Working Class life in the 1940’s - Wash Day

I don’t know if it was just a working class thing but in working class homes in the 1940’s and early 50’s Monday was always wash day. For us Mondays meant cold meat left over from the Sunday joint with chips or bubble and squeak for dinner, because this was a quick and easy meal to prepare which it needed to be as wash day was very labour intensive.

Apart from the food on washday which I loved, I hated wash days especially in the winter time, because doing the washing always made the whole house smell of wet clothes and the windows would steamed up and the house just felt really damp.

Like most people in the working class district called the Meadows in Nottingham we lived in two up two down terraced housing. Our house was an end of terrace house that had two bedrooms and an attic, which was my bedroom. Our house was an end house and my attic bedroom had a real window instead of the skylight or no window like the mid terrace houses.

This is a rough layout plan of our ground floor so you can get some idea of where things are in the house. If you click on the image you can see the floor plan at full size which is a bit bigger.

Originally my mum did her washing in a dolly tub which during the week would be stored in the pantry until it was needed.

A dolly tub was a metal ribbed tub I think ours was made of aluminium and stood about two and a half feet high.

All during the week anything that was dirty and needed to be washed would be put in the dolly tub ready for wash day to come round.

On Monday morning mum would take the dolly tub from the pantry into the scullery where she would take the dirty washing and sort it into separate piles of whites, coloureds and delicates etc.

Next she would sort the piles into the order that they would be washed in.

I found this photo on the web of a lady using a dolly tub outside her house, and this will give you an idea of the size of the dolly tub and how we looked when using it.

Mum would then fill the dolly tub up with hot water, which she would heat in the copper or in pans which she would heat on the top of the gas cooker.

Most of the houses in our district had coppers built into the scullery the coppers were brick built and had a small fireplace underneath where you built the fire to heat the water.

In the first photograph the fireplace is hidden behind the wooden lid of the copper so you can't see it.

The second photo shows a copper with its lid on and you can see the fireplace ours was a little different to these two coppers but this gives you some idea of what one looked like.

If you had a boil wash it would be done in the copper rather than the dolly tub.

The copper took up the whole corner of the small scullery. In the small terraced houses the scullery was only a small room something like eight foot long and seven foot wide. There was just enough space between the sink on one wall and the gas stove on the other to put the big tin bath on bath night.

Mum would put the cleanest stuff first into the dolly tub and she would often part wash some of the smaller items in the scullery sink before putting it in the dolly tub. This served to keep the water in the dolly tub clean for longer as mum would have to do more than one wash using the same water.

The water was agitated in the dolly tub by mum using either a posser or a ponch.

The posser sometimes also called a dolly peg had three legs and the ponch was like a copper plunger with holes in.

The ponch was used in an up and down motion while the posser was turned clockwise then anti-clockwise like the central agitators type washing machines.

The materials that our clothing was made out of at this time was very unforgiving, make a mistake at the washing stage or the ironing stage and you were stuck with the results. Clothing made from wool I remember was a particular case in point; wash woollen clothing in water too hot and you would be left with a matted miniature of your original.

Many a younger child in the family inherited the favourite jumper of an elder sibling this way. The jumper was impossible to return to its previous shape and you could see immediately that the jumper had been shrunk in the wash. I don’t think that anyone liked wearing clothing that had shrunk, but many a family could not afford just to throw stuff away. If it was possible for another member of the family to squeeze into the item that had shrunk, then even though it did not look particularly good it was still functional and therefore still usable.

After the washing had been done then came the arduous task of rinsing the soap out of the washing.

First mum would ring as much of the soapy water out of the washing by hand as she could, this water going back into to dolly tube to be used for the next load of washing. Having rung out as much as could be rung out by hand then the washing would be put through a mangle to squeeze out as much water as possible.

The mangle that we had was a big wrought iron mangle with huge wooden rollers on and it used to live in the back yard just outside of the back door.

After that the washing would be rinsed in cold water in the big stone scullery sink until the water ran clear and there seemed to be no soap left in the clothes.

If the items being rinsed were white often a Reckitt's blue bag was added to the rinsing water at this stage.

