Toilet in the 18 and 18th centuries

At my 4 classroomed flint built .victorian junior school the row of toilets were in a small slate roofed but pretty open building at the back of the playground. With crispy hard toilet paper.
The school is long gone now. All that wonderful flint I hope was used somewhere else. The picture is in my mind, but I so wish I had a photo.

Yesterday at u3a we had a speaker talking about toilets. He used to be a sanitation engineer, working in many countries. The statistics for people without safe toilets shocked us all. When they are installed, the cheapest and safest are constructed over a pit, far from the smart tiled bathrooms and efficient sewage systems we expect today. Some thought it distasteful, but there were more questions running over time than any other meeting I have been to!
Many of us can recall outside loos, down the garden, needing to be emptied. There is so much that we take for granted nowadays. Particularly for women, proper toilets mean not only better health, but more freedom, to go out, to school, to work, to socialise. ( Even if in this country, some of us won’t go anywhere without knowing if there is a loo!)

Given the hundreds of horses on the streets of towns and cities, the stench of horse manure would have been overwhelming, so human pongs had serious competition!

On holiday in Iceland, in the middle of a wide snow-covered wilderness, our guide suggested we all used the loo before moving on. It was snowing and bitterly cold. There was a little wood cabin and I was dreading peeling off my layers in the cold ..... but what a surprise! It even had a little radiator inside and was wonderfully warm, courtesy of nearby hot springs. Amazingly unexpected.

My Gran had an outdoor 2 seater loo (earth closet).

I don't remember either ever being full when we visited - me & my cousins used to go in in pairs & sit & chat, it was a novelty but we weren't the ones who had to empty them.

When we were fruit picking everyone who was out of nappies had to go in the fields - there was a trowel to dig a hole & cover up and no loo paper - we used dock leaves.So a 2-seater earth closet with loo paper was nearly as good as a flushing toilet compared with that.

HelterSkelter1

Has anyone bought a Shewee or other portable item to wee into whilr travelling. I think I would prefer to use that and then pour the wee into a pissoir or foot pad type toilet.

I bought a shee wee when atrophy was causing bladder problems. Thankfully I tried it out before using it when out and about because it just went everywhere. I’m a lot better now, thankfully but think it’s more practical to carry a small plastic jug if I think I might get caught short.

We stayed on a campsite in Finland about 35 years ago where they had a 2-seater loo. It was an earth closet and I think the idea was to use the second one when the first got a bit full, rather than to sit and chat with the person on the other seat!

At Guide camp we had to manage with hessian-walled cubicles and a ditch dug in the ground - the soil was piled up on one side of the ditch so that some could be shovelled in each time the loo was used. Using the loo was quite a balancing act and after one day of heavy rain the ground was treacherous and someone slid in!

In Syria I came across this problem. At a roman site a family were living in a large tent and offered us refreshments. I think he was the guide. The loo was in the tent but behind a curtain.
Bosra was the site and we were the only visitors.

keepingquiet

Not so far away- as a child we only had an outside toilet- so during the night we had a bucket upstairs on the landing.

It was disgusting and sometimes I got the job of emptying it!

It was 1975 when we finally had an upstairs toilet, and another one downstairs. What luxury!

Some people don't know they are born.

And on that subject, anyone here been to France??

It was disgusting and sometimes I got the job of emptying it!

So I wasn't the only one then! My grandmother had a chamber-pot (as she called it) in her bedroom, used by her and my grandfather, and I occasionally had the job of carrying it downstairs, through the living room, into the kitchen and down the steps into the garden, then along to the outside 'lavvie'. Goodness only knows how I didn't spill its contents or even drop it...

My other grandmother (who lived alone) during my visits insisted we use the outside toilet - it was only a couple of steps outside the back door - during the night and a torch was placed on the landing for this purpose. She also had no running water, not even a cold-tap - I had to carry the galvanised bucket to the pump which was situated in a communal area, grandma carried a stick with which to fend off the rats... she finally had a cold-water tap (no sink) installed in her 'parlour' (which was both kitchen and living room) a few months before she died. She considered this a luxury.

I now have 2 bathrooms/toilets in my home.

Has anyone bought a Shewee or other portable item to wee into whilr travelling. I think I would prefer to use that and then pour the wee into a pissoir or foot pad type toilet.

In Europe and Middle East you still get those 2 footpad loos, not the easiest to maneuver. In developing countries the loos can be so awful that a bush is much preferred.

