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
