Whittling Away History On Toilet Training (3 February 1978)

Our forefathers and foremothers (Oh, that Sex Discrimination Act!) led much more down-to-earth lives than we do, whatever their status.  Indeed, they had little option, for their housing and hygiene, though poor by modern standards, were the best that could be had for the money at the time.

They could not be squeamish and consequently they took for granted some ways and means of doing things that would make modern generations turn up their noses in distaste, if not in downright disgust.

However, if they could return for a scolding, they would be able to retort that we still talk of such items as farmyard manure without turning a nostril, so why regard mention of some other such matters as unsavoury?

Historians, at any rate, have to stick to the naked truth, come what may.  So I ask that what I am about to relate should be accepted in that light.

It begins with our own local historian, Sir Frank Markham, who, in a section on the tanning industry in the second volume of his History of Milton Keynes and District, wrote:

“The firm of Sharp & Woollard, still in Church Street, remains with its long ancestry, the oldest established industry in the town (Stony Stratford).  It still has some its early 19^th century account books and in at least one of these are ancient recipes for leather dressing which are most interesting and peculiar to modern ideas.  There was at that time no easy supply of ammonia, and the deficiency was made up by having tubs for the use of the men in convenient places, and utilising the product for the ammonia it contained.  In the recipes this ingredient is described as ‘stale.’

“From all accounts it certainly was.”

When I first read that item in proof form, a bell rang in my head, as they say.  It had something to do with cricket.  Then I remembered how in my youth the stumpers (wicket-keepers) of local cricket teams who found their leather gloves had become too hard did no more than go behind the tent and treat the gloves to a personal supply of this “stale.”  They said there was nothing like it for softening the leather and keeping it so.

I take a Yorkshire monthly magazine and some months after the publication of Sir Frank’s book, I noticed a reader’s letter which again rang a bell.  The reader, whose address was given simply as “Hull,” had recently visited a former country park near Wakefield, which is many miles from Hull.  In the park his attention had been attracted by a brick structure set well apart from the mansion.

According to his description, the structure was shaped rather like a fore-shortened nissen hut.  It was fully open at one end and inside it, set across the middle, was a stone trough.

He said the structure was described as “the Whittling Well,” but neither the curator nor anyone else could tell him what those words meant nor what the structure had been used for.  Could any reader help?

The bell rang in my head because I recalled that in my old home village, which was only eight or nine miles from the park, “whittling” had been one of the words used for the act of urinating.

So I wrote to the Hull reader, care of the magazine’s editor, pointing this out and offering a suggested solution to his problem for consideration in the event of his finding out nothing more specific.

I told him of the former use of human urine for leather dressing.  I also pointed out that in a mansion of that size there were bound to be many chamber pots in constant use and more when the house parties stayed the night and the trough or well he had described could have been where their liquid contents were deposited.

The place would also be convenient for the estate’s working men.

In due course the liquid might have been collected by a local tannery, but at least some of it would be retained for use on the estate, where there would be quite a large amount of leather needing freshening up from time to time – notably harness, but also footwear, belts, leggings , jerkins, coach upholstery, etc, and even household furniture brought out of doors for cleaning and an airing.

After about three weeks I received a reply from the Hull man.  He thanked me for my letter and said he thought I must be on the right track, if only because he had not had a word from anyone else!  Moreover, after receiving my letter an old man, who had been a servant at a big house in his youth, had told him women called regularly at the back door and were happy to be given the liquid contents of the chamber pots.

He said he would let me know if he discovered any other explanation, but two years have now gone by without my hearing anything more from him about this interesting little bit of historical research.

By the way, you may have noticed that somewhere above I have referred to cricket “tents.”  Actually, these were no longer tents, as they had been at one time.  Some of them were substantial wooden buildings, with spectator terraces, three rooms downstairs and a scorers’ box on top.  They were getting on for 60 years old, but were still called tents.  Two or three of them have long since been replaced by structures of brick or concrete.  These are called “pavilions,” but in the old days a pavilion was only a glorified tent – the sort of thing that kings and princes took with them on the Crusades.  Even a mansion was just a separate apartment in a building.

Hence the biblical:  “In my father’s house are many mansions.”