These blue bags made your whites look white again. Often the whites especially if bars of washing soap had been used to wash them would tend to go a little yellow the blue bag countered this and restored the appearance of the whites.

When mum was satisfied that the soap had been removed from the clothes they would then be mangled again until all the water that could be squeezed out was squeezed out.

The space between the rollers could be adjusted by screwing the handles on the top of the mangle. If you look at the photo of the mangle above you can see the large threaded bolt on the side that made this adjustment.

I remember winding the mangle in our back yard for my mum as she fed in the wet washing.After being mangled the sheets used to be so tightly squeezed between the rollers that they used to come out from between the rollers almost horizontal and as stiff as a board.

This is a photo of two children doing what thousands of children did each week. This mangle was smaller than ours but it gives you an idea of what we looked like. All this physical work kept us pretty fit as kids.

It was amazing just how much water could be removed from the washing by these old fashioned mangles. When it was cold outside mum’s fingers used to get so cold and chapped.

It was incredibly hard work and washday was something that had to be done each week, no matter what the weather.

Washing that had particularly grubby areas like socks or the collars and cuffs of shirts etc would first be treated to some intensive hand washing.

This was done using a bar of washing soap and a washboard with ridges on it and it would be done in the stone sink in the scullery to get the worst of the grime off.

This served two purposes one it got most of the grime out before it went into the dolly tub to be washed thus making sure the hard to clean parts were dealt with properly and two it kept the water in the dolly tub from getting dirty too quick.

What a relief when we had the ascot water heater put in the scullery over the sink and the brick copper taken out.For the first time ever we had hot water on demand, we never had anything more than the one cold water tap and the gas Ascot and they remained the only source of water in the whole house.

Then of course came the washing machine. The first washing machine we had was loaded from the top and over the top of the washing machine there was an electric mangle.

I can still remember the day when mum was doing the washing using the washing machine and she called me to come quick. Mum had been feeding the washing through the mangle and it had taken her right hand with it. The stop button and quick release for the mangle was on the righthand side of the washing machine and mum couldn’t reach it with her free left hand.

Don’t let the small size of the mangle fool you those rollers exerted a terrific amount of pressure and there were a lot of injuries inflicted by this type of electric mangle.

It was lucky that I was there as it had taken mum’s hand up to the wrist by the time I managed to stop the machine and release her. The pressure exerted by these mangles on the washing was tremendous and it made quite a mess of mum’s hand. Her hand was black and blue for weeks after and very painful.    

To give you some idea of one of these types of washing machines in action here is a small video of one that I found on you tube. You can see from this small video that even with a machine it was still very labour intensive and demanded your attention unlike the automatics of today.

Around the mid fifties a Bendix coin operated laundry opened locally and my mum would sometimes use them, sometimes she would do the laundry there but other times I would be sent to do it. Compared to doing it at home it was very easy as the washing machine was fully automatic all you had to do was load it and put in the measured amount of soap powder which even a child could manage that. If you had any trouble there was a manager who would show you how to do it she would also do for a small fee what was called a service wash. In a Service wash you dropped off your dirty washing and later on you picked it up clean, dry and folded.

Mum liked the Bendix that was until one day when everything changed. Mum had been to the Bendix and she had put a load of washing into the machine and set it going. Rather than sit there just watching the machine she decided to pop over the road to the local pub for a drink while she was waiting. When she came back she found the washing machine that she had put our washing into empty. While she had been in the pub someone had stolen all our washing out of the machine. They had not waited until it had finished its cycle they had lifted it out while it was still soaking wet.

For weeks after this I was constantly looking at people in the street to see if I could see some one wearing our clothes. We never did find out who took them and my mum never left her washing unattended again. We didn’t use the Bendix much after that experience.

Even in the forties before the Bendix coin operated laundry arrived not everyone did their washing at home some use to go to the big public laundry that most towns and cities would have. These places were still in operation in our city of Nottingham right up until the last ones were closed down in 1970. I have a bit of video taken of the Victoria wash house taken in 1969 shortly before it closed down. The sights and sounds that you will see on this video are little different to the sights you would have seen in the 1940’s and 50’s.

