The Public Washhouses of Edinburgh

THE PUBLIC WASHHOUSES OF EDINBURGH STEVEN ROBB HE AUTHOR’S INTEREST in public in\ uenza, typhus, respiratory diseases and vermin Twashhouses began whilst researching Ebenezer (bugs, lice, rats and mice) were also part of the MacRae’s twentyone-year spell as Edinburgh’s City wider sanitary conditions experienced by the poor in Architect, and his great-uncle George Clark Robb overcrowded urban areas. Conditions for the spread (1903-1980), who worked under MacRae for a decade of disease were exacerbated by inadequate drainage and was assistant architect for the Union Street and sewerage, and a woeful attempt to collect refuse.1 public washhouse. Consideration of the construction The subsequent accumulation of [ lth (excrement, drawings for the washhouse, which the author’s both human and animal), was exacerbated by urban family had retained, spurred him to investigate the slaughterhouses and the habit of keeping animals in building type further. It is useful to consider the place close proximity to dwellings and shops. Besides this of the public washhouse in Edinburgh’s history. This the poor often had a bad diet and a heavy reliance is especially true as, at the time of writing, only four on alcohol, the latter perhaps understandable in of the thirteen former washhouse buildings survive: their circumstances. two are likely to be lost imminently, and the long- These living conditions led to high levels of term use of one of the remaining examples is coming infant mortality, alongside the death rate, a standard to an end. favoured measure of the health of a community. Those that lived adjacent to the open sewers or those families in one or two roomed houses were PUBLIC HEALTH especially vulnerable.2 In the Old Town of Edinburgh a large migrant population lived in one or two room houses with up to 15 people sharing a single room. The washing of clothing and bedding was an The population of Edinburgh had doubled between important sanitary and public health issue within 1811 and 1881 and overcrowding in the Blackfriars the industrialised and overcrowded urban centres Wynd area alone was said to be four times greater of Scotland. Large swathes of the population often than prison accommodation of the period. Often these had limited or no access to clean continuous water rooms were in badly converted and overcrowded supplies or adequate washing facilities, and in buildings with poor ventilation, limited natural overcrowded properties the sharing of both bedding lighting and little sanitary provision.3 The result was and clothing was commonplace. one of the highest death rates in the country. This unhappy collision of poverty, substandard When access to water meant purchasing it from and overcrowded housing and inadequate or caddies or an inconvenient journey to the local pump contaminated water supplies led to conditions (which was often contaminated by leakage from particularly susceptible to disease. Although sewers or cesspools), washing clothing and bedding cholera, the [ rst epidemic in Scotland being in was not a priority, and if they were washed it was 1831, was primarily contracted by the consumption often in dirty reused water. If a household managed of affected drinking water or food, it was often then to obtain, store and heat the water to wash their spread by the shared contaminated bedding and clothing and bedding they struggled to dry it, often clothing of sufferers. Smallpox and typhoid fever making a poor choice between drying damp clothes were transmitted in a similar manner. Tuberculosis, in the house, or from a pole outside in the polluted 127 Book of the Old Edinburgh Club New Series Vol. 10 (2014) pp. 127–150 185187-06_Public-Washhouses.indd 127 12/05/2014 10:30 BOOK OF THE OLD EDINBURGH CLUB air. In 1847 James Simpson described the wretched as well as for the ‘improvement of the health of the conditions of the Edinburgh poor, as they lived: 4 town’.7 Before too long both Edinburgh and Glasgow were sourcing reliable and clean water supplies from many of them, in \ oors of very high altitude, they labour, the surrounding countryside and by 1862 legislation in particularly when sickness is in their families, under privation Edinburgh insisted proprietors provide a water supply so great that they content themselves with a driblet of water that to housing. However, supplies were hugely exceeded would surprise you – probably their little tea-kettle full. Anything like personal cleanliness in such a condition is rare, while domestic by demand and often faltered. cleanliness is quite out of the question. Their recourse to public Despite those who argued against municipal wells is not only a very great hardship on themselves, but is spending and those who thought the poor too feckless a source of public nuisance, moral as well as physical. I should be sorry to see any attempt to increase the number of these wells; to embrace cleanliness (the coal in the bath argument), and hope to live to see the time when they will be a matter of there was eventually a realisation that improvements to