Spit & Polish
Don’t those kitchens in Downton Abbey look tempting – with their scrubbed deal tables, tiled floors and shelves of gleaming copper saucepans? And what about upstairs in the drawing room, with its chintzy sofas and Persian rugs, the linen cupboards filled with lavender-scented, newly-pressed sheets, the billowing starched curtains round the dressing table, the lavatory with its luxurious mahogany seat. Lovely to look at and sit on, but a nightmare to keep clean!
We rarely see the fictional servants of Downton Abbey doing any hard scrubbing, but in real life, the Victorians and Edwardians took household maintenance very seriously. And in middle-class homes employing one or two servants as opposed to the fleets afforded by large estates, the task of keeping dirt at bay on a tight budget was a constant occupation. Books of instruction were devoted to the subject and although much of that advice is as sound as it ever was, our forbears were a hardy lot and some of their tips would to us seem hair-raising, possibly dangerous, and almost certainly smelly. But most of it worked.
As well as a vast range of specialist brushes for every nook and cranny (and the bone of a female deer’s foreleg for polishing high leather boots), the household cupboard required a breadth of knowledge of chemical substances. The journalist Mrs Alfred Praga, who made a living from books advising the cash-strapped middle-classes on keeping up appearances, recommends in Starting Housekeeping (1900): ‘Carbolic soap, yellow soap, and your favourite brand of that commodity in a powdered and put-up-in packet state; powdered pumice stone, in conjunction with paraffin or kerosene, the latter for preference, to be used to remove stains from the marble-topped washstands &c, should any exist; Benzine, [a byproduct of the distillation of petroleum and used to help dissolve fat and resin] for better cleaning of paint &c; metal polish for the brasses and coppers… Soda [a compound of sodium an alkali]; black-lead, emery paper [sandpaper], soft soap, beeswax and turpentine – the latter bought ready mixed – and a large bottle of your favourite disinfectant for flushing sinks, &c.’
Other cleaning materials generally included ammonia, a bleaching agent used as a solvent for grease and paint stains, and borax, a salt derived from boracic acid and soda. Used as a grease solvent, water softener and antiseptic, it works brilliantly for greying white garments: just dissolve a tablespoon in hot water as a pre-wash soak. Castor oil, made from the beans of the Castor oil plant, was kept for nourishing leather. Chloride of lime was a popular disinfectant: when mixed with washing soda [sodium carbonate] it produced chlorine bleach. Then there was Fuller’s earth [a fine clay powder used to absorb greasy stains] and Spirits of Salt (more commonly known now as Hydrochloric acid), a strong acid used to remove rust stains but which could damage fabrics. Lemon salts, now better known as citric acid, are a powerful drain cleaner – a teaspoon left overnight in a kettleful of water will eradicate limescale. Finally, most cupboards would have contained muriatic acid, a combination of hydrochloric acid and water, useful for cleaning cloudy glass.
Forget our spray fragrances of synthetic pine and jasmine, many traditional cleaning agents smelled revolting. For centuries, the method of bleaching cotton was to add ammonia-rich human urine to the weekly wash (dispersing it by trampling the clothes in the tub with bare feet). Advice books often recommended bullocks’ gall for cleaning stained rugs and carpets. Thomas Love, author of a household advice book in the 1820s, was an enthusiast of gall but warned that if it didn’t come from a ‘freshkilled bullock’ it smelled disgusting. But it certainly worked – and ‘ox-gall stain removing soap’ (presumably fragrance-free) is still available today.
Smells can be useful, however, and the Victorian hygiene campaigner Florence Stacpoole pointed out that a stink was an indication that one’s drains needed seeing to. As our ancestors’ homes were for the most part crawling with insects and other animals, odorous substances were also actively sought after as mothdeterrents. Apart from camphor, lavender, ground pepper, cedar and turpentine, the remedies for an infestation could be extreme: the magazine Enquire Within suggested in 1892, that a length of tarred rope would keep moths out of furs. There’s still no better way today to keep moths out than by rubbing down drawers and wardrobes with bleach. In 1770 The Vermin Killer recommended anointing your bed with boiled rabbit guts to get rid of bed bugs – though one might prefer the bugs to the cure. Slightly less gruesome was the advice offered by a household columnist in Cassell’s magazine in the 1880s that cockroaches could be put into a ‘stupor’ by cucumber – sprinkle peelings over the floor at night and by morning they can be easily crushed underfoot.
With coal fires in every home, ridding surfaces of grime was a nightmare. The development of germ theory in the mid-19th century led to a mania for domestic hygiene. By 1936, the average home might have had some labour-saving gadgets, a toaster perhaps or an electric trouser press, but experts still advised a great deal of sanitising labour. If it didn’t smell of carbolic then it wasn’t properly clean. Lydia Balderston, author of Housewifery: A Manual and Textbook Of Practical Housekeeping, urged her readers to clean the loo every day with chloride of lime, scrubbing for more than five minutes, and to boil-wash dishcloths after every use. No wonder that by the 1960s the bacteriologist Theodor Rosebury remarked: ‘We have become a nation of tubbed, scrubbed, deodorised neurotics’.
Tips that still work
Bruise two large onions, cover with water in a saucepan, bring to the boil and simmer for an hour. Cool the water and use it to clean and brighten gilt picture frames.
Stew a stick of rhubarb in a stained enamel pan. Leave the stewed mixture in the pan overnight and the stain will disappear. (Stewed rhubarb – containing oxalic acid – also brilliantly clears rust stains on fabric.)
Clean a decanter by using 2 teaspoons of salt and the shot from inside a cartridge. Add half a pint of warm water, swirl around a few times, then tip out and rinse thoroughly.
