Hidden Killers Of The Victorian Home Page #4

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certainly would have fallen down.

Exactly. Thank you

for not doing that!

By disregarding Nicholson's formula,

the Victorians' new staircases,

installed in many of these

narrower houses, had unwittingly

combined high rises, narrow goings

and uneven steps to create

a grave hazard for the servants.

With the extra weight

of carrying trays and food,

there's no way they could get up

and down those stairs in one piece.

Total death traps.

Absolute death traps.

Stairs remain one of the most

common sources of accident

and death in the home.

To understand our next

set of dangers,

we need to appreciate

one of the major preoccupations

of our Victorian forbears.

It was at this time that cleanliness

was becoming powerfully linked

to ideas of morality

and respectability

and this was reflected

in the literature of the period.

Charles Kingsley's novel

The Water Babies epitomises it

because it suggests you can take

a dirty boy off the street

and transform him

into a model gentleman,

through the cleansing power

of water.

It sums it up in the last lines.

They say,

"Meanwhile do you learn your lessons

and thank God that you have plenty

"of cold water to wash in - and wash

in it too, like a true Englishman?"

The Victorians were totally and

utterly obsessed with being clean.

For them, the idea of cleanliness

was truly next to godliness.

They were setting themselves

against the 18th century,

which was a time of dirt,

a time when the upper classes,

that perfume was used

to disguise dirt.

The Victorians believed

that a clean heart, a clean body,

meant a clean soul.

It was this desire for cleanliness

that would lead the Victorians

to embrace a whole new range

of potentially deadly innovations

and products.

One of the rooms that

the Victorians can claim

to have invented is the bathroom.

And what surer sign of progress

than a private room

in which to carry out

one's ablutions?

The bathroom really appears

primarily

because running water comes

into the home for the first time.

So if you can actually

bring water into the home,

it becomes more practical to have

a room dedicated to its use.

Until the mid-Victorian period,

hot tubs for bathing had stood

next to the fire

in the front room or kitchen,

where water had to be warmed

and poured into them.

This means that servants no longer

have to be sort of traipsing

up and down the back stairs

carrying large amounts of water.

I think this is when the bathroom,

as we know it,

as a sort of separate, private,

lockable space,

away from the rest of the house,

really starts to take shape.

What the Victorians hated most of

all was the idea of bodily fluids,

the kind of smells they made,

the kind of traces they left.

They wanted to expunge them

entirely from the body,

so that no-one can smell

the traces of these fluids

that link you

to the working classes.

And what happened in this private,

lockable space could be

incredibly dangerous.

I've come to Blaise Castle

in Bristol

to meet curator

Catherine Littlejohns.

I want to get some idea

of the inventions available

to the Victorians who sought to meet

these new high standards

of cleanliness.

Oh, wow.

We're just going to look at some of

the baths in the collection.

I'm going to show you

one of my favourite things.

It's actually a gas-powered bath.

So if we have a look

at the underneath here,

you can see where

the gas went in the front here.

And then just around by you,

there's a little door, which is

where you would light the gas.

OK, so here you would put in

your lighted match or whatever.

Yes. Gosh, so that's actually

ridiculously dangerous, isn't it?

Doesn't it mean that you can

boil yourself in your bath?

You very probably could do.

The instructions, the guidance

always says.. They're very careful

to point out you don't want

to actually start turning the gas on

until you've got some water

in the bath

so you don't boil it dry.

They don't really make a mention

of making sure you don't

get into the bath

while the gas is on.

The desire to be clean

meant that the bath's popularity

outpaced any concern about

the dangers, which were significant.

The papers regularly reported

cases of scalding

so serious they resulted in death.

It wasn't until the invention

of the thermostat,

safer gas and its installation

that these risks would be addressed.

This new room,

with its cutting edge innovations,

would bring

even more killers into the home.

I think they were trying

to understand the dangers

of electricity and water and gas,

and all of these new services

coming into fairly small,

confined areas,

without really understanding

the dangers of how they actually

interact with each other.

What could be better

or more desirable

than having a loo that flushed?

But its introduction was not

without problem.

The first danger

lay in the plumbing.

Early plumbing in Victorian houses,

the sewer systems

didn't efficiently

drain away the waste.

Gases such as methane

and hydrogen sulphide

emanating from human waste

would not be able to escape

and would build up in the sewer.

Both of these gases

are not only flammable,

but they're also explosive.

What always used to happen was

the sewerage outlet

would get blocked

and somebody would have to go

and figure out how to clear it,

to get it to actually run away free.

At the time,

there wasn't electric batteries,

torches and stuff like that, so

the only way you could actually go

and investigate it was unfortunately

with a...a naked flame.

Not only could gas

collect in the sewer,

methane could actually leak back

into the house itself.

It was a quite common occurrence

for outlets of toilets

to spontaneously combust.

And that was really where the drive

towards improvements in draining

actually came from -

they needed to stop methane

getting back into the houses.

And it was one of Britain's most

famous inventors that helped

put a stop to this potential killer

with one small

but crucial component.

Thomas Crapper, even though

he gets a lot of good press

about inventing the toilet, he

actually invented the siphon valve,

which is actually a water trap

and a valve flap which actually

stops methane coming back into

the property, so it couldn't ignite.

It didn't stop the problems

down in the main sewers

but it stopped it actually affecting

the people who lived in the house.

Not only were Victorian bodies

subject to a new regime

of washing and scrubbing,

but what they put on them was too.

Wealthy Victorians -

both men and women -

could change their clothes

up to five times a day.

By the late Victorian period,

laundry had become a huge operation

because clothing was not simple.

There was an extensive amount

of clothing, even for a child,

and certainly for a woman.

She wore a lot of underclothing,

a lot of linen

and these had to be changed

regularly.

The Victorian mistress had

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