Cottages

Some things seem to have always been there, so familiar that you take them for granted. It comes as quite a surprise to find that in reality they have all but disappeared. The two rooms up, two rooms down English cottage is for me one of those things. So much a part of the landscape, both urban and rural, all over the place, its plan as familiar and standardised as the Edwardian terrace houses and 1920s three-bedroom, semi-detached house that took its place. In reality, thanks to zealous improvers of public health and overactive town planners, the four roomed cottage began to disappear rapidly in the mid-twentieth century, and now the process is almost complete. Sadly it has mostly been beneath the notice of architectural historians, so is woefully under-recorded. Books could, and should, be written about these cottages, but I doubt if they will be. So it might be as well to jot down a word or two about them.
  I have no idea who was responsible for the design of this style of working class dwelling. It was constructed from about 1830 to maybe the early 1870s, though most of them seem to date from around 1840 and for all I know, like Topsy, they just growed. With solid nine-inch external walls of brick on minimal foundations, skimpy structural timbers only just up to their job, simple layout and small footprint, it was cheap to build and therefore cheap to rent or buy. They came either as detached buildings or in rows of anything from a couple of houses to whole street lengths. Let’s take a typical cottage, in the 1940s, still sited beyond the reach of public utilities and looking very much as it had for a hundred years.
  If what follows sounds authoritatively definite do not be deceived, there were plenty of variations on the theme. So just pop in the words ‘mostly’, ‘often’ or even ‘sometimes’ to suit your own recollections... if you are fortunate enough to have any.
  There were two external doors, one leading directly into the kitchen, which was the back room, and one that opened into the front room. The back room downstairs was always referred to as the kitchen and the front room was simply called ‘the front room’ unless the occupants were pretentious, in which case it might be called the parlour. Families lived in the kitchen, the front room was strictly for high days, holidays and funerals.
  The focus of the kitchen was the coal fired range. This was a simple affair made of cast-iron set into brickwork and recessed into the thickness of the chimney breast. The fire bed was wedge shaped, sloping down towards the front where the fire was kept in place by fire bars so that the glowing embers (‘gledes’) had a maximum exposure to the room. The opening to the flue was set back so that the top of the fire was available for cooking. To one side of the flue opening there was a hinged bracket of wrought iron (the crane) which could swing out over the top of the fire. From this cooking pots, frying pans and the kettle could be suspended in their turn by a combination of pot hooks (gaels). A set of these ‘S’ shaped hooks in various lengths hung on the crane when not in use. Kitchen gaels were made of plain iron rod and coloured black, like the rest of the range. The black colour of course did not appear all by itself, it had to be rubbed on by hand and frequently renewed with blacklead (graphite).
  Built into the range to one side of the fire, usually the right-hand side, was a small oven. This was heated simply because it was alongside the fire; these original ranges didn’t have complex circulating flues and damper plates, so baking was often a haphazard affair which was not generally resorted to. The oven was more likely to be used for slow cooking stews or keeping food warm. A little above the level of the top of the fire and on either side were the hobs where a stew jar could be kept warm and the ubiquitous kettle lived when it was not hanging above the fire. Usually the teapot lived there as well, keeping warm, with hot water and a few extra tea leaves added from time to time as required. Making an entirely fresh pot of tea was in many households only done each morning or if visitors came to call. The result was that by the time evening came the tea tasted curiously strong and somewhat stewed, which was, when made with sterilised milk, definitely an acquired taste.
  Lighting the fire was the first job every morning all the year round. Without it there was no hot water for washing oneself or, much more importantly, for tea. Life without washing was supportable, but without a cup of tea it would be unthinkable.
  In front of the fire, its top level with the lowest fire bar, stood a tall trivet on which the dripping pan rested when meat was roasting. A joint would be suspended by a hook, or hooks, from a brass clockwork bottle jack (in turn hanging from a small brass bracket fixed below the mantle shelf, which allowed for adjustment fore and aft to bring the meat closer to or further away from the fire). A bonnet oven could be rested on the trivet for cooking bacon or chops, or any thin piece of meat needing swift cooking.
