins, for which purpose it is placed in pits with an admixture of lime and bark.
In the manufacture of moroccos and roans the pure is rubbed by the hands of the workman into the skin he is dressing. This is done to purify the leather, I was told by an intelligent leatherdresser, and from that term the word pure has originated. The dung has astringent as well as highly alkaline, or, to use the expression of my informant, scouring, qualities. When the pure has been rubbed into the flesh and grain of the skin (the flesh being originally the interior, and the grain the exterior part of the cuticle), and the skin, thus purified, has been hung up to be dried, the dung removes, as it were, all such moisture as, if allowed to remain, would tend to make the leather unsound or imperfectly dressed. This imperfect dressing, moreover, gives a disagreeable smell to the leather and leather-buyers often use both nose and tongue in making their purchases…
UNGODLY TRAVEL DENOUNCED
1863
In a pamphlet published in London midway through Queen Victoria’s reign, various so-called experts denounced the new fashion for railway travel. It was ungodly, ungentlemanly and un-Christian according to many of those who contributed to the pamphlet.
One short contribution sums up the general tenor of the whole: it was written Dr Walter Lewis, the medical officer of the London Post Office. He wrote that his views and scientific conclusions on railway travel were based entirely on observations of the health of the travelling public. He was determined to give the impression that his views were based strictly on science yet to the modern traveller his views seem bizarre in the extreme.
Dr Lewis wrote:
Railway travel has little, if any, injurious effect on healthy, strong, well-built persons, such as are typically to be found among the London populace, but provided that the amount be not excessive, and if passengers ensure that they take moderate care of themselves; but persons who take to habitual railway travelling after the age of twenty five or thirty are more easily and dangerously affected than those who begin earlier, and that the more advanced in age a traveller is, the more easily is he affected by this sort of locomotion.
Weak, tall loosely-knit persons, and those suffering under various affections, more especially of the head, heart, and lungs, are very unsuited for habitual railway travelling. They may also find the extreme motion induces delusions of a most unwholesome sort and may even inflame the passions.
WHERE IS THE CENTRE OF LONDON?
1865
One of the oddest things about London is that most people have no idea where it begins – or more precisely where its centre actually is. Many think that the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus marks the centre point; others are convinced that Buckingham Palace marks the spot, or St Paul’s Cathedral.
In fact – and for the strangest reason – the centre of London is located at a spot just behind the equestrian statue of Charles I at the southern edge of Trafalgar Square. If you look carefully there is a brass plate in the roadway that marks the precise spot.
But what adds to the oddity of this is that strictly speaking – and despite modern rearrangements to suit the traffic – the brass plate set in the ground here is not in Trafalgar Square at all. It is Charing Cross. The Charing Cross we see today – which is outside the Charing Cross railway hotel just a few hundred yards away – was put up in 1865 as a publicity stunt to attract attention to the new railway terminus.
The medieval Charing Cross from which the area gets its name was actually at the top of Whitehall where the brass plaque is now.
But why choose this exact spot to define the centre of London? The answer has to do with the bizarre growth of the capital – to the east of the plaque is the City of London; to the south Westminster.
Edward the Confessor (1003–1066) made a vow to go on a the pilgrimage to Rome, but domestic unrest made this impossible and he sought absolution from his vow by promising to build a huge church. He chose Thorney Island for his church – a small area of high ground above the surrounding marsh of the Thames. This area – we now call it Westminster – already had a small monastery, but Edward enlarged it considerably and added Westminster Abbey, the church we see today. The new church was complete by 1065.
The merchants of the City had no intention of moving to what was then a windswept and remote location so they stayed put, but when the legislators at Westminster Hall wanted to hear news of the commercial goings on of the City they came to the halfway point – Charing Cross – and the City merchants wanting to know more of affairs of state also came to this spot.
The brass plaque marks the exact halfway point between the old city and the new seat of government and is therefore the centre point, as it were, of both Londons.
