by Mark Easton
T is for Toilet
I shuddered when writing the above. I was brought up to believe that ‘toilet’ was a term never ever to be uttered in company. Or even in private. More shameful than any curse (which merely revealed a foul mouth), use of the word was regarded as irredeemably ‘common’. With its ooh-la-la continental pretentiousness, ‘toilet’ suggested the worst sort of proletarian social climber: someone lacking the necessary sophistication or breeding. My shudder was as much at its reminder of the middle-class snobbery incorporated into my toilet training as the word itself.
Almost any term associated with the disposal of human waste is loaded with social baggage in Britain. In asking for directions to the… [insert euphemism of choice here], we probably reveal more about ourselves than if we were to squat in the gutter. My family, when absolutely required to describe the facility in question, would most probably plump for ‘loo’. This three-lettered sobriquet of disputed derivation is now, apparently, the most popular choice of any, a timid little thing without hard consonants or even an ending to speak of, a word that barely whispers its presence in a sentence.
Contrast ‘loo’ (regularly used by 80 per cent of Brits) with ‘bog’ (a no-nonsense label employed by just 15 per cent) or khazi (less than 4 per cent of people utilise this Cockney slang); the latter are words with self-confidence, even attitude, and they are falling out of fashion. Four out of ten of us talk of ‘going to the bathroom’ when we have no intention of taking a bath. The ‘little boy’s/girl’s room’, ‘powder room’ or the ‘restroom’ (invasive Americanisms) are similarly coy descriptions for facilities that seem to require increasing amounts of demure disguise with each century that passes. Indeed, the start of the twenty-first was marked by the coining of a new British euphemism: the designers of the eco-friendly tepee-shaped public convenience in the Millennium Dome were moved to describe it as a ‘beacon of relief’.
Britain’s changing relationship with basic bodily functions reflects the evolution of its society. It is not just vocabulary: the toilet charts the boundaries of public responsibility and private life, of our relationship with each other and even with ourselves. The shiny porcelain of the bowl acts as a mirror to British values, identities and hang-ups.
The Slovenian writer Slavoj Žižek famously suggested that ‘you go to the toilet and you sit on ideology.’ In an article for the London Review of Books in 2004, Žižek compared the design of German, French and, what he called, Anglo-Saxon lavatories. ‘In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness,’ he wrote. ‘In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible.’ The Anglo-Saxon version, he continued, ‘presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected.’
The three designs, Žižek postulated, are an expression of a triad of national cultures first identified by the German philosopher Georg Hegel: ‘Reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English).’ Whether this academic contemplation upon the toilet bowl can withstand Germanic levels of scrutiny is debatable, but what is undeniable are deep-seated cultural differences in the attitudes of societies towards excretion.
I recently took my children to the ancient Roman fort named Vindolanda, close to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. They dangled their legs over an excavated wall and tried to imagine what it must have been like on that spot almost two thousand years earlier, because what they sat upon was the remains of the sixteen-seater latrine. Here the soldiers would have occupied wooden seats, side by side, suspended above a channel of running water. In front of them a separate narrow channel, also flowing with water, which would be used to rinse the sponge-on-a-stick that served as lavatory paper. The detail of this scene that provoked most interest was not the expert plumbing of course. It was the impossible, appalling, disgusting thought of communal defecation. And yet public latrines, as against private ‘closets’, were the normal and often only form of provision for many British people until the nineteenth century.
In the Middle Ages, communal lavatories were a familiar feature of urban life. London’s Lord Mayor Dick Whittington, pantomime’s thigh-slapping ailurophile, left money in his will for the construction of a monster 128-seater — sixty-four each for men and women — overhanging a gully on the banks of the Thames. Emptied by the tide, ‘Whittington’s Longhouse’ was still in operation in the seventeenth century. The self-cleaning design was a significant improvement upon numerous latrines that clogged up the city’s waterways.
For centuries after the Roman garrisons left, British plumbing was a chaotic and unsanitary mess. Partly, this reflected a rejection of anything connected with Rome: pipes and drains from this period almost define the phrase ‘bodged job’, as if the engineers had deliberately constructed waste disposal systems to defy the laws of Caesar and physics. Cleanliness itself was rejected as a Roman indulgence by some early Christians: the English hermit St Godric walked to Jerusalem without washing, perhaps heeding the words of St Jerome, who declared that ‘a clean body and a clean dress means an unclean soul.’
This denunciation of basic hygiene as un-British and un-Christian may have offered some cultural and theological justification for the stink and the filth. But it didn’t make it any less unpleasant or dangerous. In 1326 tragic Richard the Raker fell into his cesspit and drowned ‘monstrously in his own excrement’ — possibly the worst accidental death imaginable. The great pits of human waste also contributed to the spread of diseases that could wipe out whole villages and decimate towns.
