Ah, the old tin bath; I remember it well.
I was born in Whaley Bridge but shortly after we moved to a nearby village where my parents had bought a little stone terraced cottage. A two up and two down was the proud description. And that was about it; no heating, no insulation, no double glazing, no fitted kitchen and no bathroom.
Shortly after we moved the council started to build some council houses and these had inside bathrooms and toilets.
I can still remember the reaction of the cottagers, and that was almost the entire village, when they learned of these new houses having inside toilets:
“Absolutely disgusting; toilets inside a house; stupid bloody council, who will want to live in such squalor; they’ll all be sick; don’t let the kids go to any of the houses they’ll come back with a disease, probably diphtheria.”
So while the tenants enjoyed their home comforts we continued to suffer gladly with our lack of facilities. The toilet was at the top of the garden and we were lucky it had a water supply to it and it was connected to the sewerage system. A lot just had wooden planks to sit on and a large metal container underneath. The dustbin men emptied them every fortnight. What a job. Worse in the summer.
Anyway ours was seen as something of a luxury but when you had to go out late at night if you needed to, often ploughing through the snow in your pyjamas, you weren’t always in the dark for in the winter there was an old paraffin lamp for company and it was always lit to stop the pipe work from freezing.
I can’t remember toilet roll only newspaper.
Friday night was bath night and it seems that was for the whole village. Baths were clanking all over the place as they were taken in and put in front of the coal fire. There was no hot water in any of the houses so a variety of pans were filled with water and the tin bath was slowly and eventually filled to about six inches. The worst bit was when another pan had boiled and your Mum tipped it in the bath behind you and in attempt to avoid a good scalding you jumped forward and created a mini tsunami which resulted in as much water going out of the bath as your Mum had put in. “You can clean that up after” she said.
Kids went in first and were then sent upstairs while their parents had their baths. Then we had to come down to help empty the bath. All the water was just thrown outside the front doors and drained to wherever. Who knows? Some of it didn’t but created large puddles’ a bit like Jodrell Meadow. On summer evenings the village looked as though the monsoon season had arrived. And in the winter we had great slides on frozen bath water the following morning.
The rest of the week we just had ‘a good swill’ as my Dad described it. This consisted of him standing in front of the kitchen sink in his trousers and vest, braces hanging down and legs wide apart, somewhat Sumo fashion, and splashing soap and water over his face and neck and quite a bit on the oil cloth on the floor. I don’t think any other parts of his body saw any soap or water.
“That’ll do till Friday.” He always said and it had to.
When we moved back to Whaley we had a house with a bathroom and I soon realised that all the fuss about inside toilets and bathrooms was just ridiculous. My Dad didn’t even consider taking our tin bath with us much less using it ever again.
R. S-S
