Victorian families had right method of showering

WE RESIDENTS of Cape Town have come to regard our bathing habits as a subject for general debate and everyone has a favourite way to keep clean with the minimum waste of water. The amount gets smaller and smaller with each telling, until I expect somebody to claim he has devised a way of bathing in a tea cup.

I do not think bathing has been as widely discussed since Roman times, when it was very much a social activity.

After the fall of Rome most people seem to have lost interest in communal bathing. Indeed bathing generally fell out of fashion in most countries for quite a while. As recently as 1837, when Queen Victoria became Queen of England, bathing was considered a slightly eccentric habit.

There was no bathroom in Buckingham Palace when she moved in and I doubt whether this bothered her.

I was paging through a book about the history of bathing (as one does) and found a picture of an early shower bath, which immediately made me sit-up and take note. It was a photograph of the shower that was used in Chatsworth House in Derbyshire in about 1840.

As soon as I saw it I was sure it was exactly what Cape Town homes needed. The user stood in a basin of water which had four struts attached, holding a smaller water container above head height. You stood in the lower basin and operated a pump handle which sent water into the top container, which had little holes in it, so the water came cascading down over you and back into the bottom basin.

The beauty of this system was that, after you’d showered the water was still there (albeit slightly soapy) for the next person to use. A whole family could shower in a single basin of water, which became dirtier as each bather used it.

I bet the father showered first, as this was in Victorian times, and the last user would probably have been the youngest child who was most likely the grubbiest of the lot, so nobody would have cared whether he showered in the family’s accumulated grey water. He was expected to smell funny anyway.

One water-saving solution I’ve heard of recently was by a man who simply switched off his hot water geyser. With only cold water available, none of his family wanted to spend more that a few seconds under the shower anyway. Problem solved.

Last Laugh

A small town bank was robbed four times within a single month. From the clues they found, the police deduced that all the robberies were committed by the same person.

A police officer was questioning the bank teller and asked: “Did you notice anything unusual about the man who robbed you?”

“Yes,” said the teller. “Each time he came in he was better dressed than the time before.”