In the early 1900s when I was a child growing up on the working class Huxley housing estate of Victorian-style terraces, it was a matter of principle that we - and indeed adults too - were kept clean.
We washed every day in the scullery. The sink was in a little alcove with a curtain across that provided some privacy.
We usually washed in cold water, but sometimes as a luxury we had warm water if the copper was lit, or if someone bothered to boil a kettle on the range. [In summer when it was too hot to light a fire, water was probably heated on a primus stove, as my cousin who lived with my grandparents as an evacuee in World War Two reports that that was what happened there. - Pat Cryer]
Sunlight household soap, used for washing the floor as well as washing oneself.
Brass cold water tap. The only water tap in the house. Photographed in the Cambridge and County Folk Museum.
The sink was a large box-like 'glazed stone' affair with a single brass cold-water tap in the wall above it. A wooden soap box was also on the wall. No exotic soap ever found its way there. It was always general household soap, usually Sunlight, which invariably had little pieces of grit embedded in where my mother had used it to wash the floor. I don’t think our complexions suffered as a result. I was reputed to have had a very good complexion as a child. So the Sunlight soap and the coal tar soap did little harm, although I well recall having little patches of dry skin in on my chin in the winter. This was quite common with most children and was treated with Vaseline.
I always remember my great grandmother washing me at the scullery sink. It wasn’t a case of just wiping sticky hands. It was a good old wash, and my ears burnt for hours afterwards. Her generation seemed to have a thing about ears. It was always, "Have you washed behind your ears?". It could have been why earache seemed so prevalent in those days. We children always had a twisted corner of the flannel rammed down our ears.
A man's shaving mug and brush. The mug was to hold the hot water and the lip held the soap.
In the alcove was my father's shaving mug. The mug held the hot water and the lip held the soap.
If you have an old photo which would illustrate the way of life that my mother describes, I would very much appreciate a copy. Pat Cryer
Shaving could be a tricky business because the razor had an open blade which had to be kept sharp. My father would use the brush to work up a thick lather around his chin and then contort his face and use his hand to stretch his skin. Then, as he drew the blade of the razor over it, only the stubble would be cut and not his face. It was quite common to see men with cuts on their faces from shaving.
I understand that slightly better off people cleaned their teeth with a mixture of salt and bicarbonate of soda, which was known as 'tooth powder'. The bicarbonate of soda would have made the salt slightly frothy.
Much later when I was a child in the 1940s, we had a solid pink substance in a red, green or blue tin - our choice of colour. It was known as Gibbs Dentifrice. We rubbed a wet toothbrush into it to make it froth, then used the frothy toothbrush to brush our teeth. I suppose it must have been dreadfully unhygienic, but teeth certainly felt clean afterwards. I never heard of dental floss, although the occasional use of a length of cotton came in handy at times. Pat Cryer.
A tin of EUCRYL tooth powder. The inscription round the edge of the tin reads:
Gets teeth cleaner - keeps teeth whiter
All the people I knew when I was a child cleaned their teeth with salt, which was of course mildly abrasive and was also said to kill germs. Toothbrushes were bristle in wood.
I remember that one day I overheard a local man saying that he cleaned his teeth with Vim (an abrasive powder used for scouring pans). So I thought I would have a go with it. I only learnt later that he had false teeth made of metal. My mouth smarted for days afterwards.
It was standard practice for children to be bathed on Saturday nights in a galvanised tin bath in front of the open coal fire in the kitchen. The kitchen was effectively our living room and it always felt cosy.
Bathtimes for us children was – like everything else for my mother – hard work. As there was no running hot water anywhere in the Victorian style houses of working class families such as ours, bathing necessitated lighting the fire of the copper well in advance and then pouring cold water into it to heat up. Then, when the water was hot, it had to be ladled out into buckets and carried to the tin bath in the kitchen. We children bathed one at a time in the same water. The soap was ordinary household soap.
We had our hair washed while sitting in the bath. Our hair was lathered with the household soap and then rinsed with a jug of hot water poured over our heads. There wasn't time to say, "Ouch, it’s too hot" or, "Ooooh, it’s cold!".
We always had our clean night clothes put on after our baths, followed by a dose of brimstone and treacle – which was rather ridiculous as it made me feel sick and, if I was, I risked dirtying my clean nightdress which my mother had gone to so much effort to wash and iron earlier in the week.
Sometimes after our bath my mother would you read to us. I only remember to two books “Peep behind the scenes” and “Cast your bread upon the waters”. The first book was about circus life where little gold called Rosaly lived with her mother in a caravan. The mother was very ill with consumption and little Rosaly had to perform in a circus every night. I think the reason for me to remember this so well was because I was fascinated with the little girl’s dress which was a typical circus dress, it had a tight bodice and a billowing white skirt with red roses round at the bottom. Actually it was a very sad story. The other book, I suspect had a moral to it and was based on the proverb, “Cast your bread upon the waters and ye shall find it to returned after many days”. It left no lasting impact on me.
There was in fact a full-sized bath in the house, although it wasn't plumbed in. It was upstairs inside a large cupboard in a small room which was called the offroom - and which in later years had the grand name of bathroom. For practical reasons, though, this bath was hardly ever used because of it having no running water. If you wanted the luxury of a bath, you had to work for it. You first had to fill the copper in the scullery with water, then light the copper fire, which incidentally could be very temperamental. Then, once the water was hot, you had to ladle it into a bucket and carry it upstairs. A bath took a number of bucketsful and was never filled very deeply. The full buckets were heavy and it was all too easy to spill the hot water and scald yourself.
Generally adults just had a good wash down.
China jug and bowl sets for washing oneself. The jug would be filled with hot water and taken up to guest bedroom. The guests would pour the hot water into the bowl and wash themselves. Sometimes the soap dishes and chamber pots were in matching china.
For the occasional overnight guest, things were very different. If a guest ever had a bath with us, the hot water would be carried upstairs to the bath. For other washing, guests had hot water taken up to their bedroom in an elegantly decorated china jug - see the picture on the right. A matching basin was in the room to hold the water on a rather elegant stand. The one in our house had a marble top which I very much liked.
A typical washstand in bedrooms. Note the decorative matching china set of a basin, jug and soap dish. Also note the towel rail and the bucket for slops.
Sketch provided by Rosemary Hampton from her book: A Jersey Family: from Vikings to Victorians (2009), published by Channel Islands Family History Society and available from Amazon.
In more well-off houses, the decorated china jugs and bowls were part of sets. There were also matching soap dishes; matching chamber pots were kept under beds.
The jug and basin set were seldom used for this purpose though. My mother used the basin for mixing Christmas puddings and my father used the jug for making home-made wine.
These childhood recollections from Edwardian times are of keeping clean and groomed in working class families in north London (then Middlesex). Little had probably changed since Victorian times.