Sunday nights is our regular time to go to the pub as a couple of friends usually go then and it’s a good way to catch up with them. We sit together and exchange news, funny stories, discuss sport and what has been in the newspapers, and gossip about the village… It’s usually a quiet night on a Sunday, and so it was, our friends were both away it seems, but there was a bit of excitement over a missing dog, or was it a missing husband, or were the husband and dog missing… it was all a bit complicated… One of the bar people, Ellen, said cheerio and went home but moments later she was back, she’d seen the dog, but when she tried to get it, it bit her… We never did know whether dog and husband were found…
We ended up talking to our friend Terry, and somehow we got onto talking about our memories of doing the laundry when we were children. My mum was a bit younger than Terry’s and he told us that where he lived as a child, in the north-east of England, they had a wash-house at the back of their house. It had a big copper set over a brick structure where a fire was lit to heat the water in the copper. When it was hot, the clothes were put in and a tool which Terry called a posser was used to stir and ‘beat’ the laundry.
In the 1940’s and 50’s when Terry was a lad, the north-east of England was a heavily industrialised area and the air was full of smoke, coal dust and general pollution and clothes, particularly white shirts, became almost greyish. Mothers (it was almost universally mothers and wives who did the washing in those days) had to work hard to keep clothes clean and a little tablet, called a Reckitt’s blue or a Reckitt’s blue bag, or a dolly blue, was put in the water – the blue colour countered the yellowing of white fabrics.
I was interested in Terry using the word ‘posser’ to describe the tool used to stir and beat the boiling clothes; I wondered if it’s origin was similar to the word posset – he warming milk drink; posser comes from an old English word meaning to beat, and certainly a posset would be beaten to mix the heated wine or ale with the milk as it was curdling (sounds rather horrid but it was spiced and I think would be something similar to a syllabub, although less refined!)
I was also interested in ‘posser’ because the implement I knew of was called a dolly-peg – not that I had known them when I was young, but when I moved to Lancashire I came across the word. When I investigated I discovered that in different parts of Britain it was called other things: dolly-leg, dolly-peg, peggy, dolly, possing-stick, posher, or maiden (although I thought the maiden was what damp washing was hung on – maybe it was used for both) I think, although the function was the same, the posser had a fitting which looked like a plunger on the end, a perforated copper or wooden cone, and the dolly had legs, two or three ad the clothes would be twisted round as well as pressed, much like the paddles in early washing machines.
In former times, and in poorer households where there wasn’t a wash tub or copper, clothes would have been beaten with a flat implement called a washing bat or beetles, or even a battledore – which I guess gave its name to the old game of shuttlecock and battledore…. and of course there were also the washboards, which now are probably more well-known as a musical instrument, played with thimbles on the fingers!
The things we get to talk about in the pub!
http://www.objectlessons.org/houses-and-homes-victorians/posser-victorian-original/s59/a971/
http://www.oldandinteresting.com/laundry-blue.aspx
Lois Elsden 