The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [64]
The water—men are difficult to believe in today. They seemed to me to belong to another clay. They were the biggest people I had ever seen… On their shoulders they carried a wooden yoke from which hung two gigantic cans of water. They moved on a perpetual round. Above the ground floor there was not a drop of hot water and not one bath, so their job was to keep all jugs, cans and kettles full in the bedrooms, and morning or evening to bring the hot water for the hip-baths. We were always a little frightened of the water—men. They seemed of another element and never spoke but one word, “Water—man,” to account for themselves.
Only after 1906, when Lady Diana’s grandfather died and her father inherited Belvoir, did it begin to emerge into modern times. “Bathrooms were carved out of the deep walls, rooms and passages were warm without the coal—man’s knock, the water—men faded away into the elements.”
Of course, the owners of country houses and large town establishments could maintain the old ways because their servants took care of the drudgery. Even when there was a bathroom on each floor, women often preferred to wash in the privacy of their bedroom or dressing room, with or without a full-size tub. Trotting down drafty corridors in a dressing gown was not as nice as slipping into a warm bath prepared before the fire in one’s room. As late as the 1920s, Lady Fry thought “bathrooms were only for servants.”
When it came to public baths, as with the Industrial Revolution in general, England led and the Continent followed. Between 1800 and 1850, the industrial cities in Germany and France doubled in population. Antiquated water supplies, sewers and street-cleaning practices were modernized first, but that was not enough. As Oscar Lassar, a Berlin doctor and one of Germany’s leading sanitary reformers, asked, “What is the use of all the care with which our cities are cleaned, drainage and trash removal regulated, and ventilation increased, when the person himself must dispense with the most basic cleanliness?”
In Germany, the beloved bathhouse tradition that dated from the Middle Ages had dwindled to near-extinction, surviving mostly in small, remote places. But the Romantic infatuation with cold water and swimming helped the return of public baths: swimming became part of basic training for the Prussian army in 1817, and public beaches and outdoor baths multiplied around the country in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1855, a group of Hamburg businessmen built the first bathhouse inspired by English example, with Berlin following suit later in the year. By the end of the century almost every German city had erected at least one large-scale public bathhouse.
Be clean on the outside and clean within Pure your speech and pure your thoughts.
—Inscribed on the walls of a Stuttgart bathhouse
Unlike English ones, these new baths were not exclusively or even primarily for the working class. An Armenbad, or poor bath, was considered condescending. Poor and prosperous should bathe together, “united in the cause of health,” as a Bonn architect put it. Less idealistically, the middle classes wanted bathing facilities, too. In 1881, fewer than 4 per cent of houses in Cologne had bathrooms. More significantly, the great majority of mansions springing up on the city’s showy new boulevard, the Ringstrasse, also did not include a bathroom. While the English upper—middle classes were content to spread their oilcloth on the bedroom floor and wash in a portable tub, the Germans, like latter—day Romans or their own medieval ancestors, preferred going out to bathe.
And there was something reminiscent of a Roman bath—not the full-blown Imperial version, but the well-equipped colonial type—in the new German bathhouses. (Stuttgart’s bathhouse went one better than the Romans, including among its lavish facilities a bath for dogs.) Also like its Roman predecessor, the nineteenth