This Video is well worth watching it starts with a woman pushing her weekly wash to the wash house in an old pram. This was often the only means of transportation that folks had available back then. The pram was used to transport all sorts of things including bags of coal in fact anything heavy that the housewife needed to move the pram would be pressed into service.

These laundries were often preferred to doing the washing in your own home especially if you had a large family. Here in the public laundry everything was on hand plus it was also a social outing too where people would chat and help each other with the tasks. It is hard to imagine that this Public Laundry was still being used in 1969.

If you think living this way was hard work then you would be right but just imagine what it must have been like in the early part of the 1940’s when there was a World War going on. During the war to the already hard living conditions you had to add air-raids, being bombed and working around all the shortages that being at war introduced.

This generation of working class women was a very stoic and inventive one they were the unsung home-front heroes who made an abnormal way of life feel as normal as possible in spite of all that was going on around them. I wonder if today’s women could do as well under similar circumstances?


I hope that you have enjoyed this small trip back to the washdays of the forties and fifties. If you have enjoyed reading this hub you might like to read some of the other hubs that I have written about working class life a list of them with links is below.

• Working Class Life in the 1930's The 1930s in England was a time when the Government rode roughshod over the already impoverished working class.

• Working Class life in the 1950’s – Train Sets and Train Spotting Trains featured in our childhood not just as a means of transport for taking us on holiday but also in our playtimes too.
  

• Working Class life in the 1940’s and 1950´s Britain ~ Train Travel ...When I was growing up in the late forties early fifties one of the things that stand out in my memory is the old steam trains, of course they weren’t the old steam trains back then they were just trains. Like most working class people back then we didn’t own a car and the only means of transport my father ever owned was a bicycle, which he would use to cycle to work.

• Working Class Life in the 1940s & 50s When I look back on my childhood the late 1940s and into the 1950s it seems almost like it happened in another world. In a way it did because so many things have changed since then that if I were magically plucked up from that time and brought here to 2009 it would be easy to imagine that I had been transported by aliens to another planet rather than just another time.
• Working Class Life in the 1940’s Working Class life in the 1940’s was a time of great change mostly brought about by the fact that war had been declared on September 3rd 1939. The way most people got this news in September 1939 was via the radio more usually called the wireless.
• A Victorian Woman of Substance ...she was born Annie Shingla in 1895 while Queen Victoria was still on the throne and she married my granddad William Johnson some where before 1919 when my mum was born.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum I was a stay at home mum in the seventies, before the birth of my first child I had suffered three miscarriages. Although I don’t think that was a particular factor in my decision to be a stay at home mum it certainly made me even more aware of how precious the life of my child was.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum part Two ..The seventies, was the time into which my children were born, it was a time when women were being bombarded with all sorts of new ideas that challenged the traditional role of women in the home and workplace.
• Stay at Home Mom or Working Mom? The choice of a Working Class Mum part three ... I think that this final hub has given me the most joy and it is the one that I haven’t had to write. I wrote an email to my daughter telling her about TamCor’s three questions and I asked her if she would answer the final question for me so that I could write this final hub.
• A 1950's Working Class Mum's Answer to Children Biting ..My mum Jeanie was one in a million she was born in 1919 the eldest of ten children, and you could tell right away she was used to being obeyed. In many ways Jeanie was no different from many of the mothers of that time but is some areas she had some novel ideas.

• Working Class Girl in Singapore in the late 1960's ...In March1967 I got married to my husband Malcolm who was a Petty Officer in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy. Just three and a half months later Malcolm got a married accompanied posting to Singapore. I had heard of Singapore but I hadn’t a clue where it was, so Malcolm had to show me where it was on a map.

• Bonfire Night in a Working Class area in the 1950’s ...Each November the fifth in England we remember the foiled plot of Guy Fawkes who plotted to blow up Parliament and the King. Fortunately this plot was discovered and Guy Fawkes was arrested before he could put a match to the gunpowder that he had secreted below the Houses of Parliament.