I grew up with my two sisters in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in a rather gaunt millstone grit semi-detached house in a mill village, which my parents moved to in 1950.
The house was built around 1902. It had four floors: a cellar, living rooms and a ‘cellar-head kitchen’ (i.e. a narrow room with stone steps at one end leading down to the cellar), bedrooms and an attic. The cellar had several sections: a larder with a big stone slab at one end, where we kept what today we would keep in a fridge; a coal cellar with a chute from outside, down which the coalman would noisily shoot sacks of coal; a space under the flight of steps from the kitchen where my mother’s bicycle languished and the main cellar. There was electric light and points throughout and a gas supply.

The main cellar was where my father had his workbench and where my mother did the washing. A flight of steps from the outer door (which had a window, so the cellar was not dark) led up into the garden.

The main cellar had a big wooden table with the cat’s basket and the wicker washing basket, lots of shelves all round with boxes and jars and tins of paint, nails, screws, tools etc, and a big stone sink with a wooden draining board and a mangle bolted to one end. In one corner was a built-in ‘copper’: a big round metal boiler set in a solid brick framework, with a round metal lid and underneath a place to light a fire to heat the water for the wash. We never used this, but Mum did use the new-fangled gas ‘copper’ (I think these things must have once been made of copper). This was a free-standing big metal tub boiler with a gas jet underneath, in which she boiled sheets and then, once the gas was turned out and the water cooled a little, sturdier garments. She used big wooden tongs to stir and haul the steaming linen about.

More delicate things Mum washed by hand in the sink, scrubbing them on the ridged draining board, and all were put through the mangle. She used Lux soap flakes or a big block of green Fairy laundry soap. We were allowed to help with mangling, but only with smaller things like pillow slips. Before long, though, I think Mum rebelled and sent the bedlinen out to the local laundry.

Once the washing was done the hot water from the copper was used to wash the floors upstairs.

My mother did the family washing on Tuesdays, contrary to the other local women who washed on Mondays. Her argument was that Mondays were for tidying up and housework after the weekend when the family had all been at home, creating mess and chaos.

The wet washing was hauled up the outside steps from the cellar to the washing line. Washing lines running across our lane were put up and taken down each washday by all our neighbours. Ours was looped first over a hook on the house back wall, out over the back garden and to the washing post on the far side of the cinder lane which ran along outside the back gate. Fortunately, the lane was a dead-end just beyond our house, but it was not uncommon for all the local women to have to run out to hold up their washing to let the coal-man or the fish-man drive through.

If the weather was wet, our washing would be hung to dry (very slowly) on lines strung across the cellar ceiling, and then aired on a wooden clothes horse around the coal fire upstairs. Ironing was done first on the big table in the cellar, on an old clean sheet spread over an old blanket, and later up in the kitchen, on the table which took up half the width of the narrow room.

In later years Mum had a twin tub washing machine in the cellar, which cut down a lot of the physical labour of washday, although the big wooden tongs were still deployed to transfer dripping, steaming clothes from wash tub to spin dryer. The mangle became redundant. When she and my father moved house in the 1970’s, Mum finally had an automatic washing machine.

Looking back, washday for my mother and her contemporaries in the 1950’s was still hard physical labour, despite the new inventions that were starting to appear. In her last years, Mum had a washer-dryer, which would have seemed the stuff of total fantasy to her younger self.

Mary Tyson
March 2024

The Blue Mill

My paternal grandfather was born in Backbarrow, a village in what was then south Lancashire and is now part of Cumbria. I grew up in Yorkshire but we often visited my aunt, who lived not far away from Backbarrow, in Cartmel.

A major employer in Backbarrow was the ’blue mill’. This was The Lancashire Ultramarine Company works, established in 1890 in an old cotton mill on the banks of the River Leven. The company was later purchased by Reckitt’s. The company owned houses in the village across the road from the works, which were rented to workers.

Ultramarine was a pigment made originally by grinding the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli, and was hence very expensive.

The company manufactured a more affordable laundry blue, often known as ‘dolly blue’, which housewives added to their weekly wash to brighten the whites, until the advent of optical brighteners in present-day washing powders.

The works also produced a range of other pigments and dyes, playing a crucial role in the textile and paint industries.

