SOAP
There are many things in life that we take for granted and a recent conversation about how the Romans kept themselves clean got me to thinking about soap. We all think we know what soap is because we have known it all our lives, it's the block of slippery stuff we use with water to get ourselves and other objects clean. Like many other things in this world there's a bit more to it than that! The technical definition of soap is that it is a salt of a fatty acid made by mixing a fat or oil with alkali which causes it to solidify. Sodium salts make hard soap and potassium make a softer soap. The ancient Babylonians who were writing down recipes for soap-making as early as 2,800BCE used the ashes from wood to mix with their oil and fats. They knew it worked but didn't know the chemistry. One final fact for you, soaps are not just used for cleaning things, they are an essential component of lubricating greases and also used in many textile processes. However, what I'm interested in is the household soap we all know.
When I was 'Open All Hours' at Sough we sold two main kinds of soap, household and toilet. Toilet soap is still available today but household soap is largely forgotten, it has been superseded by various sprays, gels and powders and of course the ubiquitous 'washing up liquid'. You can still get Fairy and Sunlight soaps but they are now described as 'pre-wash' treatments. This is the old trick my mother had of rubbing the most heavily soiled parts of a shirt, like the collar and cuffs, with soap before the main wash. At Sough we sold Lux soap flakes, Dr Lovelace's White Windsor soap and a semi-liquid soap with camphor flecks in it which was used for blanket-washing once a year in Spring. Funnily enough, some of the best soap was hard scrubbing soap in 3lb blocks, red, green or white and I was delighted to find last year that it can still be bought at the Shambles on the Town Square. It was called 'scrubbing soap' because that was the main use for it. I can still see my mother with a bucket of warm water and a scrubbing brush lathering the brush up with a bar of hard soap before attacking whatever it was that she wanted to get clean. Done regularly a wooden table top or a floor gradually became white and a thing of beauty in mother's eyes!
Don't write these 'scrubbing soaps' off as being harsh or impure, they are probably the nearest thing to the best traditional soaps because they have no additives or 'miracle' ingredients. Until the Industrial Revolution, soap-making was conducted on a small scale and the product was rough. It was quite easy to boil wood ash and a fat together to make soap at home but I can attest that it is a bit hit-and-miss. A friend of mine and I made some soap like this when I was at school, we left it on a painted window cill to dry and it took the paint off! Andrew Pears started making a high-quality, transparent soap in 1789 in London. Robert Hudson began manufacturing a soap powder in 1837, initially by grinding the soap with a mortar and pestle. William Lever and his brother, James, bought a small soap works in Warrington in 1886 and founded what is still one of the largest soap businesses, formerly called Lever Brothers and now Unilever. They introduced specialised soap powders for washing clothes and advertised widely. Until these powders became available the favourite method was to grate soap into the water using a cheese grater.
In all my research I have never found any mention of soap manufacture in Barlick. This doesn't mean it never happened. I know that there was a tallow renderer down Butts no doubt using waste fat from the butcher's slaughter houses in the cellars below the premises on Commercial Street facing the beck. Soap making on a small scale would have been a natural extension of this trade. By the mid 19th century the railway had reached Barlick and with it modern products like branded soap and no local soap-maker could compete on either price or quality. Good soap readily available has been recognised by social historians as a key factor in the reduction of many common diseases. Cleanliness may not have been next to Godliness but dirt certainly led to disease!
I have many references to the whiteness of washing being seen as a matter of pride and competition between housewives when they hung their washing out on Monday Morning and found that this was the reason why so many workers in early mill photographs wore white overalls. I found out it was because their wives scrubbed them until the dye came out of them, having spotless overalls on Monday morning was seen as a sign that the man had a good wife who looked after him well.
This competitive spirit seems to be alive today. The soap companies use it in their advertisements and there are numerous additives that can be used to get even cleaner clothes. I'm afraid that I am a typical man and don't agonise over my whites! My only aim is to get the clothes clean so I am advertisement proof. So, the next time you are loading your washing machine and using the last word in modern technology to get your whites even whiter, spare a thought for your grandmothers grating hard soap into the dolly tub before attacking the dirt with elbow grease! Things could be worse!
You still want to know about the Roman's? They made do with rubbing themselves down with olive oil while they were sweating in a hot bath and then scraping the resulting goo off with a blunt sickle-shaped blade called a 'strigil'. I suppose it was left to the slaves to get the tide-mark off the bath when they had finished! I'll let Mark Twain have the last word, he said that; “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”
Not named after me but a nice souvenir of America.
