Marilyn, Pam and Buffy
EDWARDS PROVIDES A POTTED HISTORY OF THE CITY’S PUBLIC LOOS
SMALLTHORNE’S very own Arthur Berry had a curious fascination for public toilets that I confess to sharing.
However, as shrines to micturition go, I doubt whether Arthur ever experienced anything like the conveniences I visited back in 2002.
Walking around Grove Park in Somerset, I found myself wanting to use the toilets, which appeared in the form of a rectangular brick block, with the gents’ to the lefthand side and the ladies’ to the right. It was evidently run as a private franchise rather than the local authority.
Sandwiched in between was a room for the (female) attendant, to whom I began chatting.
She introduced me to the gents’ loos, which were wonderfully clean and had shining tiled walls.
I was highly amused to observe that there were male interest posters and photographs adorning the walls. Marilyn Monroe, Pamela Anderson and Buffy the Vampire Slayer looked down on those answering the call of nature.
Noting the huge smile on my face, the attendant asked me if I would like to see the ladies’ section, and duly took me inside for another mini-tour.
Here were posters of the cast of Friends, Mel Gibson and Gareth Gates (remember him?) as well as a small collection of pretty dolls and a pot of flowers.
Was I impressed? With due respect to Wells Cathedral and the Cheddar Gorge, this unplanned call made my holiday in Somerset.
To this day, I have never spent a penny in such welcoming toilets – and this is a reminder that by contrast, some of our toilet visits over the years have been unhygienic, fetid and intimidating.
The brick-constructed replica toilet blocks in the social history gallery at Gladstone Pottery Museum or the Apedale Heritage Centre admirably capture the look of the primitive down-the-back-yard comfort stations of the past – but another exhibit, in the grounds of the Ford Green Hall folk museum, caught my eye recently.
Museum supervisor Chris Bell explained its history.
“Our 17th-century privy recreates a typical outdoor toilet from the time,” conveys, Chris, aged 51. “It is simply a box sat over a very deep hole. It would have been used mainly in the day, with chamber pots being used at night and then emptied into the privy in the morning.
“The night soil men would have dug out the privy once it was full, to get to the very important saltpetre that is formed when human waste sits in the ground. Saltpetre is the main ingredient in gunpowder!
“We don’t actually know where the Ford family’s privy was situated, but it would have been sensible to have it near the kitchen garden, where some of the waste could be used for fertiliser.”
Anthony Poulton-smith wrote a wonderful little book called Staffordshire Privies (1998) and he interviewed Annie Bath (nee Stephenson) who once lived in Talkeo’-th’-hill and who recalled a twohole toilet being used by her family when she was a young girl.
Anthony wrote: “It was not unusual for adults and children to be in occupation at the same time, using suitably-sized holes, whilst toddlers who could not yet reach the seat were provided with a porcelain potty.
“The whole building was located some 25 yards from the house, behind a large bank of earth, which had to be negotiated in both directions. In later years, Annie attended Talke Girls’ School. Here, the girls used an eight or ten-holer, however, each was separated into private cubicles (a luxury).”
Barry Williams told a wonderful little story about outside toilets in his 1998 book on Silverdale.
Some of the terraced houses in Church Street had gardens that backed on to the local railway line – and some had toilets down the garden path.
A local resident called John Tye had one of these toilets in very close proximity to the railway line and if he was using the lavvy when a train sped past, the vibration was so heavy that he had to hang on to the toilet seat.
“As you sat there,” imparted Barry, “Your body shook to the rhythm of the train on the line.”
My parents regularly shopped in Newcastle when I was a child and I recall the toilets in Hassell Street – opposite the Bull’s Vaults pub – being particularly serviceable for those shoppers needing ‘to go.’
These were underground conveniences, accessed by steep steps. I confess that as a young nipper, I had a curious yearning to take up being a toilet attendant as a future career.
The attendants had their own small office in the Hassell Street toilets and they would sit in it, playing a transistor radio or reading a newspaper, occasionally talking to their regular ‘customers.’
This looked to me like a cushy number, promising job satisfaction and status. Status? Well, think of it this way. Because the toilet attendants had their own office, they could legitimately claim to be office workers.
Readers may recall that there was a small number of underground conveniences in the pottery towns, including those in Swan Square, Burslem and Tower Square, Tunstall.
Of course, some pub/ hotels had underground loos, such as the Leopard in Burslem – which were never very well looked after in the pub’s later years – and the North Stafford Hotel in Stoke, where we can find elements of experimental art nouveau.
These toilets became famous for the lovely, gleaming tiles and the word LAVATORY picked out in green letters on the tilework.
These loos were a total contrast to the open-topped toilet block that I remember on May Bank Marsh in the 1960s.
No roof, I suppose, meant that waste was flushed out of the trough all the quicker, by rainwater – and decent ventilation was assured, certainly.
However, there was a downside. Several complaints were made about the toilet in 1971. Local residents and businessmen said that the toilet stank in the summer months – and considering that it was a stone’s throw away from a very good chip shop, the pong was unpleasant if you’d just come out of the shop and were about to tuck in to your unwrapped battered sausage and peas.
The toilet was ultimately rebuilt with a roof, but was demolished in 1992.
I mentioned that toilets could be intimidating. Well, as a newlyrecruited shop floor labourer at Permaflex Limited in Trubshaw Cross in 1982, I suddenly felt the urge to drop my boxes of Flexolite lighter fluid and go and see a man about a dog.
I barged open the door to the lads’ toilets to find three male employees sitting on a bench, puffing fags and reading the Daily Star.
This was obviously an unofficial break, and the three blokes looked as if they’d been sat skiving so long that deep vein thrombosis might set
in at anytime. Considering that I didn’t really know them at the time and that the toilet trough was opposite them, you may imagine my bashfulness. However, if there was any man who could write of a visit to the karzy as if it were a spiritual experience, it was the afore-mentioned Arthur Berry, who wrote a short poem entitled In The Gents. It is by turns metaphysical, recondite and trenchant – I think:
Above the angle of the damaged roof light
Above the edge of the public house wall
Over the top of the gentlemen’s lavatories
Beyond the corrosion of pipes and the decaying of cisterns
Above the erotic scratches on the wall
Through the glare of the neon lit sign from the Bingo Palace
As I stand piddling in the crazed urinal stall
I can see the red and green tail lights of some night plane
Moving across this area of infinite velvet of the
Perhaps you’ve never considered a visit to the toilet as part of our cosmic journey. I hope you will now.
Mervyn will present a Mervyn’s Mondays talk entitled Flushed With Success: The Story of North Staffordshire Toilets on Monday. The venue is the Victoria Lounge Bar, Adventure Place, Hanley. It starts at 11 am promptly and admission is £3.50, pay on the day.