SPINNING STORIES

A walk about laundry and the places peoplechat, tell stories, exchange tips and share news

by Clare Qualmann and Emily Butterworth with The Women’s Library

www.spinningstories.wordpress.com

Spinning Stories is a collaborative project by artist Clare Qualmann, whose practice focuses on walking, and is based in the East End, and Emily Butterworth, a specialist in early modern French literature, whose research examines gossip and other forms of unofficial and unregulated talk.

We have been exploring the places where women have traditionally gathered and talked, and – due to Clare’s interest in the changing face of her local area – have concentrated on the launderette as a disappearing venue for informal swapping of news, views, opinions and tips.

Clare’s association with The Women’s Library has also focused our attention on the ways people commemorate events, even the most banal, with souvenir napkins, handkerchiefs and pamphlets, and by telling and re-telling stories and memories. Artefacts and images, as well as written resources from the Women’s Library collections have inspired the development of the project.

Our historical research has been enlivened and enriched by contributions from a broad range of participants who responded to a call for laundry-related stories, memories and tips via the project blog spinningstories.wordpress.com and at a series of research days hosted by the Boundary Estate Community Launderette.

The walk begins at the Women’s Library, which is on the site of the old Goulston Square washhouse, and ends at the Boundary Estate Community Launderette, one of the few remaining facilities in the area. It includes a number of launderettes and public baths, past and present, and invites participants to think about changing attitudes to women’s talk, to public and private spaces, and to the role of informal chat in everyday life.

Clare Qualmann & Emily Butterworth, September 2009

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The Women’s Library, Old Castle Street, site of Goulston Square baths 1846 - 1989

Those who were against the establishment of public washhouses argued “it would take women from their homes... causing them to congregate in great numbers, the good and bad together, and if it did no worse, would lead to gossiping, tattling and perhaps to squabbling and gin drinking”.1

Rothschild Archway, Wentworth Street

The arch is all that remains of Rothschild Buildings, erected for the Jewish poor in 1887. Tenants were controlled by a plethora of strictly enforced regulations including the prohibition of the use of the shared scullery copper for “carrying on business as a launderess” and hanging clothes outside to dry. 2

This rule (still much in evidence today) echoes laundry-and gossip-related idiom such as airing/washing your dirty linen in public and hung out to dry.

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Bengal Cuisine, 12 Brick Lane,

site of Cash Wash Launderette, 1969 - 1985

From the 1950s onwards the new coin-operated self-service launderettes shed the requirement for privacy that washhouses were designed around, becoming a strange mixture of public/private space, open to all, open all hours.

“The whole launderette was sinister, it was a nocturnal space open to the public, people coming not just to clean their clothes but coming with all their dramas and tensions and sorrows and dilemmas.”3

© Phil Maxwell, 1982

4Bangla City Supermarket, 86 Brick Lane, site of Schewzik’s Russian Vapour Baths.

Public baths have always had something of a reputation for encouraging gossip and chat. It’s perhaps unsurprising, given the old clichés about their talkativeness, that women have always been singled out as particularly prone to this failing. The image of a group of women together in a public bath has long been an attractive one for satirists: submerged in water up to their necks or noses, women can talk at length without anything they say running the risk of being taken seriously.

© Jewish Museum London

St Anne’s Church, Underwood Rd

In June 2009, the Catholic Church issued these guidelines to its ministers for the celebration of Holy Communion in the event of a swine flu outbreak:‘Giving communion from the chalice may need to cease because the risk of droplet spread is increased. Most of us know sharing chalice will not put us at risk of HIV, but it may not be safe for H1N1 which is much more easily spread. Only the celebrant should receive from the chalice in case he is infectious. Concelebrants should each have their own chalice.’4

On 27 August 2009, St Anne’s Church noticeboard informed its parishioners that Holy Communion was suspended due to the swine flu pandemic.

