The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [63]
Bathing accommodations for the poor appeared in fits and starts. In the aftermath of the cholera epidemic of 1832, a Liverpool labourer’s wife named Kitty Wilkinson strung up a clothesline in her backyard and lent out her copper basin to any woman who wanted to wash her family’s clothes. That was the germ of the public laundry, an immediately popular idea. The city of Liverpool took up Wilkinson’s idea, added hot and cold baths to the laundry facilities, and opened the Frederick Street Baths in 1842. It was Britain’s first public wash-house and bathhouse, and more than forty thousand baths were taken there during its first three years.
Laundries and baths made a natural combination, and in 1846, the Baths and Washhouses Act authorized boroughs and parishes to build and maintain these facilities. The Act stipulated that a customer in the lowest-class bath could not be asked to pay more than two pence for clean water and a clean towel (more middle—class establishments charged two shillings), and at least two-thirds of the baths had to be in the cheapest category. Bathhouses built as a result of the Act usually had one or two plunge pools or larger pools meant for swimming, a number of private bath compartments and a laundry. Within six years, Birmingham, Hull, Liverpool, Bristol, Nottingham, Tynemouth and Preston had built baths. London had thirteen, including a model bathhouse at Whitechapel, visited by Belgian and French delegations eager to import the English innovation to the Continent.
In the first few decades after the 1846 Act, bath building in England progressed slowly. There were financial disappointments. Free baths were considered insulting to the poor, and the nominal charge was intended to be a first step on the ladder of self-reliance. Unfortunately, the low fees rarely stretched to cover maintenance, and boroughs and municipalities were reluctant to add to their financial burden with more baths.
But the bath builders and health reformers had a more fundamental problem: the majority of the poor did not crave baths. When even prosperous people had to learn the point of bathing, the poor had a much less lively sense of its value. The most up-to-date facilities for the poor held little appeal and numerous worries for them. Many older people still believed that taking a bath was a risky, strenuous affair. One woman told investigators that “baths were fine for them as do have the needful strength.” Both young and old thought they could catch colds or infections from bathing. More men than women used the baths, partly because their work made them dirtier, partly because men had fewer domestic responsibilities added on to their workday, and partly because many working-class women felt that going to a public bathhouse was not respectable.
The poor were not the only ones who found bathing suspect. Earnest and self-denying, the middle class and the more religious circles of the upper class distrusted the self-indulgence of immersion in warm water and preferred the cold bath, especially for men. Beyond religious affiliation, the English gentry looked askance at modern plumbing. Because the middle classes and the nouveaux riches welcomed gas, water closets and piped-in water, the upper classes drew back. Many a denizen of a sprawling, stony-cold country estate looked on “mod cons” as slightly uncouth, over-eager and—worst of all—middle-class.
Lady Diana Cooper, the daughter of the eighth Duke of Rutland, was born in 1892, but her memories of turn—of-the—century life at Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire, have a medieval ring. It was the same castle where Beau Brummell had frightened the household by pulling the fire bell, and nothing had been modernized in the century that followed. The broad hallways were completely unheated, and