The Lavatory Reader

Education and Sanitation

The Conservatives have just unveiled their new education policy promising better teachers and a shiny future for our schools. However, in the past, it has not just been the education that has been in need of reform. The facilities themselves were in urgent need of an overhaul. I trust the Tories will take note...

For example, in 1518, Dr John Colet (1467-1519), the founder of St Paul's School in London proudly attested to the fact that he had provided the boys with somewhere to urinate. More serious business could be dealt with in the River Thames. The mind boggles to consider what must have gone on before:

 

To theyr urine they shall go thereby to a place appointed, and a poore childe of the schole shall see it conveyed awaye from tyme to tyme, and have the avayle of the urine. For other causes if neede be they shall go to the watersyde.

(Samuel Knight – The Life of Dr John Colet 1724)

 

Matters had hardly improved by 1843 when Queen Victoria was being shown around Trinity College, Cambridge by the master, Dr William Whewell (1794-1866). Lavatory paper was not invented until 1857 – by the New Yorker Joseph C. Gayetty, whose “Therapeutic Paper” was marketed as being “a perfectly pure article for the toilet and for the prevention of piles.” At the time of Victoria's visit to Trinity, students would tend to use pages torn from books and the primitive plumbing in the colleges meant that the paper (and everything else) ended up in the River Cam.

 

There is a tale of Queen Victoria being shown over Trinity by the Master, Dr. Whewell, and saying, as she looked down over the bridge: “What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?” To which, with great presence of mind, he replied, “Those, ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.”

(Gwen Raverat - Period Piece 1952)

 

However, the collision of education and excretion has not always been a disaster. Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773) took great pains over the education of his illegitimate son, sending him endless letters of advice. Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, considered that Chesterfield's letters taught “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master”, a neat description that was recently used to describe modern bankers. Chesterfield, however, was adamant that time spent on the privy could be spent instructively. This piece also serves to explain just how those soiled book pages would end up in the River Cam.

 

I knew a gentleman, who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it, which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets, in those moments.

He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained; and I recommend you to follow his example. It is better than only doing what you cannot help doing at those moments; and it will make any book, which you shall read in that manner, very present in your mind.

Books of science, and of a grave sort, must be read with continuity; but there are very many, and even very useful ones, which may be read with advantage by snatches, and unconnectedly; such are all the good Latin poets, except Virgil in his Aeneid: and such are most of the modern poets, in which you will find many pieces worth reading, that will not take up above seven or eight minutes.

Bayle’s, Moreri’s, and other dictionaries, are proper books to take and shut up for the little intervals of (otherwise) idle time, that everybody has in the course of the day, between either their studies or their pleasures. Good night.

(Lord Chesterfield – Letters to His Son December 11^th 1747)

 

All of which should serve as useful information for the Conservatives as they refine their education policy...

Freezing Shitty Winter

Britain continues to freeze and shudder under the longest cold snap in thirty years bringing out the climate change deniers in force. Welsh pensioners have been forced to start burning cheap second-hand books in a bizarre imitation of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451...

This, of course, is accompanied by the usual wintery gripes about how the councils have cocked up on gritting the roads and countered by accusations of how we have lost the old Blitz spirit. You'd have thought there were more important things to concern us but no - the weather dominates the news.

 

Sitting indoors, however, I can’t help thinking how much worse it could be. The central heating is on and the plumbing – miracle of technology – still works despite the cold. A working lavatory in inclement weather was even possible in the eighteenth century, thanks to Joseph Bramah (1748-1814), an inventor better known for his later work as a locksmith. In 1778, however, Bramah made a vital improvement to Alexander Cummings’ original water closet of 1775. He noticed that Cummings’ lavatory tended to freeze in cold weather and came up with the valve closet. This ingenious contraption had a hinged flap that sealed the bottom of the bowl when not being flushed and – at a stroke – managed to stop any smell coming up from the sewers and, crucially, stopped the water in the bowl from freezing solid.

 

Today, of course, our lavatories have no need of Bramah’s hinged flap and yet, despite their sophistication, it is still possible for the pipes to freeze. Few people, fortunately, have to undergo the horrible wintery defecation experienced by Henry Miller (1891-1980), as he recounts in his seminal work Tropic of Cancer.

On publication, Tropic of Cancer was declared obscene and banned for decades. It was finally published in the States after a groundbreaking obscenity trial of 1961 (as had happened with Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Britain), leading to a radical rethink of America’s pornography laws. Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Musmanno declared in disgust that “Cancer is not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity.” Judge for yourself…

Here, Miller has foolishly taken a job as an exchange Professor of English at a Lycée in Dijon. The Lycée turns out to be both dilapidated and Spartan, more akin to a monastic retreat than a centre of education. Miller is forced to take revenge on his boss, Monsieur le Censeur. 

