At Home - Bill Bryson [201]
Bathrooms were not at first decorated any more than you would decorate a boiler room, so they tended to be starkly utilitarian. In existing houses, baths had to be fit in wherever they could. Usually they took the place of a bedroom, but sometimes were jimmied into alcoves or other odd corners. In the rectory at Whatfield in Suffolk, the bath was simply put behind a screen in the downstairs front hall. Baths, toilets, and basins tended to be of exceedingly variable sizes. A bath at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall was so big that a stepladder was needed to climb into it. Others, with showers built in, looked as if they were designed to wash a horse.
Technological problems slowed the take-up of bathrooms, too. Casting a one-piece bath that was neither too thick nor too heavy was a surprisingly challenging proposition. It was easier in some ways to build a cast-iron bridge than a cast-iron bath. There was also the problem of giving the bath a finish that wouldn’t chip, stain, graze into hairline cracks, or simply wear away. Hot water proved to be a formidably corrosive medium. Zinc, copper, and cast-iron baths looked splendid when new but wouldn’t keep a finish. It wasn’t until the invention of porcelain enamels, about 1910, that baths became durable and attractive. The process involved spraying a mix of powder onto cast iron and baking it repeatedly till it acquired a porcelain-like gleam. Porcelain enamel is in fact neither porcelain nor enamel, but a vitreous coating—in essence a type of glass. Enamel bath surfaces would be quite transparent if whiteners or other tints weren’t added to the glazing compound.
At last the world had baths that looked good and stayed looking good for a long time. But they were still extremely expensive. A bath alone could easily cost $200 in 1910—a price well beyond the range of most households. But as manufacturers improved the processes of mass manufacture, prices fell: by 1940, an American could buy an entire bath suite—sink, bath, and toilet—for $70, a price nearly everyone could afford.
Elsewhere, however, baths remained luxuries. In Europe a big part of the problem was a lack of space in which to put bathrooms. In 1954, just one French residence in ten had a shower or bath. In Britain the journalist Katharine Whitehorn recalled that as recently as the late 1950s she and her colleagues on the magazine Woman’s Own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms, as not enough British homes had them, and such articles would only promote envy.
As for our Old Rectory, it had no bathroom in 1851, which is of course no surprise. However, the architect, the endlessly fascinating Edward Tull, did include a water closet—quite a novelty in 1851. Even more novel was where he elected to place it: on the landing of the main staircase, behind a thin partition. Apart from putting the water closet in an odd and rather inconvenient place, the partition would have had the effect of closing off the stair window, leaving the staircase veiled in permanent darkness.
The absence of any outlet pipes on the drawings of the house exterior suggests that Tull may not entirely have thought all this through. The point is, in any case, academic as the water closet was never built.
* There is slightly more to this. James Chadwick, the father of Edwin and Henry, had earlier in his life been a teacher in Manchester, where he taught science to John Dalton, who is generally credited with the discovery of the atom. Then, as a radical journalist, James Chadwick had gone to Paris, where he had lived for a time with Thomas Paine. So although he was a man of no particular importance himself, he served as a direct link between Thomas Paine and