Making synthetic ultramarine was a complex and difficult process, using sulphur, china clay, soda ash, pitch and feldspar.

The whole Backbarrow works was steeped in the colour, the river ran blue and the village as a whole had a blue tint. I have a vivid memory of being driven by either my father or my aunt along the road which bisected the works and seeing one of the mill-workers crossing the road ahead. He was blue from head to foot.

The local bus company laid on a special blue mill bus (presumably with seats permanently dusted with blue) to ferry workers who lived in Ulverston home.

The mill was finally closed in 1982, and the buildings now form the Whitewater hotel and holiday complex. The Lakeland Motor Museum now occupies the old packaging sheds.   

Mary Tyson

“My home life was very very hard times, my mother was left a widow when my father died. I was two years old then. She was left with seven children.

There was no dole, no income whatever. She brought us up practically, they call “on the washtub”, doing work for other people. It was very hard times”.

Forest of Dean miner Harry Toomer (1902 -2004)
Harry Toomer was interviewed by Elsie Olivey and Helen Nash on 9 February 1984
Credit:  Gage Library, Dean Heritage Centre.

“Washing day always had a smell of its own. Mum always used Lifebuoy soap as there were no soap powders then. The kitchen would be full of steam if it was a wet day and wet clothes would be everywhere.

It was hard work in those days as you had to get the dolly tub out, fill it full of hot water, beat the clothes with the dolly for some time, take them out all dripping wet and put them through the mangle which was kept in the cellar, as it was a big awkward thing. Then more cold water was put into the boiler and all the white clothes boiled up until clean. Then they were put through the mangle again.

Most people did their washing on Mondays and if it was a fine day you could see lovely white clothes blowing in the wind in some gardens. Tuesday was ironing day. The flat irons were heated up on the stove or the fire and so had to be cleaned before using them. You had to put them up to your face to feel if they were the right temperature before you could iron the clothes.”

Freda Phipps nee Morse (1912-2000) from Early Days at Stone Cottage, Yorkley, Forest of Dean by. Credit: Forest of Dean Family History Society.

Washday 1919

My father was a great one for organisation and timekeeping, despite his blindness. Every morning he would be out in the scullery, stripped to the waist, and having a good scrub down. Then breakfast in the living room where mother would be frying bacon and eggs on the black stove with which she had been wrestling from an early hour. We would be rushing around getting ready for school and having our breakfast. In the pram the baby would be trying to command attention. By the time we were out through the front door on our various ways, Dad would be at the rug-making frame, hard at work.

Mondays were more demanding still on my mother as, in the time-honoured tradition, this was washday. The old copper in the corner of the scullery had to be filled with water and a fire lit underneath; an even more tenuous operation than the stove in the living room. Still one had to persevere with it as there was no hot water to commence the washing until the monster began roaring. A large tin bath was filled with blue water for the final rinse and kettles boiled on the stove for making bowls of starch, considered essential.

My father had bought a modern luxury supposedly designed to lighten my mother’s labours on Mondays…a mangle. This huge instrument stood well above my mother’s head, was built of cast iron with huge wooden rollers. On one side, an enormous wheel with a handle to turn the rollers. And on top a smaller wheel to screw the rollers together, or to loosen them when not in use.

The clothes were washed in a dolly tub in soapy water, dollied vigorously with a wooden dolly and white cottons boiled in the copper. The garments were immersed in another container of cold clear water, well rinsed and put through the mangle. My father would come in and help out with this operation. He would screw down the rollers and, as Mam had not sufficient reach to feed the clothes into the rollers while turning the wheel, he would do this for her as well.

Another zinc bath would be standing on the floor in front of the mangle to receive the flood of water which came gushing out while the garments, flattened into board-like shapes, came peeling out at the back. If the day was fine Mam would pile these into a washing basket, climb the high stone steps to the back garden and hang them on the line. Most of the colliers’ wives would already have lines of washing flapping in all the back gardens all over town.

Going back down the steps, Mam would take the whites, which had been boiling merrily, from the copper, and start once more on the rinsing, blueing and starching routine. Dad would be called in once more to lend a hand.

