Monday's Washing Day

The sun is shining and it's a Monday morning. I have a full load of washing in my automatic washing machine and I am looking forward to drying it outside on the line. The Old House Museum in Bakewell offers a very different laundry experience to visiting school groups. Mangles and maidens, dolly tubs and possers. Water had to be heated in a copper boiler by the fire. Washboards, later made good use of in skiffle groups, were used to work the dirt and soap out of clothes.

Monday was traditionally washing day, when the kitchen was turned over to soap and steam. When I was a student I lived in an area of West Yorkshire where this traditional pattern was still enforced. Washing lines were hung across the road of terraced houses on a Monday, and woe betide anyone who drove a vehicle through them! Later I lived in an Edwardian house in Manchester, with a purpose built outbuilding for use as a laundry. There was a fireplace, a copper, runnels in the stone floor and pulleys for a clothes rack above the fireplace. We didn't use it as a laundry, but it was a link with the wash houses of the past. I invested in a traditional wooden clothes rack with pulleys and still use it in the house where I live now, though it's no longer above the fireplace in the kitchen. I also still have a couple of wooden maidens or clothes horses, bought in West Yorkshire all those years ago. I still use them to put in front of the open fire for washing to dry overnight. Cleanliness is next to godliness they used to say. Twin tubs, automatic mangles, laundries and laundrettes, automatic washing machines, electric dryers, washer/dryers. The technology has come on in leaps and bounds. Talking of leaps and bounds, my twin tub used to vibrate its way across the kitchen, and the hoses had a habit of leaping off the sink or tap as a result! Some of you must remember having to hold them down while the spin dryer was running. And did anyone have a Flatley electric dryer? It was a great invention and we had one in our wash house as we were growing up. Generations of children are unfamiliar with the dangers of the mangle. I know people who learnt the hard way.

It's still a challenge to get the washing dry when we have a wet spell of weather. Dryers are expensive and there's nothing like seeing washing drying on a line. Outdoor rotary dryers come with covers nowadays. There's a whole industry based on making washing smell as if it has been line dried! We have made the journey from wash house to utility room, but it is still takes planning to keep on top of the washing. I haven't even mentioned the ironing! When you visit the Old House Museum and see the dolly tub and the mangle, spare a thought for those generations of women whose lives were dominated by Monday as washing day.