Keep it clean

If there's a cleaning job to be done about the house, there's a specialist product for the job. And that goes for personal hygiene too. Whether you want a deodorant that doesn't leave a white residue on your clothes, a whitening toothpaste for sensitive teeth, a carpet cleaner that smells like everything's coming up roses or a self-cleaning spray for the all-glass shower, you're guaranteed to find just what you're looking for at the local supermarket.

Today, we are so spoiled for choice when it comes to keeping ourselves and our homes spick and span it's near impossible to imagine a time when all there was was Fairy soap.

Or sand. Yes, before there was soap and water, there was sand.

"Sand was used to clean your dishes," explains Sherri Steel, curator of social history at York Castle Museum. "In fact, any sort of rough material such as oatmeal, bran or crushed oyster shells could be used. The scouring action gets things pretty clean."

For the past year, Sherri and her colleagues have been putting together a new exhibition for the museum, titled Spotless, looking at how people kept themselves and their homes clean over the past 200 years.

Spotless opens on March 23 and replaces the popular Chocolate exhibition which ran for more than three years.

If you ever wondered what life was like before running water and inside loos, or without washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and what ingenious methods folk concocted to keep bodily odours at bay, this exhibition has the answers.

Sherri says water was a scarce resource in York with many families having to draw their own supplies.

She said: "In the 1850s in York, there was one standpipe between numerous families. In Walmgate, 170 people shared one standpipe."

Queuing for water was a daily chore - undertaken by women and children - and was a cementing part of community life.

"Standing and waiting for your water was an important social event - lots of gossip was exchanged," said Sherri.

It was just as well that the neighbours were so friendly as some of the outside loos - or privies - had two and four holes in them, allowing several people to go to the loo at the same time.

As to what they used for loo roll, well you'll have to use your imagination, says Josie Sheppard, curator of costumes and textiles at the museum, who also looks after its cosmetic collection.

"We just don't know what they used. It's one of those things that nobody spoke about or wrote about, so it's impossible to know. We have the same problem with sanitary protection. Because no one wrote about this, we have no history."

For general bathing, people used the public baths but shied away from the communal washing areas, which had a stigma attached to them.

"Many people washed in the sink or tin bath and if the were more well off had a hip bath," said Sherri. "Sponge baths were used too where people stood on a tray and squeezed a sponge full of water over themselves like a shower."

Not surprisingly, water has its own section in the exhibition. To hit home just how tough things were in the days before modern plumbing, visitors will be able to lift two gallon buckets of water, which is what people carried from the standpipe to their homes. Today, we use more like 72 gallons of water a day.

"How much water you had in your house was dictated by your proximity to the water supply.".

Weird and wonderful gadgets also abound in the exhibition, all of which were used in years past to keep up standards of cleanliness.

"Cleanliness was next to godliness," says Sherri. "Part of keeping your house clean stemmed from an incredible moral responsibility that your house reflected you."

Devices for cleaning clothes, carpets and furniture will all be on display.

The history of everyday household items such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines is a colourful one. Washing machines date from the 18th century. The first ones featured a drum powered by a handle, but because they could only handle large items people thought they'd never become popular.

The prospects seemed equally poor for the early vacuum cleaner which worked by blowing dust and dirt around rather than sucking it up into a bag for disposal.

Hubert Cecil Booth invented the first suction model, which was patented in 1901, but it wasn't exactly user-friendly. "It was mounted on a horse-drawn cart and parked outside a home where pipes were fed in through the window," explains Sherri.

The development of personal toiletries is equally enlightening. Two hundred years ago, people used charcoal to clean their teeth.

Josie explains: "It would be ground into a powder and mixed with flavourings such as peppermint, eucalyptus, rose and clove oil. Chalk or oyster shells, which were ground up, could be used too."

In place of deodorant, which didn't arrive until the late 19th century, people used fragrance or a toilet vinegar, which was scented vinegar.

"Body odour must have been a fact of life," says Josie. "People must have smelt as not everyone had access to water to wash in or the anti-perspirants we have now."

Even the humble shampoo didn't arrive until the 1920s. Until then, women used soap or relied on recipes from magazines which involved adding scented or herbal infusions to grated soap.

Sherri hopes the exhibition will make us reflect on just how much our lives have changed.

"If anything we are over hygienic today," she says.

"We have all these anti-bacterial products and different cleaners for everything. Some experts say this may be a bad thing because it stops us building up a natural resistance in the way we did in the past - that there is a danger of being too clean."

She says the latest survey on social trends reveals women still do most of the housework and that much of their free time is spent cleaning and tidying.

She said: "It would be nice if people asked the basic question what are they doing it all for. Is it really to clean things or to impress people?"

Updated: 09:26 Tuesday, March 12, 2002