Incidentally, the baby would have been bathed, dressed and hopefully put to sleep. When we all rushed in, hungry for dinner, Mam would be glad if she had managed the bulk of the washing and had the cloth on the table with the cold Sunday joint, cheese and pickles. Every other day we had a hot dinner, but everybody accepted that Monday was washday. I hated Monday dinner. I didn’t like cold meat and hated pickles, not realising at this age how I added to my mother’s problems, I complained bitterly.

My father had a hearty appetite, loved strong cheeses and a variety of pickles. One Monday I remember he told me to shut up moaning, and offered me sixpence if I would eat a pickle he choose for me. I pondered the offer for a while, then thought of all the choice there was with a whole sixpence, and accepted. My sisters were loud in their protests. Had they not eaten all their meal and had no reward? Dad merely grinned and told them to shut up. He then presented me with a large red peppercorn. [chilli pepper by the sound of it]

My sisters, more familiar with the varying taste of pickles than I, who had refused to sample them, gazed at me wide-eyed. I bit the end of the red object. Not only did it smell and taste vilely, it was burning hot on my tongue. I swallowed it quickly and took another bite. Eventually I ate the whole of it, rushed into the scullery and swallowed cold water. Back into the living room. My father handed over sixpence and I said, “Good afternoon” as we always did, and went out into the street.

When my eyes had finished streaming I made my way along the street fingering my riches. I decided on a large block of Cadbury’s Nut Milk Chocolate, the ultimate in luxury. I went down Foundry Lane, breaking the squares, sucking the chocolate from the nuts, then delightedly crunching the crisp kernels. Halfway through afternoon school I had to rush out and was violently sick, then had to sit in the corner with my head on my arms until closing time. I can’t remember having any feelings of resentment. I had made a bargain and kept it, and after all still had half a block of nut milk chocolate to be nibbled when I felt more like it. [Not sure if dinner mentioned above was lunch, or if the chronology became confused some other way.]

When we came home from school we sat around the table for tea, the table being covered with a starched white cloth…one product of the mammoth washday session. When I say white, you could almost tell the day of the week from the appearance of the table cloth. Starting at Sunday tea-time when it appeared newly laundered, stiff as a board, sharp creases running longitudinally in the correct manner, it proceeded through stages of spots and dabs to a limp travesty of its former glory. Only when drama intervened in the guise of an overturned cup, or worse still upset gravy, was the cloth replaced by a clean one in the week.

It was not the lack of table cloths, we were well supplied with those, but the time-consuming labour of their maintenance. Boiled with soapy water and soda in the copper, rinsed and rinsed again, put through the blue rinse and finally starched, mangled and dried, they still demanded attention.

My mother had to enlist one of us girls to take one end while she took the other. You had to gather the material levelly between your fingers, stretch the linen between you. from one end of the room to the other, and do a sort of jiggling movement to straighten the threads. You then opened the cloth to full width, folded corners together in time with your partner, same again, hold the now quarter width high in the air, advance to meet your partner. It was all quite like the measured steps of a dance.

Then Mam would take over, see that the dampened spots were evenly distributed, roll up the long length in a tight tube, then leave it to become evenly damp all through.

Meanwhile the stove would have been coaxed into an evenly glowing red, and the heavy flat-irons set to heat up. The table was covered with blankets and sheet, bath brick and cloth at the ready to keep the surface of the iron well-polished. Then to work… a large wicker basket piled high with folded laundry awaited.

Sheets, pillowcases, towels and underclothes all had to be ironed. But the most demanding, which had to have just the right temperature, the most polished iron, were the table cloths, and Dad’s shirts and collars.

You had to take the iron from the fire, hold it near your face, spit on it to see if, when the globule hit the surface squarely, it immediately bounced off sizzling. A final rub with the brick cloth, a further test on some dampened material to see if the result was correct, then get going. The most shattering hazards of which to be wary were a too hot iron which resulted in a scorch mark, or a smoky smut which had slyly attached itself to your iron, and resulted in a black blob on the pristine surface. Certainly washday in 1919 was no easy process.

Gladys Duberley (1911-1988). Credit Nick Duberley and Gage Library in the Dean Heritage Centre.

(Not everyone worked in the mines. Gladdys’s husband was blinded during World War One and worked at home making mats, so was able to help with the washing)

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