PERSPECTIVE UKNORTH
People and their profiles: dukes, archbishops, actors, writers, monks, oddbods, the garish, the gregarious - here they are in single file, chosen by chance, by inclination, or by necessity ... and all reflecting, one hopes, the essential, but indefinable, spark that makes one human being interesting to many. Geoffrey Mather
The Public Wash-house
You could always recognise the men whose wives had old-fashioned mangles. Their shirts were full of half buttons. - Mickey Finn, Liverpool comedian. (Then, of course, came rubber buttons to save the slaughter.)
THE YEAR IS 1970 and an old woman, bent like a safety pin, pushes a truck full of washing. She says she can't stop, love, because the old fellow will be home for his tea; but if you want her opinion - not just her opinion but her honest opinion - about public wash-houses, they are the best places in the world apart, that is, from the danger of rheumatics.
The public wash-house she has just left, in Dainton Street, Ancoats, Manchester, looks like an over-worked old tooth in a mouthful of gum. Alone, it puffs and grunts in a wasteland where once there were houses and schools and pubs. By the laws of progress, it should be dead, but it thrives, steaming warmly, nurtured by people from towns miles away.
Manchester and Liverpool have more wash-houses than the rest of England combined at this time (the one on the right was in Nottingham which had its first in 1850) and they are still being built. Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow are the high altars of wash-housery. Sometimes the equipment is brand new: soap and soda injected automatically, choice of twelve-pound or twenty-pound machines, automatic spin drying, one ironing machine for every two customers, complete drying tumblers for all, water like silk.
In others, the Amazons whirl the clothes in iron horses, red pipes for hot, white pipes for cold. The front-loaders occasionally spew white tides of soap to stroke the floor, a gorgeous sight to the women.
In an office where you buy your ticket, a coke fire burns and on the mantelpiece is a first-aid box labelled ARP (for Air Raid Precautions), a relic from a quarter of a century before. Wellington boots are everywhere. The women work like drudges. There is a constant procession of old prams and trucks, some passed on by women too old now to go to the wash-house, and here is the whitest white you will get, right out of an advert.
DoIly tubs, possers, wringers--the word for iron rings in the walls. Sheets were fed through them, and twisted to eject the water. The women called 'professionals' spent much of their lives in profit 'doing' for others. They were the ones suffering from rheumatism, so they say.
Women arrive in cars now. Rumour has it that a Rolls occasionally at a public wash-house like this in Manchester. Certainly, there Rovers and many Minis. One woman arriving in a Mini says she goes out in a morning in her beads and things, which might make her look toffee-nosed at the wash-house, so she changes into trousers at the office.
Wash-houses such as this were born in poor areas where people died unprotesting in their twenties. Legend has it that Kitty Wilkinson was founder; Kitty the Scouse, who gathered together some elementary things for carrying out a weekly wash in Liverpool and allowed the neighbours in. The first Baths and Wash-houses Act, allowing local authorities to build establishments, came later, in 1846. A penny for the first hour, threepence for two hours including drying. for two hours including drying. If the women did not pay, the corporation could keep the clothes. ..
From overcrowded areas, wash-houses and baths took their legions into a cleaner future, possers (an implement on a stick for pounding rubbing boards) erect. Everyone rediscovered what the Romans had tried to teach them all along with their public baths. The supervisor of Newton Heath Laundry and Baths says, 'You don't see much of the professional washers now. We used to get old people coming here at 7 am. and they would be in until 6 p.m. They knew as much about a laundry as myself because they spent their lives in it. They would bring lunch and have communal parties, tea and cakes. It was a part of their lives.
"The job has altered because, at one time, you used to have what they called washing stalls. No machines, everything by hand-rubbing. When machines were introduced, a lot of the old-timers would not use them. It is all machines today. One time, if you pulled down houses the wash-house would lose trade, but that is not so today. We get teachers, all sorts.'
A machine attendant at another wash-house says, 'A woman knows what she wants and she will get it. I do not think there is one in a :thousand who has gone home with a bad wash.'The women are usually called ladies. One superintendent involved in a difference of opinion with a lady was suddenly propelled up the aisle by her mother, who had approached stealthily from behind. When a council decided to close a wash-house, more than a hundred chanting women waving banners marched on the town hall and dumped dirty washing on the steps. It surprised no-one.
One establishment had a machine you could hear miles away: a real clanker. It was very popular for that reason. the ladies invent their own names. Hydro-extractors are Whizzers.Women shove thirty-five pounds of washing into a twenty-five- pounds machine and walk the clothes in prams looking like something out of a January sale. None has much time for your high-street laundromat.
Some have the latest front-loaders at home, but they still go to the wash-house, where they get a good boil, then slot their sheets into drying cabinets, which have Sahara breath: 180 deg. F when I tried it. Forty-five minutes for the washer, forty-five minutes for the dryer, the rest for machine-ironing. You book your machine and women will be faithful to a particular one. In the past, when customers grew old, they tried to pass on their places at the machines, as if they were legacies.
The ladies are fierce in defence of the old, mistrusting the new. There is nothing like a good boil. Mrs Catherine Stiles, mother of Manchester and England's footballer, Nobby, presented a 320-signaturepetition for the reprieve of one wash-house. She had been going there thirty years. Not uncommon.
The wash-houses, 16 in Manchester, are subsidized by rates and are lively as ever, getting better year by year, they say. As the old woman declared, 'Rheumatics or not, it is the best five-and-sixpence-worth' in the world. "But then, the year is 1970, and times have changed.- text from Tacklers' Talescopyright: Geoffrey Mather 2002
Geoffrey Mather © 2007
3 March, 2007
