Women have been accessing the Palace of Westminster for centuries, yet sanitary facilities have not always been provided. Chloe Challender, a PhD candidate working on a collaborative project between the University of Warwick and the Parliamentary Archives, discusses the meagre provisions for women in need of relieving themselves at Parliament during the 19th century.
Last year Dr Robin Eagles explored the unusual topic of toilet provision in the Old (pre 1834 fire) Palace of Westminster. The blog vividly portrays the often public face of parliamentary sanitation, with chamber pots and close stools situated within the Lords Chamber until well into the 18th century. We know also of the Commons ‘bogg house’, a tower built next to the old House in the 16th century with effluent overflowing into adjoining public areas.
This blog views sanitary provision through the lens of gender and intimacy, assessing its role as a private space within this most public of buildings. The presence of women both in formal and informal roles in the palace antedated the 18th century. Works accounts as early as 1701 note the presence of a (public) women’s toilet in New Palace Yard (TNA, WORK 5/52, f. 156). Comments in a letter from a Member in 1743 suggest visitors to the Commons relieved themselves in a somewhat direct fashion: “some Gentlewomen in our gallery, not being able to hold their water, let it run on Mr Dodington, and a Scots member who sat under. The first had a white duffel frock spoiled, the latter almost blinded” (Thomas, House of Commons in the Eighteenth Century, 148-9.) Presumably more likely to be a mere accident than an act of feminist subversion, this anecdote is more plausible than it may sound. In 18th– and 19th-century London there was an almost total absence of public lavatories for women; women would have been forced to rely on bourdaloues (the female equivalent of a chamber pot) or hold on until they reached home.
The new post-fire Palace that opened in the 1850s seemingly did little to improve provision for women; while WCs do appear on plans, there is no mention of women’s facilities (though an 1881 plan of the Commons shows a WC adjacent to the Ladies’ Gallery). This is somewhat paradoxical given there was a Queen on the throne, though Victoria did manage to have her own secret lavatory built within a hidden door off the Sovereign’s Robing Room in the Lords, rumoured to be the first flushing toilet in London. Minutes of evidence taken before a select committee on House of Lords Construction and Accommodation in the 1880s reveal that the Lords was underserved compared to the Commons:
None of the modern appliances have been fixed in the House of Lords lavatories. In the House of Commons a complete change has been made in the last four or five years. The old gratings which are fixed to the urinals in the HoL lavatories are extremely objectionable; the urine gets into these gratings and it is not possible to keep them clean.
(PA, HL/BR/1/5, 22 June 1883)
However, contemporary records from the Commons do not tell a tale of sanitary plenitude. A Serjeant at Arms memo on accommodation for refreshment department staff in 1886 tells us that while “the entire kitchen staff male and female take their meals at a table in the kitchen”, they were segregated for more private matters and that “further retiring rooms are urgently wanted both for male and female staff and there is no lavatory at all, the men using loose basins on a table in the kitchen passage to keep themselves clean.” (PA, HC/SA/SJ/5/16. Memo on accommodation for Refreshment Dept staff, 1886.)
Even if scanty, provision, according to the Lords minutes, did include the “excellent washing-room” that was “very largely used, that is quite away from all the Committee-rooms and the Library, and the writing-rooms”. There were deliberate measures to ensure privacy of toilets, an interesting contrast to the very public conveniences of the 18th Century and one that speaks of changing Victorian social mores around the privacy of the body and sanitary arrangements, and about shifting emotions of shame and disgust: “There might be an outside door, with inside doors, so that when the outside door was open you would not be able to look in”.
These secluded-sounding spaces are of particular interest to historians of gender and sexuality as they were relatively rare private rooms within Parliament that were accessed by both sexes (despite being formally assigned to men). Histories of sexuality show us that toilets—for example in railway stations, as they sprung up later in the 19th century—were a key site for clandestine meetings, including for same-sex encounters between men. We know from evidence by a Mr John Taylor, given to the Select Committee on Westminster Hall Restoration in 1884, that when deciding where to locate urinals around the Estate, consideration was given to safety and ‘order’: “ideas from time to time have been that the urinal might perhaps be put under the roadway of Bridge-street; and that has always been abandoned because it would necessarily be a dark and ill-ventilated place, and would require an attendant to keep order there” (oral evidence taken on 19 November 1884). This concern was likely linked to the Palace’s proximity to barracks. We know that, among others, William Bankes MP was arrested in 1833 for engaging in what was then perceived to be indecent behaviour with a soldier in a urinal outside the Houses of Parliament.
From the Lords minutes mentioned above, we learn that women kept the keys to lavatories; indeed, a peer complained that the housemaid had forgotten to unlock his local lavatory door: “it is the rule to have it open, and it was not open.” Another complaint tells us that high class women also accessed men’s facilities: “On busy nights I have seen several instances of Peeresses inadvertently going into the lavatories instead of into the doorway leading up to the Peeresses’ room.” This presumably got curious minds on the Committee working, for it leads on to a more general discussion about female access to Parliament, and the cryptic comment “Perhaps you have not seen what some of us have seen take place at night when more want to come?”
These small but telling insights allow us to begin to piece together the interaction between different genders in private spaces, offering a possible revision of assumptions about modes of intimacy in Parliament. These liminal and uncelebrated spaces (‘the smallest room’) were both hidden (lockable) and provided for the convenience of the public: segregated in theory but in practice accessed by both men and women; spaces that perhaps reveal how this most formal and public of institutions—a Royal Palace—has a hidden, intimate history bound up with emotions of shame and disgust. Looking at archival records anew, and outside customary hierarchies of significance, can unlock different histories, even via the most mundane of human activities.
CC
Further reading
Matt Cook, London and the culture of homosexuality 1885-1914 (2003)
Robin Eagles, Spending a penny in the old palace of Westminster (History of Parliament blog, 2022)
Liz Hallam-Smith, ‘St Stephen’s in 1846: ventilation wars, ‘offensive emanations’ and lost building’, blog for ‘Virtual St Stephens’ research project, University of York, 7 January 2022
Mari Takayanagi and Elizabeth Hallam-Smith, Necessary Women: The Untold Story of Parliament’s Working Women (2023)
Chloe Challender is a second-year PhD candidate working on a collaborative project between the University of Warwick and the Parliamentary Archives, ‘Contested sexualities: love, desire and the institution of Parliament in the long nineteenth century’. The project is AHRC-funded via Midlands4Cities. Chloe is also a House of Commons Clerk.
The History of Parliament 