Gossip, too, is described as a pandemic: a virus or bacillus that spreads unseen through an unwitting population, sowing devastation in its wake. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period, both Catholic and Protestant churches were keen to warn their parishioners (particularly the women) of the dangers of indiscriminate talk and chat during the sermon: they would lose their souls to the devil, who would be there, unseen, noting down all their idle words, ready to hold them to account.5

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Cheshire Street Baths & Abbey Street Laundry,

1900 - 1974

“The method of having a long range of drying horses in a row, although the easiest to construct, is obviously objectionable, being a place of gossip, and does away entirely with the comfort and privacy that the other plan gives.” 6

© Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive

While a ‘gossip’ in English was originally a godparent, the German Klatsch has a more diffuse and physical origin. It means at least three things: (1) ‘a resounding slap’, a kind of onomatopoeia; (2) a stain; (3) a pejorative word for prattle, typical of women’s conversation. These three meanings come together in the image of the communal laundry: washerwomen beat at their linen, washing and scrubbing away embarrassing stains, while exchanging news and opinions on their neighbours. The ‘resounding slap’ of their tools (mallets, mangles, scrubbing boards) signal to the rest of the neighbourhood what is going on: not just the washing of dirty linen, but the exchange of (dirty?) secrets.7

“I think each woman would have done a whole week’s washing during her allotted time – I remember the warm, steamy smell and the flushed faces of my Mum and the others as they slogged away (still with scrubbing boards if they were using the sinks). The best bit was when I was trusted to “sweep” away the water from where my Mum was working with a large, heavy broom-type implement with a rubber blade. I felt as if I had joined an exclusive women’s club. Very occasionally, the male caretaker of the flats would come in while the women were doing their washing. I don’t think I ever understood what was said to him but he would always disappear again very quickly, looking sheepish, while the women roared with laughter. It was a women’s space and I remember it very fondly. I really loved it.”8

Princess Dry Cleaners & Launderette,

19 Wellington Row, 1973 - 2008

This site was occupied through the 1950s & 1960s by Harry’s Valet service,

meaning that this area is devoid of a local clothing care business for the first

time in 60 years.

Smarty Pants Dry Cleaners & Launderette, 222 Bethnal Green Road

Gossip sometimes seems like a form of surveillance: a way of policing behaviour by criticising and ostracising deviance. In a story from the Heptaméron, a woman leaves her husband for a canon of the church, much to the scandal of the town. After 15 years of cohabitation a laundress tells a duchess the local ‘news’ of a woman living in sin, helping to correct what the town perceives as the immoral behaviour of the woman in question. 9

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H.M.P London Brain Wash, by Dr. D, 2009

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“when the housewife does the washing herself, small establishments are preferable to large, as the distance from home is less and it is possible to obtain a better spirit among the users, and pilfering is practically eliminated.”10

The Old Laundry,Boundary Estate, Montclare Street

Built under the Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890), the Boundary Estate included an experimental large central laundry, partly due to considerations of hygiene, but also because of the problems involved with piping water to the 5th floor flats. The cost benefit to tenants was calculated at 1/2 d. per week per room.

Doris, who was born on the estate and has lived nearby for all of her life, remembers the laundry in the 1950s when the top floor of the building was a flat occupied by a Mr. Adams, the manager, baths were on the first floor, and the laundry on the ground floor. Her mother, Kate Bright, took on the job of launderess in the mid ‘50s from a Mrs Watson (or Wilson) who lived around the corner in Marlow buildings.

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“Baths and washhouses have been provided. No washing is allowed to be done in the tenements and it is difficult to understand how any housewife could desire to do so in view of the facilities provided at the splendidly equipped central laundry in the middle of the estate. There the occupation hated most by many women, and most dreaded in many homes, is exalted into a luxury and a fine art. The laundry is a spacious, lofty, well ventilated building.....Thus the whole process of washing and finishing clothes can be done in a pure and warm atmosphere, with the minimum of labour.” 11

“In terms of using this launderette, as well as doing my laundry here, it’s always been a place of information. So when we were campaigning to save the estate from being privatised there would always be posters in the windows and when we had a protest the protestors from the estate were photographed outside the launderette, which was in the local paper.”12