  To one side of the range there would be floor to ceiling fitted cupboards. Because the warmth of chimney breast kept them comparatively dry these housed dry goods - flour, sugar, tea and such.
The kitchen floor, like that of the front room, was made of large, ceramic quarry-tiles, laid directly on the earth beneath, which were generally wax polished to a high gloss and dotted with rag rugs. A scrub-topped table fitted with a small drawer for knives, forks (prongs), and spoons, took up a great part of the floor space. Plain wooden chairs, a high-backed wooden settle, maybe a rocking chair or a rustic splat-backed wooden arm chair, and a five-drawer chest of drawers (as often as not mahogany veneered), filled almost all the available space, which wasn’t much to start with. Coal and fresh water lived in buckets under the table.
  This room was the centre and hub of family life. Mother, father, six or seven children and maybe a widowed granny somehow fitted into it to eat, play, squabble and laugh, generation after generation.
  The front room also had a range, but this was embellished with brass gaels, and was never, ever used for cooking. It was strictly for heating the room or for show. Between the range and the wall dividing the front room from the kitchen there were two doors fitted with thumb latches. The furthest door closed off the space beneath the stairs which was used for storage. The door nearest the range opened outwards to reveal the staircase which wound upwards clockwise so that climbing the steep steps one turned through 180 degrees to reach the front bedroom. The stairs were open at the top with a rail to stop the unwary falling. The front bedroom often had a small fireplace, but the back bedroom, which was divided by a vertical extension of the wall dividing the kitchen from the front room, did not. The only door upstairs was between the two bedrooms.
  The front room mantle shelf was invariably fronted with a pelmet, usually of stiffened velvet, with a bobble fringing running along its bottom edge. But that kind of decorative finish was never used on the kitchen mantle shelf for the obvious reason that vaporised cooking fats from the frying pan, jack roasted meats and the bonnet oven would have condensed out onto and into the fabric in no time at all.
  Original window frames and external doors, being subject to wind and weather, as well as fashion, seldom lasted more than the first fifty years, if that. Even so, some survived to show that typically windows were small-paned with minimal opening lights, and external doors, often decoratively panelled but sometimes of board and ledge construction, were fitted with thumb latches, rim locks and blacksmith-made tee hinges.
  The two internal doors were more likely to survive for the life of the cottage. They were generally made of vertical boards, close butted and held together with three unbraced ledges. The centre ledge often carried a rim latch, while the top and bottom ledges were fitted with tee hinges, frequently with distinctive ‘penny’ finials.
  In some cottages built before the 1870s the internal doorframes were a little wider than today’s 30 inches, allowing the ladies of the house to pass through easily when encumbered with the crinolines they wore for high days and holidays.
  Outside the cottage there were outshuts and detached outbuildings of various kinds. One detached building was bound to be the ash closet, privy, necessary or whatever the family chose to call it. It’s siting was a compromise between making it distant from the dwelling for decency and close enough for comfort. On a cold winter’s night it was a brave cottager who made the trip up the garden, resorting instead to the chamber pot kept under the bed. But at other times the privy had its advantages. You could be alone there for a start, though there were some that were fitted with two holes side by side, sometimes three, with a smaller hole set closer to the ground for small children to use. Sociable you might say, but certainly rarely if ever would propriety allow mixed sex evacuations. In fact men rarely shared the privy with each other, it was the ladies and children who tended to go together.
  The internal fittings were very simple, a brick shaft as wide as the building permitted fitted with a strong, smooth (always smooth) wooden seat pierced with one or more circular holes. Sometime the holes were fitted with hinged wooden covers. The shaft opened at the rear of the privy to allow the contents to be shovelled out. Except when it was being cleaned out this opening was closed with a wooden cover to keep the draught out. In more rural areas the contents, human waste and ashes from the grate, were trenched into the vegetable garden to serve as a valuable fertiliser. In more urban areas, served by well organised local authorities, a ‘night soil’ collection was provided by a couple of men with a horse and cart who went round emptying privies under the cover of darkness at regular intervals.