Bread, particularly the soft, white kind, is an excellent way to clean decorated wood or plaster. Roll it into balls and squash into nooks and crevices to dislodge dirt.
Spit And Polish by Lucy Lethbridge (Bloomsbury, £12.99).
We rarely see the fictional servants of Downton Abbey doing any hard scrubbing, but in real life, the Victorians and Edwardians took household maintenance very seriously. And in middle-class homes employing one or two servants as opposed to the fleets afforded by large estates, the task of keeping dirt at bay on a tight budget was a constant occupation. Books of instruction were devoted to the subject and although much of that advice is as sound as it ever was, our forbears were a hardy lot and some of their tips would to us seem hair-raising, possibly dangerous, and almost certainly smelly. But most of it worked.
As well as a vast range of specialist brushes for every nook and cranny (and the bone of a female deer’s foreleg for polishing high leather boots), the household cupboard required a breadth of knowledge of chemical substances. The journalist Mrs Alfred Praga, who made a living from books advising the cash-strapped middle-classes on keeping up appearances, recommends in Starting Housekeeping (1900): ‘Carbolic soap, yellow soap, and your favourite brand of that commodity in a powdered and put-up-in packet state; powdered pumice stone, in conjunction with paraffin or kerosene, the latter for preference, to be used to remove stains from the marble-topped washstands &c, should any exist; Benzine, [a byproduct of the distillation of petroleum and used to help dissolve fat and resin] for better cleaning of paint &c; metal polish for the brasses and coppers… Soda [a compound of sodium an alkali]; black-lead, emery paper [sandpaper], soft soap, beeswax and turpentine – the latter bought ready mixed – and a large bottle of your favourite disinfectant for flushing sinks, &c.’
Other cleaning materials generally included ammonia, a bleaching agent used as a solvent for grease and paint stains, and borax, a salt derived from boracic acid and soda. Used as a grease solvent, water softener and antiseptic, it works brilliantly for greying white garments: just dissolve a tablespoon in hot water as a pre-wash soak. Castor oil, made from the beans of the Castor oil plant, was kept for nourishing leather. Chloride of lime was a popular disinfectant: when mixed with washing soda [sodium carbonate] it produced chlorine bleach. Then there was Fuller’s earth [a fine clay powder used to absorb greasy stains] and Spirits of Salt (more commonly known now as Hydrochloric acid), a strong acid used to remove rust stains but which could damage fabrics. Lemon salts, now better known as citric acid, are a powerful drain cleaner – a teaspoon left overnight in a kettleful of water will eradicate limescale. Finally, most cupboards would have contained muriatic acid, a combination of hydrochloric acid and water, useful for cleaning cloudy glass.
Forget our spray fragrances of synthetic pine and jasmine, many traditional cleaning agents smelled revolting. For centuries, the method of bleaching cotton was to add ammonia-rich human urine to the weekly wash (dispersing it by trampling the clothes in the tub with bare feet). Advice books often recommended bullocks’ gall for cleaning stained rugs and carpets. Thomas Love, author of a household advice book in the 1820s, was an enthusiast of gall but warned that if it didn’t come from a ‘freshkilled bullock’ it smelled disgusting. But it certainly worked – and ‘ox-gall stain removing soap’ (presumably fragrance-free) is still available today.
Smells can be useful, however, and the Victorian hygiene campaigner Florence Stacpoole pointed out that a stink was an indication that one’s drains needed seeing to. As our ancestors’ homes were for the most part crawling with insects and other animals, odorous substances were also actively sought after as mothdeterrents. Apart from camphor, lavender, ground pepper, cedar and turpentine, the remedies for an infestation could be extreme: the magazine Enquire Within suggested in 1892, that a length of tarred rope would keep moths out of furs. There’s still no better way today to keep moths out than by rubbing down drawers and wardrobes with bleach. In 1770 The Vermin Killer recommended anointing your bed with boiled rabbit guts to get rid of bed bugs – though one might prefer the bugs to the cure. Slightly less gruesome was the advice offered by a household columnist in Cassell’s magazine in the 1880s that cockroaches could be put into a ‘stupor’ by cucumber – sprinkle peelings over the floor at night and by morning they can be easily crushed underfoot.
With coal fires in every home, ridding surfaces of grime was a nightmare. The development of germ theory in the mid-19th century led to a mania for domestic hygiene. By 1936, the average home might have had some labour-saving gadgets, a toaster perhaps or an electric trouser press, but experts still advised a great deal of sanitising labour. If it didn’t smell of carbolic then it wasn’t properly clean. Lydia Balderston, author of Housewifery: A Manual and Textbook Of Practical Housekeeping, urged her readers to clean the loo every day with chloride of lime, scrubbing for more than five minutes, and to boil-wash dishcloths after every use. No wonder that by the 1960s the bacteriologist Theodor Rosebury remarked: ‘We have become a nation of tubbed, scrubbed, deodorised neurotics’.
Tips that still work
Bruise two large onions, cover with water in a saucepan, bring to the boil and simmer for an hour. Cool the water and use it to clean and brighten gilt picture frames.
Stew a stick of rhubarb in a stained enamel pan. Leave the stewed mixture in the pan overnight and the stain will disappear. (Stewed rhubarb – containing oxalic acid – also brilliantly clears rust stains on fabric.)
Clean a decanter by using 2 teaspoons of salt and the shot from inside a cartridge. Add half a pint of warm water, swirl around a few times, then tip out and rinse thoroughly.
Bread, particularly the soft, white kind, is an excellent way to clean decorated wood or plaster. Roll it into balls and squash into nooks and crevices to dislodge dirt.
Spit And Polish by Lucy Lethbridge (Bloomsbury, £12.99).