Monica's memories of Sheffield: Did you use hard, medicated toilet paper?
The outside toilets were cold and inhabited by spiders.
Todays new build houses very often have a bathroom and also an ensuite shower room. Both with a toilet.
Those of us of a certain age remember the Victorian terrace houses of our youth with the toilet housed in a brick built outhouse in the back yard. With no bathroom, the washing facilities were courtesy of the kitchen sink, and bathing took place once a week when the whole family would take turns to get into the tin bath which was otherwise kept on a hook in the outside toilet. Water would be constantly heated on the range to top up the bath water. A friend of mine to whom this was a weekly occurrence said that she had never felt clean until she married and had a house with a bathroom. Being the youngest child in the family her bath water was decidedly nasty when she got into the bath.
Chamber pots or gazunder (goes under the bed) was a feature of life in those days when mothers duties involved in emptying them each morning.
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The outside toilets were cold and inhabited by spiders. People would cut newspapers into squares and thread string through a corner, hanging them on a hook behind the door. The newsprint would rub off making dirty bottoms.
Eventually toilet paper was manufactured, with the most popular at the time being Izal which was made locally in Newton Chambers of Chapeltown.
It was thin, hard, shiny and medicated, rather like tracing paper. It was awful to use but popular for a very long time especially in schools and hospitals, and viewed today with some nostalgia. The added disinfection was a selling point with its adverts in the 1930s saying that ‘it was an invisible guardian against risks to health’
During the 1940s, toilet paper with Hitlers head on it and anti -German propaganda was certainly manufactured at Newton Chambers under the Izal brand.
Eventually the brand eventually owned by Jeyes was discontinued in 2010.
By the 1950s governments started to look unfavourably on terraced houses, replacing the building of them with tower blocks but they have always been a popular purchase in the housing market, being cheap to modernise and turn a bedroom into a bathroom complete with toilet!.