Evening talk by Nick Higham. How did people keep clean before baths and showers? Answer: they washed their underclothes.
Doing the laundry was vital for personal hygiene, to ensure people didn’t stink. But doing the laundry was also immensely hard work (almost always done by women) and used enormous quantities of a scarce resource: water.
Nick Higham’s “A Short History of Laundry” starts with Sir John Falstaff and Elizabethan England, takes in dollies, possers and titillating laundrymaids and finishes up with the modern launderette and the fearsome Victorian mangle.
Zoom hybrid event, contact the chairman for a Zoom link: chairman@glias.org.uk