  Another building, which might serve more than one cottage, was the wash house (in the Black Country ‘weshus’ or ‘brewus’). Set in one corner of its single room there would be a brick construction fitted with a cast-iron ‘copper’, round bottomed, maybe twenty-four inches in diameter and almost as deep with a fire box beneath it. There was usually a stoneware ceramic sink on brick sleeper walls, This was fitted with a plug and lead drainpipe leading outside, but the copper had no drain and had to be emptied with a semi-spherical tin bowl with a wooden handle (a ‘gawn’). The copper, which was fitted with a hefty, lift-off wooden cover, would be three-quarters filled with water and the fire lit at say five in the morning which would mean the water would be boiling and ready to take the washing at six o’clock. The sink was used for rinsing the clothes, or for any scrubbing needed to shift heavy soiling prior to boiling .
  After the washing was done the fire was allowed to cool a little, the dirty water emptied out with the gawn, then, after a swift wipe round with a clean cloth the copper was refilled with water and the delicate art of the home brewing of beer begun.
  Every family had its own way of brewing with small variations of ingredients and method, secrets jealously guarded and handed down from mother to daughter. Men played little part until the drinking stage. Mostly the end results were somewhere between unbelievably good and ecstasy. Genuine home brew at its best has no competitor and truly defies description in mere words. Fermented in a bread crock (joel) with home-grown barm floated on a piece of toast, bottled with care...... but I’m about to give too much away! Incidentally, the name joel for a terracotta, internally glazed, large pot size has a fascinating etymology; remind me to tell you some time.
  Outshuts, frequently small timber additions to the rear of the cottage, could be small lobbies built onto the back entrance of the house proper to give the comfort of another outer door, so that cold air didn’t flood into the kitchen every time someone arrived or departed. If and when the piped gas supply arrived a cast iron gas stove, rented from the gas company, could be housed there. Beyond the lobby some householders built small pantries where food could be kept cooler than in the kitchen, and where, if the luxury of piped water arrived, a sink and a single cold tap could be installed.
  Water generally came from a well, either one’s own in the garden or a communal affair serving a group of cottages. The general idea was to sink the well as far as possible from the privy, particularly after the 1832 cholera epidemic when people became aware of the dangers. A water butt fed from roof gutters supplemented the well by providing rainwater for washing and cleaning. Towards the end of the nineteenth century water companies increased their business by installing outside stand pipes, substantial, stubby pillars of cast iron with a cast spout and bucket hook moulded all of a piece, turned on and off with a removable spigot, one of which was issued to each customer. Such stand pipes (known in Gornal, and doubtless elsewhere, as ‘the tap’) stood at the road or lane-side and served a number of households round about.
Alongside rural cottages there might also be a chicken run and a pigsty. If there was enough land, and land was comparatively cheap in the mid nineteenth century, as well as the small flower garden there would be a large vegetable garden and perhaps an orchard.
  Does this ill-organised ramble round a cottage make it sound as if the inhabitants were deprived, distressed and depressed? I do hope not, for all those cottagers that I knew were justifiably proud of their neat and sparkling little homes, so scrubbed clean that you could, as they used to say, eat your dinner off the floor. Shining brass, polished glass, gleaming mirrors, unfailing hospitality shown to every visitor, a cheerful fire and a pussy cat on the hearth rug, these were what you would have found. Idyllic? No, of course not, they were damp, insubstantial little places. Those who lived in them needed to work hard and, particularly in times of crisis, have a sense of humour.
  Talking of which, just about every cottage had a motto or two framed on the wall. We did; ours read (in black letter intertwined with beautifully embroidered flowers) "Here we Suffer Grief and Pain..... and over the road it’s just the same."