Washing Clothes

Joyce Cann interviewed by Romano Cavaroli

Photograph of Joyce Cann

What do you remember about wash day in your mother's time?

It started before I got up in the morning and lasted all day. I lived in a brick bungalow with three small rooms and a tiny kitchen - a scullery, an outside toilet in the back garden and a well in the front garden. In a corner of the kitchen was a coal fired concrete boiler with a galvanised boiler inside, the size of a water butt, filled by hand from the well in the front garden. The bungalow was in the Laindon Plotlands, but we lived on a made-up road.

In the early 1930s water was fetched from the well on Sunday night - the day before wash day when the fire was prepared with wood and coal an lit early on Monday morning - the water took hours to heat up. The hot water was then transferred into the Butler's sink, and the washing was done by rubbing it against a wooden rubbing board, (later a galvanised one) and washing soap. This was very rough on my Mother's knuckles and hands, which I remember were red and sore.

Interviews Soundbites