Photo Copyright: Janet Cameron |
Many older people
still remember the weekly bagwash during the 1940s and 50s, when a housewife
would leave out a bag of dirty washing for the laundry to collect. It would be delivered back to her door, duly
washed and rinsed, but sopping wet, for her to mangle, dry and iron.
‘It was before most houses had a washing machine,’ explains Stan
Dyson, who now lives in Newhaven in East Sussex, but grew up in London’s Docklands. Stan remembers his mother stuffing all those
clothes, mixed whites and coloured, into those large, white canvas-type
bags.
‘In our area it was collected by either the Sussex Laundry or, I
believe, the Co-op, and it was returned the following week. On the odd occasion I had to run after the
lorry as it went down our streets because they had delivered someone else’s
laundry and Mum used to go absolutely potty when she was short of an item, or
had someone else’s piece of laundry mixed up in hers – I wonder if someone just
did that on purpose?’
If a housewife couldn’t afford the bagwash she’d put the dirty
washing into the old copper boiler in the scullery, using either soap flakes or
a huge bar of Fairy Household soap. She also
used soda crystals and maybe Dolly Blues or Reckitt’s Blue. The latter were a
kind of blue dye which brightened and made off-colour whites appear whiter,
working on the same principle as ‘blue rinses’ for ladies, also popular in the
middle of the century.
‘We used to curse Mum when she ironed the clothes especially if we
were trying to read our comics,’ said Bob M.
‘We had a 3–way adaptor on our light, one was used for the bulb, another
for the wireless and the third one to plug in the iron. It was when she did the ironing the light
would swing all over the place and cast shadows. She used the Morrison indoor shelter as her
ironing board.’
In some cases, though, the laundry
wasn’t collected and returned and one of the children would be have to take and
fetch it back. Some housewives used a
bolster case and it was not a pleasant job for a child of eight or nine,
lugging home a heavy bag of wet washing.
Children were also expected to help their mothers turn the heavy handle on
the mangle while she fed the sheets through the rollers.
Sylvia Kent of Billericay in Essex
explains how, with seven children to wash for, her mother had to rise at the
crack of dawn on a Monday morning to fire up the old copper in the kitchen. ‘The
food had to be easy, so easy that day, so many people had something that would
go into the oven, say a stew or rice pudding that didn’t need too much
attention.’
My own mother’s washing machine, during the forties and fifties, was
a basic affair although I can’t remember its make. She had to fill it up with water by using
saucepans and then turn on the heat, finally pounding the submerged dirty linen
with a sturdy wooden paddle to agitate it.
Then the water had to be drained away and the machine would be refilled
for the rinses. Mum was thorough, she
always did at least three rinses. But
first, my bricklayer grandfather’s detachable working-shirt collars had to be
attacked with soap and a scrubbing brush using a corrugated washboard over the
sink before being tossed into the machine.
One of my most vivid memories was of the old Acme mangle that reared
up behind my mother’s washing machine, a source of great anxiety for me. I could imagine that my fingers might become
trapped and then my whole body would slowly be squeezed between the rollers,
flattening out like a sheet.
To dry her washing, my mother had a rope line slung between the back
of the house and a tall pole, which she could let down and wind up via a
pulley. Wooden pegs, simply constructed of two curved pieces of wood joined by
wire, secured the clothes. Sometimes the
line would break due to a worn rope or strong winds, and a whole line of clean
washing would descend into the mud of the backyard and Mum would,
understandably, be in a ‘mood’ as the whole complicated process had to begin
again.
It’s strange to think that in the United States housewives were
actually using the first electric washing machine, with its motorised agitator
as early as 1908. By 1920 American
housewives who could afford it could purchase a machine with a horizontal
cylinder. Technologically-speaking, we
in Britain were lagging behind.
As a young wife and mother in the sixties, I also had a rope line,
preferring it to the new rotaries. I’d get it up as high as possible by using a
forked wooden pole to hoist up the heavy load. I had better pegs than Mum, still wooden but
with the spring action we’re familiar with today. However, I was luckier than my mother as I did
have an automatic washing machine. The
first top-loading automatic washing machines in Europe, swiftly followed by the
first computer-controlled machines, were produced in the late forties and early
fifties by Upton Machine Co whose name was later changed to Whirlpool.
If it was raining, clothes were dried indoors, sometimes on a
‘clothes horse’ or ‘clothes maiden’, a simple wooden rack which opened out from
two central vertical poles joined by hinges.
The term ‘clothes horse’ came into use in the 1800s and, of course, the
evolution of language has now designated the term to describe a supermodel. Sylvia Kent remembers the trouble her mother
had, drying clothes for seven children.
‘It all had to be hung on an overhead dryer, what a business! The whole event seems terrible in retrospect,
but I think all working-class people like us did this.’
For some people, it wasn’t so hard though. Sylvia also tells the story of a lady who was
asked about how she managed with her washing as a young housewife. ‘Oh, I know nothing of this,’ she said
airily. ‘Dorothy the maid did it all – I
think it was on Monday.
Read more:
A Brief Introduction to the Evolution of Washing
Read more:
A Brief Introduction to the Evolution of Washing
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