 

The fog and snow, the cold latitude, the heavy learning, the blue coffee, the unbuttered bread, the soup and lentils, the heavy pork-packer beans, the stale cheese, the soggy chow, the lousy wine have put the whole penitentiary into a state of constipation. And just when everyone has become shit-tight the toilet pipes freeze. The shit piles up like ant hills; one has to move down from the little pedestals and leave it on the floor. It lies there stiff and frozen, waiting for the thaw. On Thursdays the hunchback comes with his little wheelbarrow, shovels the cold, stiff turds with a broom and pan, and trundles off dragging his withered leg. The corridors are littered with toilet paper; it sticks to your feet like flypaper. When the weather moderates the odor gets ripe; you can smell it in Winchester forty miles away. Standing over that ripe dung in the morning, with a toothbrush, the stench is so powerful that it makes your head spin… In the night, when I am taken short, I rush down to the private toilet of M. le Censeur, just of the driveway… His toilet doesn’t flush either but at least there is the pleasure of sitting down. I leave my little bundle for him as a token of esteem.

(Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer 1934)

Drowning in a Pit of Shit Part 2

The sinking of Tony Blair's hopes of becoming the first president of the European Union has delighted some and dismayed others. However, it is not the first time the unelected leader of a pan-European community has seen everything collapse around him. In the following account, the sinking feeling was more than metaphorical - resulting in a mass drowning in a medieval privy. The horror!

In 1184, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I summoned a Diet (an Imperial assembly) in the German city of Erfurt. Business as usual, one might think...

 

The Emperor… had occasion to go to the privy, whither he was followed by some of the nobles, when suddenly the floor that was under them began to sink; the emperor immediately took hold of the iron grates of a window, whereat he hung by the hands till some came and succoured him. Some gentlemen fell to the bottom where they perished. And it is most observable, that amongst those who died was Henry, Earl of Schwartzenburg, who carried the presage of his death in a common imprecation of his, which was this, If I do it not, I wish I may sink in a privy.

(Nathaniel Wanley – The Wonders of the Little World 1678)

The Emperor escaped but at least eight princes and several nobles and knights were left to drown.

Spot the difference?

Frederick I                 Tony Blair

Drowning in a Pit of Shit

This story of the Jew of Tewkesbury seems funny at first for the pig-headed stubbornness  on display – until one considers the undercurrent of anti-semitism… and, of course, the revolting undercurrent in the privy pit (although one scholar has claimed that the story is not anti-semitic).

 

And in this year, that is to say the year of our lord 1258, there fell a Jew into a privy at Tewkesbury upon a Saturday, the which would not suffer himself to be drawn out of the privy that day for reverence of his Sabbath day: and Sir Richard of Clare, then Earl of Gloucester, hearing thereof, would not suffer him to be drawn out on the morrow after, that is to say the Sunday, for reverence of his holy day; and so the Jew died in the privy.

(Fabyan’s Chronicles 1516)

 

Amazingly, these accidents were not that uncommon. In 1326, one Richard the Raker, a latrine cleaner, fell through the rotten boards over his privy and drowned ‘monstrously in his own excrement.’ It’s hard to know if it’s better to drown in one’s own excrement or somebody else’s.

Spike Milligan's Exploding Lavatory

The silliest death on the loo is fictional – but if we have to turn to fiction, who better than Spike Milligan and his tale of Count Nuker-Frit-Kraphauser, a Hungarian noble forced to flee to Northern Ireland, leaving his homeland and “the greatest toilet in the western world.” The replica he builds is described in all its ornate glory, before Spike explains how the Count met his foolish end.

 

From his commode, the Count could select any one of a number of fine fowling pieces and bring down his dinner. Alas, this caused his undoing. The boxes of 12-bore cartridges, though bought at the best shops in London, had sprung a powder leak. Carelessly flicking an early morning cigar, the hot ash had perforated the wad of a cartridge…

The Count had just received his early morning enema of soap suds and spice at body heat; crying ‘Nitchevo!’ he leapt from his couch. Colonic irrigation and enemas had made his exile one internal holiday. Clutching a month-old copy of der Tag, and contracting his abdomen, he trod majestically towards his famed Imperial outdoor abort bar. A few moments later the waiting retainers heard a shattering roar and were deluged, among other things, with rubble.

‘Himmel? Hermann? What did you put in the last enema?’ queried the family doctor of the retainers.

Flames and debris showered the grounds and there, floating down on the parachute, came the Count. ‘People will look to me when I die,’ he had once said. His wish had come true.

(Spike Milligan – Puckoon 1963)