How the rubber glove changed our world

SPIT AND POLISH by Lucy Lethbridge (Bloomsbury £12.99)

Those of us who hanker for the good old days probably wouldn’t like it very much if we were transported back to them.

As Lucy Lethbridge says in this fascinating little book, ‘the outside world was dirtier than it is today’, swirling with dust, smuts, dung, smoke, mud and germs. Deodorant hadn’t been invented — people ponged.

The modern world may be pretty horrible on the whole, but at least we have Toilet Duck. What our ancestors had instead, of course, were armies of servants. An ordinary edwardian middle- class family would make any financial sacrifice ‘ rather than suffer the ignominy of doing their own housework’.

As people tended to consume huge meals, and as each course required different china, glasses and cutlery, washing up was ‘an almost continual labour for kitchen maids’. Polishing silverware was ‘ very hard, physical intensive work’. servants’ fingers got sore and blistered — ‘ the blisters burst and you kept on despite the pain’, a former footman recalled.

Indeed, fresh air was considered a fiend. Windows and blinds were kept firmly shut and drawn. Rooms were swept daily, using a myriad of feather tickling- stick- like dusters. Curtains were taken down and shaken. Clothes were brushed.

‘The battle against dust,’ says Lethbridge, ‘often seemed to represent a battle against outside life itself.’ We must give praise for the invention, in 1901, of the vacuum cleaner, ‘arguably the most important technological advance in domestic cleaning . . . . Now dust particles could be sucked up in a matter of minutes’.

The advertisement for a hoover was unequivocal and almost military: ‘It Beats as it sweeps as it Cleans.’

The other important breakthough was the rubber glove, which came in after World War II. Rubber gloves, says Lethbridge, ‘must rate as one of the more life-changing of all domestic innovations’, as hitherto detergents containing harsh caustic soda ‘hardened hands and burned the colour off linoleum’.

If bathrooms today are sweet with the smell of alpine breezes and fir trees, plumber and inventor Thomas Crapper is the man we must salute.

Until the 1890s, kitchen maids had to

collect water from a shared public pump, which was a fearful harbinger of diseases such as cholera. People also took baths infrequently, instead giving themselves a rubbing with a rough cloth.

Up until recently — my mother had her first automatic washing machine in 1972 — the most labour-intensive task was the laundry. The earliest washing machines — only a small advance on bashing clothes against boulders by the riverside — were wooden tubs, rocked or rotated by hand.

It took all day, boiling, scouring, rubbing garments on a washboard, rinsing them over and over to remove the soap. A muslin bag of blue powder was added to the final rinse to prevent the yellowing effect that was a by-product of soap made with tallow.

Because of the British weather, damp laundry was forever draped around the kitchen. ‘No one who has not experienced it can imagine the misery of living for several days with a firmament of drying clothes on lines overhead,’ wrote Flora Thompson of Lark Rise fame. Well, I did experience it — and much else, too. In the Sixties in South Wales, my grandmother still did her washing with a mangle. Wet clothes were suspended above the kitchen on a hoist. Condensation ran down the walls and windows, and of course all the adults were chain-smoking.

Even if the bedsheets were pegged outside, coal dust from Bedwas colliery always gave your whites a greyish hue.

Indeed, much of this book is familiar — fly papers, carbolic soap, bonehandled cutlery you can’t shove in a dishwasher — and just the other day, I saw a Ewbank in a museum.

The Ewbank of old was a primitive vacuum cleaner, a frightening assemblage of thick insulated rubber cables, a big wheezing sack, and a high pitched angry groaning motor. We had one of those until the early Seventies, and amazingly inefficient it was.

Also in the museum were Bakelite telephones, multi- coloured Formica work- tops, pumice stones and a packet of Lux soap flakes. The ordinary bits and bobs of my childhood are already history.

I’ll be stuffed and exhibited in a glass cabinet myself next, as the Last Man in the World to Use a Fountain Pen.