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By Root 724 0

Switzerland, Sweden and Germany already included showers as part of their school program, and Austria, France, Holland and Belgium were following their lead. Fifteen British school boards approved their use. It was a challenge for teachers, who had to overcome parental objections, learn to separate out and arrange for treatment of the verminous children (one in three), inspect underwear and supervise the showers, all the while promoting the idea that washing was fun. At least according to their own reports, they seem to have succeeded in the last objective. Children showered once a week, and some of the graduating girls told their teachers, “I shall miss my shower bath.” They asked, “as a special favour, to be allowed to have two during the last week of their school life.”

“What separates two people most profoundly is a different sense of cleanliness. What avails all decency and mutual usefulness and good will toward each other—in the end the fact remains: ‘They cannot stand each other’s smell!’”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Claiming that “the bathing habit is distinctly on the increase,” a 1918 report on British public baths allowed itself a note of muted triumph. Still, progress could hardly be described as galloping, since once—a—year attendance at big—city baths at the start of the First World War ranged from under 20 per cent to 80 per cent. The habit of bathing publicly caught on most in London, where the Friday night visit to the neighbourhood bathhouse became a working-class institution that lasted through the 1930s.

Social workers, public health experts and doctors were convinced that the poor would take even less advantage of a bath at home than they did of the public baths. Persistent reports in Britain and America-amounting to an urban legend—that the rare tub found in a working-class house or tenement was invariably used to store coal bolstered this prejudice. The authorities were wrong, and the working class took up frequent washing only when they had baths at home.

“The hygiene book made the not uncommon error of allowing one or two utterly impractical edicts to discredit much good sound common sense. It prescribed a nightly bath which everyone knew was silly. The teacher did not have one and neither the McFarlanes nor … the Robbs, where she boarded would have tolerated for a week a woman who required a washtub full of warm water before retiring.”

—J. K. Galbraith on early-twentieth-century schooling in southern Ontario

The poor found it hard to love the bathhouses. Hungary, with its rich tradition of Turkish-style baths, still tempts bathers out of their own bathrooms to soak in company. People with tubs at home continue to patronize the public baths in Morocco and Japan. But the bathhouses built to wash the great unwashed in Europe and America sorely lacked the camaraderie and pleasure that enliven these traditional baths. Intentionally or not, they were joyless, even reproving. Private compartments with a carefully calculated measure of time and warm water could not compete with the ease of bathing at home, once that was possible, or with the familiar comfort of not bathing.

A French man in his makeshift shower. Fewer than one in ten French people had a bathroom in the first half of the twentieth century.

While the poor were resisting public baths and before most of them had their own bathrooms, a relatively new prejudice was thriving among the middle classes. It was a bias that people, especially on the left, were more reluctant to voice as the century advanced. But in 1937, in The Road to Wigan Pier., George Orwell dared to write “four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood.” The words expressed what Orwell considered the secret heart of class differences in the West, and were: “The lower classes smell.”

Because of that visceral aversion, Orwell wrote, even the bourgeois European who thought of himself as a Communist found it difficult to see a working man as his equal: “Very early in life you acquired the idea that