Life Below Stairs by Sian Evans

Author:Sian Evans [Evans, Siân]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: urn:ean:9781907892585
Publisher: Anova Books
Published: 2011-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Domestic Sanitary Regulations, a cartoon (c.1851), printed in Punch.

But country houses were slow to adopt the new-fangled methods of bathing. Partly this was for practical reasons: inserting a decent plumbing system in a rambling and idiosyncratic old building was often a daunting engineering prospect. There was also antipathy for the modern, self-operated, functional, designated bathroom – it was seen as nouveau riche. Even at Lanhydrock, largely rebuilt in the 1880s, only two bathrooms were installed, one for the family and one for the children. The 1886 inventory suggests the continued use of hipbaths. Indeed, few large houses had more than one or two bathrooms until the end of the nineteenth century.

At Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk in 1861, Agnes Willoughby, who was marrying the eccentric heir ‘Mad’ Windham for his money, insisted as a condition of her marriage that an enamel bath with hot and cold running water was installed for her. Her fiancé refused; the marriage went ahead, but was short-lived. Agnes bolted with an Italian singer, presumably for warmer climes and lavish supplies of constant hot water. ‘Mad’ Windham ‘remained faithful to the hipbath all his days’, and a plumbed-in bathroom was only introduced in the 1920s, six decades too late for Agnes.

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