For all but the richest, the process and product of defecation remained a manifestly public business. There was no place for modesty. Even at Hampton Court Palace, Henry VIII built the Great House of Easement — a twin-level, twenty-eight-seater latrine suspended over the moat — for the use of his courtiers. He, meanwhile, would sit privately upon a luxurious ‘close stool’ with padded seat, trimmed with silk ribbons and studded with gold nails. Privilege and class increasingly defined the politics of the privy, a legacy still in evidence today.
In 1530, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus finished a book that instantly became a European blockbuster. De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (‘A Handbook on Good Manners for Children’) was the bestseller of the sixteenth century, translated into twenty-two languages and running into dozens of editions. Although it purported to offer thoughts on the moral and practical education of children, what it really amounted to was the first self-help book on how to be civilised. It became essential reading in the upper echelons of British society, not least for its thoughts on the manners of the toilet. ‘It is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating,’ Erasmus wrote. ‘A well-bred person should always avoid exposing without necessity the parts to which nature has attached modesty. If necessity compels this, it should be done with decency and reserve, even if no witness is present.’
Three decades later, the Italian cleric Giovanni della Casa took these ideas further. In his famous treatise on manners, Il Galateo, he wrote that ‘it does not befit a modest, honourable man to prepare to relieve nature in the presence of other people.’ The public latrine had been condemned. Britain’s upper classes would look to privatise poo.
Modesty and affected repugnance at bodily functions became fashionable behaviour. Indeed, Queen Elizabeth I was something of a pioneer in the new manners, influenced by her ‘saucy godson’ and courtier, the poet Sir John Harington. In 1596 he published A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, a controversial tome that literally and satirically argued for the cleansing of the court. It ends with a two-line verse:
To keepe your houses sweete, clense privie vaultes.
To keepe your soules as sweete, mend privie faults.
; It turned the teachings of St Jerome upside down and encouraged a return to Roman sanitation and hygiene methods. Harington’s manor was close to the city of Bath and the book was evangelical in its praise for the waste disposal systems of the ancient emperors. It also included his own design of the first flushing toilet, the Ajax (a pun on ‘a jakes’, the colloquial word for a privy), which was installed in a number of the great houses of the time, including Richmond Palace.
Beyond the walls of such grand residences, however, the lack of even a rudimentary sewage system meant urban life remained contaminated by the odorous and potentially deadly consequences of human waste. The aristocracy turned their superior noses up at ‘the great unwashed masses of humanity’, as the political philosopher Edmund Burke described them. How you smelled defined your status.
The arrival of industrialisation only served to widen the gulf between the personal hygiene habits of the ruling classes and the common people, as rapidly expanding towns and cities were quite unable to cope with the sanitation demands placed upon them. Waves of cholera, influenza and typhoid in the 1830s brought a new urgency to matters, and with all social strata at risk from infection, Parliament asked the public health activist Edwin Chadwick to investigate. His Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population led to a raft of legislation attempting, in the course of a few years, to transform the practices and attitudes of centuries.
The Public Health Act of 1848, for instance, made it mandatory to have some sort of private lavatory in one’s home — privy, ash pit or flushing WC. However, there was opposition to such ideas in working class areas. Many labourers and their families thought it unhygienic to have a lavatory inside the house and regarded the new laws as parliamentary interference with the most basic and domestic of human rights.
The aspirational middle classes, on the other hand, largely welcomed the privacy and modesty afforded by the new technology and increasingly associated personal hygiene with moral virtue. Public health reform was seen as the key to the spiritual regeneration of the urban poor and an army of propagandists, including many women, sought to save the working classes from the corruptive stench of human waste. The Ladies’ National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge was founded in 1857 and published a series of penny tracts with titles such as Hints to Working People about Personal Cleanliness and The Power of Soap and Water. The Reverend Charles Girdlestone, a Black Country parson with fervent views on hygiene, claimed that the sanitary reform movement was ‘pregnant with the most important advantages to the human race, in every point of view — social, moral and religious’. The toilet had become the measuring stick for a civilised society.
At the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park in 1851, the engineer George Jennings installed his Monkey Closets in the Retiring Rooms of Crystal Palace. More than 800,000 visitors spent a penny to use what were the first public conveniences. The price included a private cubicle, a clean seat, a towel, a comb and a shoeshine. As the sociologist Norbert Elias wrote later in his book The Civilizing Process, industrial societies like Britain had developed ‘embarrassment at the mere sight of many bodily functions of others, and often at their mere mention, or as a feeling of shame when one’s own functions are exposed to the gaze of others, and by no means only then’.
The novelist William Thackeray described the Victorian era as ‘if not the most moral, certainly the most squeamish’, and it was from that peculiarly British mixture of prudery, pride and invention that our contemporary attitudes to the lavatory have their roots. The development of vitreous china by Twyford, Wedgwood and Doulton; the flushable WC refined and mass-produced by Thomas Crapper; the opening (often with a fanfare) of public lavatories incorporating the very best in artistry and design — in the field of human waste disposal, Great Britain led the world in technology and magnificence.
