Victoria Baths, Manchester. Opened 1906 with Turkish Baths, swimming (men and women separated)
Before the industrial revolution, household laundry was undertaken once a month or less. Everything changed with railways, conurbation expansion and increased number of chimneys belching out smoke. Cities and towns were smothered by a pall of black smog. Indoors, homes were smoky from fires, cigarettes, pipes, candles and gas lamps. Increasing the housewife’s burden, everything now required washing more frequently but, for anyone with money, there was always someone who, for a few pence, did the laundry.
Neither the occupation of char or washerwoman/laundress was a pursuit of choice but a last resort for widows and/or unskilled women on the brink of penury and many charwomen, laundresses and washerwomen ended her days in the workhouse and pauper’s grave.
Also known as a mop, the charwoman (char/chore/cherre; old English for ‘turn of work’) worked in other people’s houses on unskilled jobs; scrubbing floors, helping with the weekly wash, cleaning boots and silver (chars had a dishonest reputation so count your spoons afterwards!) and generally doing jobs servants were too busy to fulfil. For a household without servants, a char helped with menial jobs on an ad hoc basis perhaps working for different establishments on different days of the week and month. It was low-status graft. According to an 1850 edition of satirical magazine Punch, she was paid 1s 6d plus beer, tea and sugar at the end of the day. Wearing ‘pattens, dirty mob-cap, battered black bonnet, – soiled ribbons that, sun or rain, are never tied – tucked-up gown, and bare arms … of an unpleasant redness all the way up to the sleeve,’ she was the ‘lowest trade of domestic’. Red arms were the result of constant scrubbing with abrasive and noxious washing chemicals and, from the hard life of washerwomen and chars, it’s their arms and raw hands that haunt me most. No moisturiser then.
A char was a daily who didn’t live in, so her slightly higher pay compensated for board, lodging and clothing but, as her income was irregular and chars were generally older widows, she struggled to survive.
baths, and washhouse at the back.