Sudsy Stories From the 1960s

My mum grew up in one of the poorer areas in Sheffield, England. How poor? Well, when she was a little girl in the 1930s, some of the kids she went to school with didn’t even have shoes or socks. Having said this, my mum is adamant that her family wasn’t poor (“It’s just that we didn’t have any money to spare.”)

Mum lived in a tiny rented house with her brother, Harry, her sister, Shirley, her parents, and her grandfather (my great-grandfather).

The living areas consisted of only two small rooms downstairs and two small bedrooms upstairs. A spiral of tiny wooden stairs led from the upstairs landing into an attic (loft).

My great-grandfather had one of the bedrooms. My grandparents had the other, which they shared with my mum and her sister, who slept head-to-toe in the same bed. Mum's brother slept in the attic. The attic didn’t have any insulation or any windows, and — since there was no electricity in the house — it didn’t have a light, so he had to use a candle. However, at least it had floorboards, so that was a plus.

There wasn’t a kitchen. Instead, a humongous, coal-fired, cast-iron appliance called a “kitchen range" occupied one of the family room walls. Besides serving as a fireplace, this range also functioned as a cooking stove and hot water tank, both of which were heated by the fire.

There was a small washroom at the back of my grandparents’ house. The back door from the outside world opened into this room, through which you had to pass to enter the family room. The only items in the washroom were a sink with a cold-water tap (faucet) and a large metal container raised off the floor by a brick surround. This container was called a “copper” because it was made of copper (cheaper versions were often made of galvanized iron, but they were still referred to as “coppers”).

When my mum was a kid, Monday was the day when all the ladies in the neighborhood did their washing. On that day, my grandma would get up at six o’clock in the morning, fill the copper with water, light a coal fire underneath it, and wash the family’s tablecloths, towels, bedding, and clothes.

Washing clothes by hand was hard work, but my grandma considered herself lucky. This was because most of her neighbors didn’t have washrooms. This meant they had to wash their clothes in their family rooms, making their houses hot, sticky, and full of steam on wash day.

In the old days, before people had washing machines, they used various handheld tools to do their laundry. In addition to the copper that grandma used for heating water and boiling clothes to remove tough stains, she also used a large, wooden basin called a “wash tub” for soaking and washing laundry items. This resembled a barrel that had been cut in half.

Grandma had a wooden stick with a handle on one end and three legs on the other. She called this a “posser” (some people would call it a “dolly”), and she used it to agitate any items in the copper or the wash tub.

Something else Grandma had was a “washboard” (or “scrubbing board”). This was a wooden frame holding a sheet of metal with a ridged surface. Grandma rubbed the laundry against the ridges with soap and water to scrub out any dirt.

Once the laundry was clean (well, cleaner than it used to be), Grandma used a “mangle” (some people called it a “wringer”) to force as much water as possible out of the clothes. This was a massive mechanical device featuring two large wooden rollers and a substantial handle. Turning the handle made the rollers rotate, pulling the clothes through and squeezing the water out.

Next, Grandma took the damp laundry outside in a basket. A thin rope, called a washing line (or clothesline), was strung between tall metal posts that were driven into the ground at both ends of the backyard. Grandma hung the damp items of clothing on the washing line and secured them with small springy wooden clips called “clothes pegs.”

Doing the washing by hand this way took all day. It must have been very tiring. It certainly made me feel tired, and all I was doing was watching.

Things didn’t change all that much as I grew older. Since both my parents worked, I spent my summer vacation days in the mid-1960s at my Auntie Barbara’s house, up the road, with my cousin Gillian, who was a year younger than me.

Just like my grandmother, Auntie Barbara, and all the other ladies in our area did their laundry on Mondays. I don’t know why this was. Maybe it was some sort of “unspoken rule.”

Something exciting happened when I was about eight or nine years old. Auntie Barbara got her very own washing machine! It was a bit old and battered (she had gotten it secondhand), but it was a lot better than washing everything by hand.

This was a “top-loading” machine, which means you lifted the lid and dropped your clothes into the drum. When it was running — shaking and rattling and making strange noises — a post sticking up in the middle of the drum rotated backwards and forwards. This post had fins sticking out of its sides, and these fins agitated the clothes, causing everything to mix up.

Auntie Barbara didn’t have a dryer, but she did have a mangle. It was my and Gillian’s job to crank the handle on the mangle to squeeze as much water out of the clothes as we could. We took turns. We mangled and mangled until our arms ached, and then we mangled some more.

Next, we put the laundry into a basket and carried it into the back garden. We helped Auntie Barbara hang everything on her washing lines. If we were lucky, a light breeze would be blowing, and the sun would be blazing hot. When we looked down the hill, there was laundry flapping in the wind in every garden.

I don’t know why, but when those clothes had dried in the sun, they looked the cleanest of clean and they smelled the freshest of fresh. When we took them off the washing lines, they were stiff and crispy and crackly, almost as though they’d been starched.

After we’d brought the dry clothes back into the house, Auntie Barbara ironed them. She ironed everything — not just shirts and trousers, but socks, handkerchiefs, sheets, pillowcases, bath towels, dish towels, tea towels, and anything else she could get her hands on. I consider myself fortunate that she didn’t become overly excited and iron me!

I remember those days with fond nostalgia. How about you? Do you have any memories of washday from days gone by? As always, I welcome your captivating comments, querulous questions, and sagacious suggestions, all of which you can share on Hackster's "Throwback Thursdays" Discord channel. I look forward to seeing you there.

P.S. Don't forget that you can peruse and ponder all of my Throwback Thursdays columns here.