To this day, the Isle of Bute council promotes its gentlemen’s convenience in Rothesay as a tourist attraction:
The interior is magnificent with walls entirely clad in decorative ceramic tiles, ornately patterned in rows. The floors are designed with ceramic mosaic, with the crest of the Royal Burgh of Rothesay at the entrance. Fourteen urinals stand like sentinels along two walls, another six surround a central stand — each a white enamel alcove topped with the legend ‘Twyfords Ltd. Cliffe Vale Potteries, Hanley’ and crowned with imitation dark green St Anne marble.
The cast-iron, oak and porcelain assurance of the Victorian convenience often echoes to this day in the domestic lavatories of Britain’s professional middle class: a wooden seat, white tiling and a no-nonsense functionality. Conversely, apricot pedestal carpets, fluffy toilet-roll covers and potpourri fragrance are reflections of the continuing influence, perhaps, of the Ladies’ National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge. The ‘smallest room’ may offer abundant clues as to how the owner sees themselves, their aspirations and self-confidence. My wife’s grandmother, for example, used to have two supplies of lavatory paper in her highly scented bathroom: soft for the ladies and scratchy Izal for gentlemen callers (as well as her husband). From class values to sexual politics, one learned more about her character and background from a trip to the lavatory than anywhere else.
While Britain developed its own unique loo politics based on centuries of subtle toilet-training, elsewhere in Europe and around the world, different historical, religious and cultural forces have been at work. The French toilet remained a ‘hole in the ground’ long after the sit-down WC had won universal acceptance in the UK, and while many Brits might consider such basic provision as archaic and uncivilised, the international world of sanitary hygiene remains divided over the ‘sit or squat’ debate. Sharia law requires the use of running water for cleaning, and many Muslims regard sitting on the loo as un-Islamic. There are similar cleansing rituals and customs in Jewish and Far Eastern cultures that are at odds with sedentary British practices.
The Germans have a peculiar respect for human excreta, Sigmund Freud being one among those who have documented the country’s association between scheiss and geld (excrement was once a valuable fertiliser). One consequence is a bluntness and honesty to bodily functions, in contrast to British coyness and modesty. While a UK advertisement for a laxative might hint at its purpose in achieving regularity, its German equivalent is likely to include a diagram and stress the product’s effectiveness on the ‘sluggish intestine’. While Britain’s loo-roll commercials feature puppies, Germans get a drawing of buttocks with the legend: ‘Velvety soft Servus turns a dissatisfied butt into a satisfied face.’
The Americans have been on a similar journey to their British cousins. Early settlers imported pre-Enlightenment attitudes to cleanliness, regarding excessive bathing as an indulgence, but with urbanisation came a moral propriety that went far beyond Victorian prudery. In the 1950s, Hollywood sensibility meant bathrooms featured in movies never contained anything as vulgar as a toilet.
The business of relieving oneself has become such a source of potential embarrassment and shame in both Britain and the US that it is cited as an explanation for widespread constipation and the prevalence of bowel cancer. Men in both countries are also said to suffer particularly from Shy Bladder Syndrome or ‘paruresis’ — the inability to pee in a public lavatory. This was famously (or infamously) revealed in a 1976 study of university students.
Psychologist R. D. Middlemist wanted to test the hypothesis that subjects would take longer to start urinating if someone was standing next to them. He initially tried to measure this by setting up an experiment involving three urinals, one of which was occupied by a ‘confederate’ and another marked ‘Don’t use, washing urinal’ with a bucket of water and a sponge on top. The trouble was, as he explained in his report, it was tricky to know at exactly what time the subject starting peeing: ‘The urinals were so silent that even the confederate standing adjacent to the subject could not hear the urine striking the urinal.’ So, with the students oblivious to all of this, Middlemist opted for vis
ual cues, embedding a periscopic prism in a stack of books lying on the floor to watch the stream of urine.
The American Psychological Association later said that the experiment was not only unethical but probably unlawful in many countries. That said, the results are still cited: with no one else in the lavatory the average student took 4.8 seconds to start urinating; with a confederate one urinal away the time rose to 6.2 seconds; if the accomplice was at the next urinal it took 8.4 seconds. Privacy and modesty have turned to embarrassment and shame. Doctors warn that our bodily functions are in danger of becoming almost dysfunctional.
However, the legacy of lavatorial innovation has now passed from British Victorian inventors to Japanese electronic giants, who promise a new generation of high-tech toilets protecting the delicacy and well-being of the user. Often designed as pre-fabricated toilet ‘pods’, the sophisticated machines include an array of photoelectric buttons and gizmos that preclude the need to touch anything or the risk of emotional distress. Some play music or the sound of running water to disguise more basic noises and computerised features allow consumers to personalise their toilet experience.
At the Ideal Home Show 2011 in London, visitors were told how technologically advanced toilets were set to dramatically change Britain’s bathroom habits. The AquaClean, it was explained, would clean you with a gentle spray of water, the temperature adjusted to suit your requirements, leaving the user with a feeling of ‘extreme cleanliness and a sense of well-being’.