Kids nowadays miss so much. One delight they will never experience (unless it is a fashion statement) is having their heads shaved for reasons of hygiene. (I never quite understood what it prevented!) My dad had been reared with horses in Australia and every year when they sheared the colts his father used to shave his head and it never did him any harm so I got done as well. I remember clearly that my mother didn't like it!
I was reared in a modern semi with an inside lavatory so, in the 1930s I was a lucky lad. All this changed when I went farming in 1953 in Warwickshire and the lavatory there was a board with a hole in it perched over the overspill from the pig midden so you got the benefit of faeces from more than one species. There was no flush and disposal came when the midden was emptied to spread on the land.
When I came out of the army in 1956 and found that I was a grocer, open all hours at Sough, I found that once more I had reverted to an outside lavatory, we had a tippler in an outhouse in the back yard. This arrangement fascinated me. They were called a tippler because there was a cunning earthenware hopper under a manhole in the back yard which collected the waste water from the kitchen. When it reached a certain level, because of the design, the hopper overbalanced on its hinges and sent the water into the base of the tippler with a satisfying whoosh!
They were trouble free as long as you kept the hopper clean and free moving and when they were first introduced in the late 19th century in Barlick they were a tremendous improvement on the old night soil collection from the dry bucket toilets. However, they had one very big drawback! It was an adventure to have to use the tippler in the middle of the night with shot ice on the backyard flags! I tell you, the kids don't know what they are missing! By the way, we were posh, we had a proper toilet roll in there but lots of people carried on for years with the squares of newspaper in a nail. They tell me that in Minnesota where they have far colder winters than us, the lavatory seat was kept in the warm in the kitchen and you took it out with you to the outhouse.
All this must sound incredibly primitive to today's youngsters but we accepted it as part of life. It reminded us that there were such things as sewers and how important they were to our lives. Do the young ever think of this when they flush and all the nastiness magically vanishes? We may have been deprived in their terms but we knew what had to be done to make our lives comfortable and appreciated it.
Sewage disposal the old fashioned way.