history alone. public health and personal hygiene could be an effective measure of disease prevention, and that prevention In any case many families only had one set of clothing rather than cure could, in the long run, make [ nancial and bedding, often shared amongst family members, sense. Diseases such as cholera also spread from the and therefore cleaning and drying them in one day, in a poorest members of society up the social ladder, and one-room house, was clearly impracticable. this was no doubt another consideration. The problems experienced by the poor began This is not to say that the mechanism of disease to be addressed by social reformers and benevolent transmission was properly understood. Although it was authorities in the nineteenth century. This came about recognised that disease was most virulent in bad urban with a real desire to improve the lot of the poor, both housing and [ lthy unsanitary conditions, it would for altruistic reasons as well as to assuage fears about be the later nineteenth century before the miasma or the fracturing of the social order following Chartist and ‘bad air’ theory of disease transmission was [ nally anti-Poor Law demonstrations. The latter fears were discredited in favour of the germ or pathogenic theory, also fanned with the publication of Friedrich Engel’s which argued micro-organisms, often water-borne, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) were responsible for many diseases. This discovery and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848. The provided an added impetus to the provision of pure economic and national cost of continued poverty and water supplies, washhouses and public baths. ill health was also an issue, brought to prominence The phrase ‘Cleanliness is next to Godliness’, in times of con\ ict when many volunteer recruits popularised in a sermon by John Wesley, was used were judged un[ t to [ ght. Bad housing began to be liberally in press reports on the commissioning and seriously addressed by municipal authorities only opening of washhouses. This ‘crusade’ of cleanliness after legislation in the late nineteenth century, but little re\ ected the belief that educating the poor about happened before the Housing Act of 1919, when central personal hygiene, as well as making them more Government offered [ nancial assistance alongside the resistant to disease, would improve their moral, and requirement to provide housing.5 even their religious standing.8 In Edinburgh religion However, by the second half of the nineteenth certainly played its part in the wider campaign for century addressing the lack of access to public washing better housing with Rev. Dr James Begg and Rev. Dr facilities for both clothing and personal ablutions would Thomas Chalmers, two ministers of the Free Church become a public priority. Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 of Scotland, prominent in pressing for improvements. Report for the Poor Law Commissioners had promoted Consequent improvements in morality and cleanliness cleanliness in the population and suggested clean water would, it was believed, also help the poor to shun supplies, along with drainage and refuse collection, alcohol, which often accounted for up to half of a as the most practical measures an authority could working family’s expenditure. In Edinburgh an early provide.6 In 1847 the Edinburgh Sanitary Association campaigner for baths and washhouses was Councillor agreed, considering the supply of constant high Robert Cranston (1815-1892), a teetotaller, and the pressure water to dwellings as an essential prerequisite founder of several successful temperance hotels, for their plan to erect housing for the working classes, including the Old Waverley on Princes Street. 128 185187-06_Public-Washhouses.indd 128 12/05/2014 10:30 THE PUBLIC WASHHOUSES OF EDINBURGH PUBLIC WASHHOUSES The sterling efforts of Liverpool and London, together with the work of the various committees, were both instrumental and in\ uential in the drafting Public washhouses, buildings funded entirely and of the Baths and Wash-houses Act of 1846.12 The Act, operated by the local authority for the use of the general introduced by Sir George Gray, empowered parish public, differ from the small unmanaged washhouses vestries and borough councils to borrow money found to the rear of many Scottish dwellings, one of or raise it on their rates in order to build public which, in Kirriemuir, gave J. M. Barrie his [ rst stage. washhouses and baths for the working classes. The Act Such washhouses, where they existed, were often also allowed for reduced prices for water supplies to poorly maintained and their communal unmanaged such facilities, and it promoted three areas of activity: use inevitably led to quarrels. Although the Royal the provision of washhouses for the laundering Commission on Housing in Scotland (1917) reported of clothes and linen; individual ‘slipper’ baths for washhouses serving tenements in Paisley, Motherwell, personal ablutions; and open bathing places, e.g.

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