The servant’s privy…

I tidied out my garden shed yesterday. Well, when I say shed it was once the servants outside privy. It still has the remains of the lead pipe on the back wall, chopped off at the ground, the one that fed the water to the high level cistern. My next door neighbour still has his in tact, pipes and all, and a metal cistern enclosed in a wooden box with ‘Invictas’ printed on the side in script face. It even has the dangling, rusty iron chain that you pulled to make the toilet flush.

The house has always had inside plumbing, but the bathroom wasn’t for the servants. There are little telltale signs of the difference between servants quarters and family quarters all over the house. The top floor where the servants slept has a pine banister whilst the other two floors are mahogany, the roof rooms have cast iron fireplaces, whilst all the others have oak, mahogany and marble, the rooms where the servants worked and lived have no mouldings or ceiling roses, whilst the main rooms are quite ornate. All small indications of a lesser status I suppose.

When we first moved into the house there was even more of the past in evidence, a huge limestone cold slab in the cellar for keeping meat fresh and a massive iron copper for boiling the water for the washing. The copper was built into a square brick oven with a space for coal or wood and a cast iron door with a heavy metal latch. The fire would boil the water in the copper and there was a second fire-brick oven to the side for baking bread. In the scullery the walls were made from white glazed bricks and there was a huge enamelled sink in one corner by the back door. There were even a few redundant gas sconces remaining on the landings and a couple of brass pull knobs for the servants bells by the fireplaces in the living and dining room.

Our neighbours still have the original servant’s bells, all numbered in fading blue-inked handwritten script, high on the wall of the kitchen, and one house further down the road is rumoured to still have the original range, plate-warmer and all.

Now the thing is these aren’t very grand houses. They are just a row of very early Edwardian town houses, terraced glazed red brick, grey slate roofs, three floors and cellars. But back in the early 1900’s most of the house owners had a couple of servants living in, a cook and a maid usually, sometimes two maids making three in all.

It’s odd to think of those teenage maids creeping out into the cold on a winter’s evening to use the privy in my back yard. I wonder if a ghost or two still does.

Well, if they do, at least it’s tidy for them now.