“I used to live near Spitalfields and I used to come a long way to get my laundry done here, it’s a real community. Also for me the link with Eastenders was there, I’m from the Netherlands originally and I always watched Eastenders. The laundry was like a community focal point in it and I thought it was really nice to have that here for real, and it is all real East End drama. I just feel warmly welcomed because I know all the staff and it’s just really nice to now live right next door.”13

The Boundary Estate Community Launderette, Calvert Avenue

Founded by local tenants and residents on a not-for-profit basis, the launderette was one of the only occupied units when it opened in 1992, on what is now a very busy and fashionable thoroughfare. Despite the threat of rent increases the directors are determined to continue to provide this vital community resource.

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“at the moment what I’m doing is taking my laundry to my friend’s house nearby because it’s free to use his machine. The downside with that is that the cycle takes an hour and a half, an hour and 45 minutes. But we talk and have a cup of tea. Yesterday as my washing was on we spent about half an hour talking about planning issues because we’re both very involved in objecting to planning applications that we think are damaging to the estate. That’s something we really care about. And the other hour talking about online dating and whether we could face doing a profile of ourselves or whether speed dating was a better alternative as we’re both single.”15

“I think you can quite happily go to a launderette, whilst your washing’s being done and kind of waste time. Read a book and be happy to let yourself do that.It’s just down time. A little bit of permitted free time. Somehow you escape, I guess because you don’t want to go all the way back home and then come back so you just take a book and sit it out.”14

Notes and References:

1. Arthur Ashpitel, Observations on Baths and Washhouses with an Account of their History, 1851, p.4

2. Cited by Jerry White in Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East-End Tenement Block, 1887-1920, Law Book Co of Australasia, 1980

3. Transcribed from a research interview at The Boundary Estate Community Launderette, August 2009

4. Jim McManus and Rev. Nick Donnelly, Sustaining Pastoral Presence: Swine Flu Outbreaks, issued by the Catholic Diocese of Lancaster, June 2009

5. Susan Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England, 2007

6. Arthur Ashpitel, Observations on baths and washhouses with an account of their history, 1851, p.18

7. Jörg R. Bergman. Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organization of Gossip, 1993, pp. 59-67

8. Rita Pullen, Blog entry ‘Laundry Memories’, July 2009

9. Marguerite de Navarre, Heptaméron, story 61

10. Janet C. Wilson, An Inquiry into Commercial Laundry Facilities, 1949, National Building Study

11. Sunday at Home Magazine, Jan 1898, p. 167

12., 13., 14., 15. Transcribed from research interviews at The Boundary Estate Community Launderette, July 2009

More images, stories, references and research can be accessed on our blog at www.spinningstories.wordpress.com

Thanks to the staff and directors of The Boundary Estate Community Launderette, all of the participants and contributors, both online and in person, the staff at The Women’s Library and at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive.

Published by Site Projects, September 2009all content © Clare Qualmann and Emily Butterworth, and contributors

ISBN 978-0-9554379-5-3

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© C r o w n C o p y r i g h t 2 0 0 9 . A n O r d n a n c e S u r v e y D i g i m a p s u p p l i e d s e r v i c e

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The Women’s Library, Old Castle Street, site of Goulston Square Baths 1846 - 1989

Rothschild Archway, Wentworth Street

Bengal Cuisine, 12 Brick Lane, site of Cash Wash Launderette, 1969 - 1985

Banglatown Cash & Carry, 86 Brick Lane, site of Schewzik’s Vapour Baths, 1898 - 1939

St Anne’s Church, Underwood Road

The Bath House, site of Cheshire Street Washhouse &

Abbey Street Laundry, 1900 - 1974

Smarty Pants Dry Cleaners & Launderette,

222 Bethnal Green Road

Princess Launderette, 19 Wellington Row, 1973 - 2008

The Old Laundry, The Boundary Estate, Montclare Street

The Boundary Estate Community Launderette, Calvert Avenue