Britain Etc.

The three designs, Zizek postulated, are an expression of a triad of national cultures first identified by the German philosopher Georg Hegel: ‘Reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English).’ Whether this academic contemplation upon the toilet bowl can withstand Germanic levels of scrutiny is debatable, but what is undeniable are deep-seated cultural differences in the attitudes of societies towards excretion.

I recently took my children to the ancient Roman fort named Vindolanda, close to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. They dangled their legs over an excavated wall and tried to imagine what it must have been like on that spot almost two thousand years earlier, because what they sat upon was the remains of the sixteen-seater latrine. Here the soldiers would have occupied wooden seats, side by side, suspended above a channel of running water. In front of them a separate narrow channel, also flowing with water, which would be used to rinse the sponge-on-a-stick that served as lavatory paper. The detail of this scene that provoked most interest was not the expert plumbing of course. It was the impossible, appalling, disgusting thought of communal defecation. And yet public latrines, as against private ‘closets’, were the normal and often only form of provision for many British people until the nineteenth century.

In the Middle Ages, communal lavatories were a familiar feature of urban life. London’s Lord Mayor Dick Whittington, pantomime’s thigh-slapping ailurophile, left money in his will for the construction of a monster 128- seater — sixty-four each for men and women — overhanging a gully on the banks of the Thames. Emptied by the tide, ‘Whittington’s Longhouse’ was still in operation in the seventeenth century. The self-cleaning design was a significant improvement upon numerous latrines that clogged up the city’s waterways.

For centuries after the Roman garrisons left, British plumbing was a chaotic and unsanitary mess. Partly, this reflected a rejection of anything connected with Rome: pipes and drains from this period almost define the phrase ‘bodged job’, as if the engineers had deliberately constructed waste disposal systems to defy the laws of Caesar and physics. Cleanliness itself was rejected as a Roman indulgence by some early Christians: the English hermit St Godric walked to Jerusalem without washing, perhaps heeding the words of St Jerome, who declared that ‘a clean body and a clean dress means an unclean soul.’

This denunciation of basic hygiene as un-British and un-Christian may have offered some cultural and theological justification for the stink and the filth. But it didn’t make it any less unpleasant or dangerous. In 1326 tragic Richard the Raker fell into his cesspit and drowned ‘monstrously in his own excrement’ — possibly the worst accidental death imaginable. The great pits of human waste also contributed to the spread of diseases that could wipe out whole villages and decimate towns.

For all but the richest, the process and product of defecation remained a manifestly public business. There was no place for modesty. Even at Hampton Court Palace, Henry VIII built the Great House of Easement — a twin- level, twenty-eight-seater latrine suspended over the moat — for the use of his courtiers. He, meanwhile, would sit privately upon a luxurious ‘close stool’ with padded seat, trimmed with silk ribbons and studded with gold nails. Privilege and class increasingly defined the politics of the privy, a legacy still in evidence today.

In 1530, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus finished a book that instantly became a European blockbuster. De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (‘A Handbook on Good Manners for Children’) was the bestseller of the sixteenth century, translated into twenty-two languages and running into dozens of editions. Although it purported to offer thoughts on the moral and practical education of children, what it really amounted to was the first self-help book on how to be civilised. It became essential reading in the upper echelons of British society, not least for its thoughts on the manners of the toilet. ‘It is impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating,’ Erasmus wrote. ‘A well-bred person should always avoid exposing without necessity the parts to which nature has attached modesty. If necessity compels this, it should be done with decency and reserve, even if no witness is present.’

Three decades later, the Italian cleric Giovanni della Casa took these ideas further. In his famous treatise on manners, Il Galateo, he wrote that ‘it does not befit a modest, honourable man to prepare to relieve nature in the presence of other people.’ The public latrine had been condemned. Britain’s upper classes would look to privatise poo.

Modesty and affected repugnance at bodily functions became fashionable behaviour. Indeed, Queen Elizabeth I was something of a pioneer in the new manners, influenced by her ‘saucy godson’ and courtier, the poet Sir John Harington. In 1596 he published A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, a controversial tome that literally and satirically argued for the cleansing of the court. It ends with a two-line verse:

To keepe your houses sweete, clense privie vaultes.
To keepe your soules as sweete, mend privie faults.

It turned the teachings of St Jerome upside down and encouraged a return to Roman sanitation and hygiene methods. Harington’s manor was close to the city of Bath and the book was evangelical in its praise for the waste disposal systems of the ancient emperors. It also included his own design of the first flushing toilet, the Ajax (a pun on ‘a jakes’, the colloquial word for a privy), which was installed in a number of the great houses of the time, including Richmond Palace.

Beyond the walls of such grand residences, however, the lack of even a rudimentary sewage system meant urban life remained contaminated by the odorous and potentially deadly consequences of human waste. The aristocracy turned their superior noses up at ‘the great unwashed masses of humanity’, as the political philosopher Edmund Burke described them. How you smelled defined your status.

The arrival of industrialisation only served to widen the gulf between the personal hygiene habits of the ruling classes and the common people, as rapidly expanding towns and cities were quite unable to cope with the sanitation demands placed upon them. Waves of cholera, influenza and typhoid in the 1830s brought a new urgency to matters, and with all social strata at risk from infection, Parliament asked the public health activist Edwin Chadwick to investigate. His Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population led to a raft of legislation attempting, in the course of a few years, to transform the practices and attitudes of centuries.

The Public Health Act of 1848, for instance, made it mandatory to have some sort of private lavatory in one’s home — privy, ash pit or flushing WC. However, there was opposition to such ideas in working class areas. Many labourers and their families thought it unhygienic to have a lavatory inside the house and regarded the new laws as parliamentary interference with the most basic and domestic of human rights.

The aspirational middle classes, on the other hand, largely welcomed the privacy and modesty afforded by the new technology and increasingly associated personal hygiene with moral virtue. Public health reform was seen as the key to the spiritual regeneration of the urban poor and an army of propagandists, including many women, sought to save the working classes from the corruptive stench of human waste. The Ladies’ National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge was founded in 1857 and published a series of penny tracts with titles such as Hints to Working People about Personal Cleanliness and The Power of Soap and Water. The Reverend Charles Girdlestone, a Black Country parson with fervent views on hygiene, claimed that the sanitary reform movement was ‘pregnant with the most important advantages to the human race, in every point of view — social, moral and religious’. The toilet had become the measuring stick for a civilised society.

At the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park in 1851, the engineer George Jennings installed his Monkey Closets in the Retiring Rooms of Crystal Palace. More than 800,000 visitors spent a penny to use what were the first public conveniences. The price included a private cubicle, a clean seat, a towel, a comb and a shoeshine. As the sociologist Norbert Elias wrote later in his book The Civilizing Process, industrial societies like Britain had developed ‘embarrassment at the mere sight of many bodily functions of others, and often at their mere mention, or as a feeling of shame when one’s own functions are exposed to the gaze of others, and by no means only then’.

The novelist William Thackeray described the Victorian era as ‘if not the most moral, certainly the most squeamish’, and it was from that peculiarly British mixture of prudery, pride and invention that our contemporary attitudes to the lavatory have their roots. The development of vitreous china by Twyford, Wedgwood and Doulton;