Dishing the dirt

HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS TAKES A LOOK AT ATTITUDES TO HYGIENE DOWN THE DECADES

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Street School in Wolstanton in the 1960s.

BACK in the 1960s, my maternal grandmother always used to say to me, “You've got to eat a bit of dirt before you die.” I confess that at that time, I much preferred to be eating Smarties or Milky Ways or Rolos but Grandma had been born in 1896 and had her own views about dirt, disease and illness.

Let's face it, there was a lot of it about in those days. Elizabeth Fanshawe, who wrote Penkhull Memories (1983) was born a sickly child in 1912 and caught most of the usual childhood maladies, such as mea-

sles, chicken pox, whooping cough and even double pneumonia from which she was not expected to recover. The ailing Elizabeth was examined by the local doctor who recommended that her temperature might be reduced by the preparation of a bowl of hot water with some mustard added to it. It worked!

It always intrigued me how folks of my grandmother's generation seemed to be obsessed with what they called 'shifting wind.' Grandma's kitchen cupboard was rarely

out of things like bicarbonate of soda or Alka-Seltzer - which I quite liked to drink if she had no Tizer in the house while at bedtime she would sip peppermint water.

She came from a generation that carefully avoided dirt and disease while simultaneously spreading them around through sometimesquestionable personal hygiene.

We might speak of Chesterton for a decent example of this. It could boast of the Alexandra Picture House, known as Maggie's after its owner Maggie Shemilt. My father

recalled that she always demanded that kids had clean hands before they were allowed into the cinema, and if they hadn't, she told them to go home and scrub them. Dad remembered, however, that some children would wash their hands in nearby puddles of rainwater before returning.