With the growth of the civil service in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the brass plaque helped solve a more practical problem too: where London weighting was paid to public officials there had to be a decision about the area of London within which the extra rate of pay would be calculated. It was decided that anyone working within a six-mile radius of the brass plaque at Charing Cross would be entitled to the extra payment.
MAD ABOUT FOOTWARMERS
1867
It’s no longer acceptable for the general public to treat the staff of particular companies badly just because they are paying for the service those companies provide. But that wasn’t always the case and customers in the past could get away with treating shop and railway staff – to take just two examples – as they pleased simply because they were paying.
Some customers were so unreasonable in their behaviour that stories about them have become legendary. Among railwaymen and railway historians the tale of the woman and the footwarmer has been handed down from generation to generation.
The carriages of high-speed trains that ran between major cities in the great age of steam were warmed during the winter season by excess steam, an innovation that overnight reduced the need – at least on some journeys – for vast numbers of greatcoats and capes, hats, gloves and scarves.
The steam heating innovation was a clever one because the steam used to heat the carriages was recycled steam that had already been used to drive the engine. The system was to force the steam along pipes from end to end of the train with connections going into each compartment of the carriages.
Most people loved the new system, which also dispensed with the need for cumbersome and inefficient footwarmers, but a few diehards petitioned for it to be abandoned.
Among the latter was a famously eccentric old lady who, prior to taking her seat in a train shortly to leave King’s Cross in London, asked, in a tone that suggested she had no intention of being refused, to be provided with a footwarmer. Since footwarmers were no longer available she was told, as politely as possible, that this would not be possible but that she could comfort herself with the knowledge that the carriages were now heated in a far more efficient way by steam.
According to the policeman who was soon called to the scene, she at once assumed an extremely militant attitude, and railed against the new method, apparently for no conceivable reason other than that it was a departure from a practice she had grown accustomed to, and that she could not bear such newfangled notions.
She demonstrated the full depths of her anger by using an umbrella to poke and swipe at the poor old railwayman who’d originally come along to see if he could help her, which was a bit unfair as he couldn’t have supplied her with a footwarmer even if he’d wanted to, since none was available.
With the aid of the policeman who calmed her down, the patient railwayman at last persuaded the old lady to at least try sitting for a few moments in one of the steam-heated compartments. She entered, with misgiving writ large on her countenance, and immediately declared that the atmosphere was unbearable, and that she knew beforehand that it would be so.
‘But, how can that be,’ said the railwayman, ‘when the engine is
not yet attached to the train, and the steam pipe, which you’re welcome to touch, is stone cold?’
Her only answer was to shout at both the railwayman and the attendant policeman:
‘Get away with you both. I will in future travel on a line where they will not both boil me and make me make a fool of myself.’
THE HOUSES THAT EXIST BUT AREN’T THERE
1868
An elegant stuccoed street in Paddington hides one of the oddest pairs of houses in the world. The passer-by would hardly notice that numbers 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens have permanently darkened windows, nor that the front doors have a curiously solid feel to them. But look closely and you quickly realise that these are not actually houses at all.
The story starts in the 1860s when the world’s first underground railway was being constructed. The Metropolitan line – which was opened in 1868 – was built on the cut and cover principle. This meant that to build a tunnel you first had to dig a huge trench. Once this was done the circular supports (to make the tunnel) were fitted and the whole then covered with earth again. When the line between Bayswater and Paddington was being built it became necessary to demolish two houses in what was then a recently built and highly prestigious row of terraced houses.
Numerous railway acts tended to ride roughshod over the rights of tenants and landlords in the mid-Victorian era so the railway company simply compulsorily purchased two houses in the path of their tunnel and knocked them down. But the householders on either side refused to be beaten by a mere Act of Parliament – they managed to force through a condition that when the tunnel had been built and covered over, the facades at least of the two demolished houses should be reinstated. And that is precisely what happened. What look like a pair of rather grand houses are actually only walls about five feet thick.