Friday Night, One Tub: How Victorian Families Kept Clean

This video answers one question. How did an ordinary British family keep clean, in a house with no bathroom, no hot tap, and very often no tap at all? The answer runs through a London doctor's evidence in eighteen forty-two, an Act of Parliament that fixed the price of a warm bath at twopence, a boiler meant for the washing, and a census taken within living memory. That census found that forty-five in every hundred households in England and Wales still had no bath of their own. Chapters: 0:00 Friday Evening, Lambeth 0:31 The Question 1:06 Water You Had to Fetch 3:09 Coal Dust and Wasted Hot Water 5:05 Twopence for a Warm Bath 8:30 Who Went in Which Water 12:06 The Copper and Washday 13:31 The Slipper Baths 14:46 The Census That Counted the Baths 16:29 Your Bath Night Sources: — Maud Pember Reeves, "Round About a Pound a Week" (G. Bell and Sons, London, 1913), chapters II–IV, XII–XIII — Project Gutenberg #58691 — "Report … from the Poor Law Commissioners, on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain" (Edwin Chadwick, Secretary; presented July 1842), pp. 63–65, 253–255 — Hansard, House of Lords, 8 June 1846, "Public Baths and Washhouses" (vol 87 cc104–9) — An Act to encourage the Establishment of public Baths and Wash-houses, 9 & 10 Vict. c. 74 (26 August 1846), ss. I, XXXVI, XXXVII and Schedules A–B — "St. Pancras' Baths and Washhouses", illustrated London weekly, 3 January 1846 — Wellcome Collection V0020092 (CC BY 4.0) — B. Seebohm Rowntree, "Poverty: A Study of Town Life" (1901), chapter VI — General Register Office, "Census 1951, England and Wales: Housing Report" (HMSO, 1956) — Wellcome Collection b32183240 — Picture the Past (Derbyshire libraries), "Old Slipper Baths, South Place, Chesterfield", DCCC003727 — "Public baths/washhouses/slipper baths", 1900s.org.uk — recollection of Peter Johnson (late 1940s) — Money conversions: Office for National Statistics, RPI long-run series (CDKO), to 2025 — going by prices alone Every photograph in this video is a real historical record — Wikimedia Commons, Wellcome Collection, LSE Library and Imperial War Museum collections; public domain unless credited below. Money is converted to today's pounds with the ONS long-run Retail Prices Index (series CDKO), going by prices alone. Image credits: "Baths and wash-houses, Bilston, near Birmingham; above; plan" by Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons "Baths and wash-houses, Bilston, near Birmingham; with a plan" by Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons "Details of St. Pancras baths and washhouses; interior bath," by Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons "Edwin Chadwick" by Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons "Elevation of St. Giles and Bloomsbury public baths and wash-" by Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons What night was bath night in your house, and who got the water first? Tell me below. I read them all.