Who Needs Washing Machines?

[Buenchico]

[bookbinder]

Granted, my wife and I like to stick the old, tried ways of doing things (we're traditionalists, I suppose), but we are thankful that we never had to frequent a place such as is shown on the video. I think that we would rather hang our laundry on a hedge than patronise the old laundry.

[Tilly2]

That was really interesting. Thank you.

Do you know the outcome?

[Buenchico]

I agree, BB.

I'm just a little bit more up to date than that, in that my laundry ends up here about once per month
https://postimg.cc/9RxYcYGh
where I pay to have someone else do it all for me 🙂

[Tilly2]

Do you incude you underwear in the service wash?

[Buenchico]

Tilly @ 1733: The council got their way, of course.

Tilly @ 1741: Everything goes in together!

[Tilly2]

Eergh!

[Buenchico]

^^^ I'm sure that the ladies in the launderette get far worse stuff than my undies to wash, Tilly!

They probably also like the tips I leave them too 😉

[Barsel]

Chris, how are the charges worked out for service washes and do they wash, dry and iron everything?

I've taken duvets for a service wash in the past, but that's all.

[Buenchico]

Barsel:
Although I do get an itemised receipt with my service wash, I rarely study it.  So I can't remember exactly how it works out.  (I've a feeling that the service charge bit might be £6 but I'm far from sure).

I usually take in three jumbo laundry bags, with each filled right to the top:
https://www.poundstretcher.co.uk/jumbo-zipped-laundry-bag

I just throw everything in together and ask the launderette ladies to do the same when they put my stuff into the machines.  (I could separate whites from coloured, etc, but I simply don't bother.  I'm the only person to see my white vests, so I'm just not bothered if they grey a bit over time). 

The total cost, for a month's washing (including soap, washing, tumble drying and the service charge) is usually somewhere between £20 and £25.  

[Thisoldbird]

This has reminded me of being taken to a communal laundry in Glasgow around 1945..as a family we had traveled overnight from Essex to Glasgow to visit my paternal Grandmother, after the war ended. 

During our stay Granny took me with her when she did the washing. Her tenement apartment had a single tap in the living room with washing up bowl. No sink!!. 

 

 

[Barsel]

We had what was known as washhouses where I lived, but my Mum preferred to do our washing down the cellar using a boiler and a tin bath. Must have been absolutely backbreaking. Dad eventually bought her a washing machine.

[andres]

Back then women just got on with the housework. I never heard any of my friends moaning about housework. In fact most women took a pride in looking after their houses and  families. 

[Buenchico]

>>> "Her tenement apartment had a single tap in the living room with washing up bowl. No sink!!. " <<<

That (by a rather indirect chain of thought, admittedly) reminds me of a B&B I stayed at in Stratford, London.  The advertised 'tea making facilities' were comprised of a kettle and a solitary tea bag.  I had to visit a nearby Morrisons to buy a mug, milk and sugar!

 

My mother always did the washing by hand, Barsel. Water would be boiled in the 'copper', emptied out into a bucket and then poured into the sink.  Bath night was much the same, except that lots of buckets of hot water had to be carried between the copper in the kitchen and the bathroom.  

 

>>> "In fact most women took a pride in looking after their houses and  families."

My mother certainly did, Andrés.  However, unfortunately for her, she'd been 'in service' for a Harley Street surgeon and she  then decided that everything in our house had to be done "as it was done in the Big House". That meant that she ended up doing vastly more work than was actually necessary, such as ironing every sock, every pair of underpants, every duster and so on.

[Barsel]

You were lucky to have a bathroom, Chris. Bathtime, when I was young, was in the tin bath brought up from the cellar and put in front of the coal fire in the living room. When I was older, I had to go down to the cellar for a bath!

Outside loo, no hot water until Dad eventually bought a little Ascot for the kitchen. Lived like that from birth to getting married when I was nearly 22 years old and hubby and I got a flat with a bathroom. Bliss.

[Buenchico]

Thanks, Barsel.

You've reminded me of . . .

[Atheist]

The four Yorkshiremen comes from Dickens. (Hard Times?)

[lankeela]

Our bath was in the kitchen with a drop down table top to cover it.  We had a gas heated copper and had to use buckets to fill it, then we graduated to an electric Baby Burco which sat on a plank across the bath.  Loo just outside the back door but no outside door on the porch.  Didn't have a bathroom until I was about 21 and we moved into a house across the road, as our third bedroom was turned into a bathroom.

[barry1010]

I used to be taken to the public swimming pool to use the baths, soap and towel provided. We didn't have a bathroom, just the kitchen sink.

We had a copper, tin and dolly and a mangle.  It was the mangle that killed the buttons.

There was a communal laundry near my gran's house which I hated. Cockroach city 

[lankeela]

Meant to say mum did the washing in the copper too, and then we had a wringer in the garden and a pulley airing rack above the kitchen.  I remember as a kid telling my mum when I got a job I would buy her a washing machine.  

[andres]

Stone slab sink but I did have a gas geyser. No washing machine . Everything washed in a dolly tub with a posser and rubbing board. A lightweight mangle on legs and hanging the clothes out on a line stretching across the street.  Must say that I did iron a lot more then than I do now. Mondays washing, Tuesdays ironing and airing . No bathroom or indoor toilet until the late 60s