Where I live, in country West Australia, an outing in the bush often involves a bush toilet, a very deep hole in the ground, a toilet bowl atop and a rugged wooden shed round it. Instead of flushing you put sawdust or straw over it. It doesn't really smell too bad, but in fly season..........

Some years ago I was on a trip to the Isle of Bute and was slightly offended to be told that my first stop should be the public toilets close to the pier. What I didn’t know was that while the ‘ladies’ was functional, Formica, the gents was high Victorian with porcelain and marble and the men were made to wait at regular intervals so we could have a guided tour.

They were opened around 1900 to cater for the many day trippers, well the male ones, and are still working, having been beautifully restored.
www.britainexpress.com/scotland/Bute/rothesays-victorian-toilets.htm

There were still plenty of pissoirs in French villages in the early 1990s.

My husband parked the car and waited outside while my daughter and I opened the door of this stinking place no bigger than a cupboard.

We were both wearing jeans so it was extremely hard to take off one leg of them and keep them dry and clean while trying to squat over the hole in the ground and not touch anything..... meanwhile also holding one's breath. Absolutely vile.

They look extraordinarily like gravy boats to me. It rather puts me off onion gravy.

Crotchless pants were the norm for a long time, with good reason. It must still have been hard to do your thing without spilling, and just imagine the stench.

WithNobsOnIt

Maybe they did what 500 million Indians still do and pee and poo in the street?

Africa too you often see roadside signs "no open defacation"

In communities, privies in the yard became a public health issue, the well for water was too close and got polluted, cholera outbreaks in cities resulted. No doubt other smaller sickness outbreaks happened before the cause was found.

I'm pretty sure Lucy Worsley did do a programme about ladies relieving themselves in the eighteenth century. Try googling it.

What a great thread! Thanks HelterSkelter1!

Millie22

I read a book about the life of the maids who would have looked after a family like the one in P & P.

With five girls to wash for they were continually doing laundry and washing muslin squares presumably used at period times. Poor things.

Washing was done once a week at the most freuent. Sometimes families would only have the washer women come in once a month, Under clothes and night clothes were worn for weeks.

When I was at boarding school in the 1950s, we had one change of underwear a week. Each Friday a linen roll would appear on ne's bed. A ste of underwear and clean nightware rolled up in the week's towel. Sheets were changed every three or four weeks. One bath a week. It was remarkable, that we did not spell, but we didn't. Most of us would wash as much as we could in our washbowls in th privacy of our cublicles.

I have just found some more info. Flushing loos were introduced in 1851 at the Great Exhibition. Tickets were bought to use them by 28 women and 830,000 men.

In 1879 Glasgow and Paris had public toilets and London lagged behind until 1893.

Selfridges introduced their women's toilets in early 1900 and GB Shaw wrote his essay in 1909 about the lack of women's toilets which excluded women from public life. Working class women could not afford the penny to use a public toilet. Middle/upper class women could afford to enter a department store and buy goods and use the toilet or belong to a women's club where there would be facilities. Toilets were needed by the Suffragettes so they could campaign on the streets for longer.

It must have been an amazing expansion of a woman's world to be able to leave the home and go somewhere other than friends or family where they would have used their toilet facility.

Working class women had such a hard time. I wonder what facilities there were in cotton mills and factories which were staffed mostly by women.

It's an interesting subject the "subjugation" of women by a lack of public toilets. I must find the complete GB Shaw essay

No wonder Indian women look so comfortable squatting, they must be very supple!!

I have been to India and Vietnam on recent holidays and both abound in ladies squat toilets which are just holes-in-the-ground. It would actually be easier to use them if you were wearing skirts, its terrible in trousers trying to stop the hems touching anything whilst suspended over the drop on a damp and slippery footplate, holding your breath against the stench. Only used them for a wee luckily. Anything else demands you master the technique of tipping jugs of water over the relevant part whilst suspended over the drop. Normally you cant throw loo roll down them and none is supplied.

I once had to use the bailer in an open sailing boat.
I had taken all precautions to make sure I didn’t want to need a toilet.
That didn’t happen. I was in agony 😱 On board were 3 men and me. Fortunately one of them was Mr P. He took the tiller the other two turned their backs while I used the bailer 😂

Girls and women used to wear red flannel petticoats, usually with another white one on top. Obviously not under muslin dresses. In The Railway Children the girls waved their red petticoats to stop a train.
These would have been very useful to protect their dresses from blood stains.

Fascinating information, they're things you wonder about but are never talked about.