Shower
Category
Historic Services / Sanitation
Date
c. 1850
Materials
Wood, iron and brass
Measurements
2340 mm (H); 850 mm (Diameter)
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Erddig, Wrexham
NT 1147767
Caption
In the first half of the 19th century plumbed bathrooms were uncommon even in grand houses. Servants filled and emptied ewers, basins and hip baths in bedrooms or dressing rooms. Shower baths such as this one were also portable, rather than plumbed in. A framed copy at Erddig of John Leech’s cartoon Domestic Sanitary Regulations (see NT 1149603), published in the satirical magazine Punch in 1850, shows the shower’s labour-intensive operation: servants filled the tank at the top with hot water; the water was then released by pulling a chain; finally, the integral stirrup pump was operated to force water from the tray back up the pipes and into the tank to be used again. Leech shows reluctant children wearing oil-cloth conical ‘extinguisher caps’, which were designed ‘to break the fall of the descending torrent upon the head’, as American magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book described it in June 1855. In the 1960s, Erddig’s last owner Philip Yorke rigged up a shower with a portable gas ring heating a tank. A suspended rubber hose dribbled out water ‘just long enough for a hasty wash’.
Summary
Shower. A Victorian, iron and wooden shower. The six uprights are painted to resemble bamboo poles, the tank above and basin below similarly decorated, with integral stirrup pump and brass chain.
Provenance
Given by Phillip Yorke III (1905-1978) along with the estate, house and contents to the National Trust in 1973