Gas lighting in houses on a working class housing estate in the early 1900s

Based on childhood recollections of working class family life in north London in Edwardian times.

We considered ourselves to be very fortunate that our house had gas lighting laid on. Few working class households in the early 1900s had it. (Electric lighting and gas heating and cooking came to our Victorian style terraces much later.) My grandmother on my mother's side only ever had only oil lamps and candles, but we lived on a housing estate that was regarded as modern and state-of-the-art at the time. There was gas lighting in the streets, too.

Gas lamps had to be lit every time we wanted light. So they were only lit when someone wanted to stay in a room for some time. For short-term and emergency use, we either moved around in the semi-dark or used candles, lit with matches. There was always a box of matches and a candle in a candlestick beside our beds at night. We were, though, discouraged from using them, because of the fire hazard and because of dripping wax over the floor or furniture. Anyway our eyes were quite used to the dark and we had chamber pots so that we didn't have to go outside to the lavatory at night.

What old household gas lamps looked like and how they worked

Household gas lamps worked by heating something called a 'mantle' with a gas flame. The mantle then glowed brightly, lighting up the room. Lamps had two chains: one to turn the gas on and the other to turn it off. These chains could also adjust the flow of the gas and hence the brightness of the mantle.

Gas mantles were extremely fragile, and once they had been heated, they crumbled very easily indeed. They were made from a material that looked like a fine honeycombed silk. To protect them; to spread their light; and of course for decorative purposes, there was always a glass cover of some sort screwed round them. In our house, this was a globe: the top half was milk-white frosted glass and the lower half was frosted with a pattern on it. There were, though, other colours and shapes. Mantles, being so fragile, had to be replaced quite frequently. We bought new ones from the oil shop, each one always in its own cardboard box to protect it.

When the gas was lit, it made a popping sound. We did the lighting with a match through a hole in the bottom of the globe, taking care not to touch the fragile mantle. Some families used wax tapers which were like very thin candles about 8 inches long. These, being longer than matches, were easier to use, although they did have to be lit with a match first or from the fire and it was all too easy to touch the mantle and for drops of the wax to fall off. The lamps in some houses, particularly later on, had pilot lights which were alight all the time and which delivered the gas through a narrow tube. This tube always weaved and curved in exactly the same way as the main supply pipe, so that it looked like part of the decoration. Such lamps could look very pretty, particularly when they were in a group arrangement.

 

The gas for the lamps in most rooms of the house came in through a pipe from the centre of the ceiling. In the scullery the gas came from a pipe in the wall. In our house, these pipes were hidden but in some places I saw them outside, as if the gas supply had been added as an afterthought. I always thought that this looked very ugly.

  

  

  

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This website Join me in the 1900s is a contribution to the social history of everyday life in early to mid 20th century Britain, seen through personal recollections and illustrations, with the emphasis on what it was like to live in those times. It is © Pat Cryer.