Liverpool's wash-houses remembered in new exhibition

Feb 9 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Along with post offices, church halls and the corner pub, they were the pulse of the old communities. Now wash-houses are to be celebrated again. David Charters reports

THEY didn’t talk much about feminism and girl-power in those days of frosted breath and thin hopes, when pride was a plucky button and communities were held together by strong women – blessed Marys, whose spirits rise again from the shadows of old photographs to remind us of how it was before God and plumbers brought hot water to the houses.

We can’t be sure, of course. But, at first glimpse, you would not imagine that these magnificent women, steadfast of jowl and in apparel of priestly black, would choose flimsy smalls to stimulate the midnight dreams of spouses, whose own woolly combinations are hidden in the bundles on their heads.

But the babies came, nonetheless, and in those bundles there would be little clothes as well – these were pulled over the wheezy chests of children, sitting on their beds with arms raised.

It is Liverpool in 1952. Young knees are grazed on the jagged rubble of bomb sites and the grey grip of post-war austerity is still tight, but in some ways these mothers of dignity seem to be copying the style of African women walking to the riverbanks.

But their destination is the wash-house, not only a place of mangles, tubs and steam, but the very heart of the community, where people could really talk, often wearing wellies to keep their feet dry.

Births, marriages, even deaths, were announced, along with courtships and every anxiety known to women, from the price of spuds and coal to the nocturnal demands of Paddy and the slow-reading age of Veronica.

But there would also be anxieties about the thumps and cries sometimes heard on the other aside of the wall. The wash-house could be a council and a court.

"God help me Edith, I’m at me wit’s end. Wally’s appetites are insatiable, if you take my meaning, especially when he’s had a drink – and when hasn’t he had one? And now Tony has got a motorbike and Betty’s still seeing that smiling Cockney from the betting shop and we know nothing about him. Seamus hasn’t been to Mass for weeks. Father Carney’s always asking about him. Where are we all going, luv?"

Of course there would be talk of all the celebrations as well – the exams passed, the matches won, the jobs secured.

Some will recall the Sunday paper which claimed all human life was there. That was just the wash-house in print.

From great basins in stalls fitted with washboards and hunks of soap, to electrically-charged rotor-tubs to the comparative luxury of laundrettes with their padded plastic chairs, the weekly washday had huge importance in the communities – before we caught up with those rich Americans, who had their own washing tubs and tumble-dryers in the home. Liverpool’s last public wash-house, the Fred Robinson laundry in Everton, closed in October 1995.

Most old wash-houses also had a cubicled section for baths and showers, where people could scrub and preen themselves.

So we move on. Today’s women dream of the platinum-plated taps and whirlpool baths of Hollywood.

But in the end it’s all about soap and water, or is a little more? In a wonderful episode of Tony Hancock’s Half Hour called The Big Night (1959), the Lad Himself ends up in a laundrette watching his washing rotate, as though it was on the telly.

Now an exhibition is being prepared, for Liverpool’s Wash-house Memories is to be held at the Lee Jones headquarters of the Liverpool League of Welldoers on Limekiln Lane, Vauxhall, on March 31. The centre is near the old wash-house at Burroughs Gardens.

Ron Formby, of the Vauxhall Neighbourhood Council, is collating the photographs, which will also be part of his wider exhibition on the Changing Face of Local Communities, being shown at various venues, before moving to the Liverpool World Museum in William Brown Street in July.

The first wash-house for poor people in Liverpool (and Britain) was opened by Kitty Wilkinson on Upper Frederick Street in 1832.