A Guide’s Tale

Robert Burlinson shares his experience of being a guide with a tale about the unmentionables in the life of a great house.

When I became a guide I imagined that names and dates would trip off my tongue. Artists and their works would be familiar and every piece of furniture would have its own unique story that I would know. To some extent that has been the case but over the years people that I’ve taken around the Mansion have been far more interested in how the families lived, how they got their money and how they lost it. And more importantly for me what were their domestic arrangements. Amongst my colleagues I have a certain reputation for knowing and being interested in lavatory arrangements and corsets.

Until the middle of the twentieth century there was no flush lavatory in the Mansion. Before that there was a shed, a bench with a hole or more likely holes in it and a pit underneath that was emptied periodically. Privacy was probably not an option. In the house there would have been pots for night use in bedrooms and other pots in other rooms, either kept in pieces of furniture called commodes or behind a screen, but not necessarily.

The contents, carried by servants, would have gone either to the shed or more likely directly to the compost heaps that every garden maintained. It was then used to fertilise the garden where fruit and vegetables were grown for the house. The productive garden for the Mansion was towards the Fonnereau Road entrance where there is now a copse of trees. In the town the night soil men would collect human waste and sell it to local farmers. Urine could also be sold to local tanners, situated near Civic Drive (hence Curriers Lane) , as it was used in the curing of skins.

I suspect that to our noses it would have been a bit smelly in the house hence the use of perfume and pomanders, scented balls made of herbs, flower extracts and spices to cover the smell. One would also imagine that people would have been keen to wash themselves. But that seems not to have been the case. Hot water may have been provided occasionally for men to shave with and for every member of the family to wash but only a jug full. I always imagined cosy tin baths in front of bedroom fires but in reality that would have been very labour intensive and servants had more to do than carry hot water upstairs even though it may only have been at Christmas and Easter. It is more likely that baths would have been taken in the wash room where the boiler was and that the hot water was used by more than one person in turn of course finishing with the children. Servants would not be so fortunate and probably had to make do with the pump outside.

Corsets of course are a whole other story.