History of the Home

As we careered towards the end of another year I began to think about home and why it means so much to me.  I also read the highly entertaining and informative book Home by Bill Bryson (genius Bill and thankyou!).

Here are a few thoughts, facts and figures on just where the whole idea of ‘home’ comes from, and why it features so large in our lives.

Here’s to the magic of home, and 2012…

Home is a very important place. Dr Johnson (1709-84) said that ‘the sum of all ambition is home’. And I agree. For me, home is the ultimate destination, the place that means most to me, the one I always want to come back to. It’s about the people I live with, it’s about home comforts. Ultimately, it’s about identity. And it has always been the sum of my ambition.

But home as we view it today, with heat, light and water taken for granted, is a relatively new phenomenon of the past hundred years or so. Until very recently, even fully furnished rooms were an exception and not the rule. In many ways, the Great Exhibition of 1851 marked the moment that Britain opened its eyes to new domestic inventions such as flushing loos and the electric light bulb. This was the moment when the ‘modern house’, with all its comforts, came into being.

The very first move to living in permanent communities (which led to the need for a permanent dwelling) was about 12,000 years ago. But it wasn’t until Saxon times that we see anything that even resembles what we would call a house – and then it was called a Hall, as it was typically just one room in which people all ate and slept together – with the animals for warmth! The word ‘family’ comes from the term ‘familiar’ – as everyone who lived together in this hall would know and be familiar with each other.

‘Hall’ is also one of the oldest words in the English language, and the Hall remained the model for domestic dwellings until the 15^th century – hence famous names such as Hardwick hall or Toad Hall!

Was designed to be moved around, as medieval estates comprised hundreds of people moving from one castle to another (for hygiene reasons!). Hence the French and Italian word for furniture ‘meubles’ which comes from being ‘mobile’. This also explains why early chests and trunks had domed lids, to throw off water during travel.

Floors were earth, furniture was minimal and in some places, a table was literally a board which was rested on people’s knees as they ate. This is the origin of lodgers being called ‘boarders’ and why an honest person – someone who keeps his hands visible at all times – is called ‘above board’. Chairs were rare until the 1600s, as was glass for windows. Indeed, as nobles moved from one castle to another, they would remove and take their glass windows with them. The word chimney does not appear in the English language until 1330 – prior to that, it was just a hole in the roof for smoke to escape.

Think what you could not eat if there was no refrigeration – yet ice was only introduced widely to this country in the 1840s. Despite that, the Victorian had huge appetites and most of Mrs Beeton’s 900 pages of Household management, published in 1859, was about recipes (incidentally, Mrs B was only 23 when she wrote it, she didn’t like cooking and was suspicious of most vegetables: Garlic was offensive, potatoes were narcotic and cheese only fit for sedentary people!

For most people however, the staple diet was bread. Yet foods we would consider a luxury today were so common then that, for example, servants would have it written into their contract that they would not be served lobster more than twice a week.

Oddly, kitchens were often far away from the dining room in the layout of the house, and in Tatton Park in Cheshire, a mini railway had to be built inside the house to carry the food from one to the other.

There were no luxuries such as running water or electricity until the late 1800s, so everything had to be cleaned and polished by hand – servants worked 18 hours a day with one day off a month. And they were the lucky ones.

In 1939, over 4000 people were killed on Britain’s  roads, most of them pedestrians. Why? Because of the blackout imposed for the 2WW – no one could see on the roads! Not since the Middle Ages had Britain been so dark. 1846 saw the first electric arc lamp. Prior to that, people’s whole lives were dictated by what they were able to achieve in daylight hours and with candles. It wasn’t until after 1900 that electric lighting came into common use, with things like street and domestic lighting. Thomas Edison became one of the richest men in the world with his patent for the light bulb.

Bill Bryson says that the history of private life is “the history of getting comfortable slowly”. Until the 18^th century the notion of being comfortable at home was so rare that the word ‘comfortable’ only carried the meaning of ‘capable of being consoled’ – nothing at all to do with soft chairs – as there weren’t any”! But the Industrial revolution of 19^th century England created a whole new prosperous middle class, whose town house had to be furnished to keep up with the Jones’s. And thus began the age of interiors…carpets, mirrors, curtains – if the Victorians could see it they could decorate it – every inch of domestic surface suddenly became a decorating opportunity.

Dining rooms didn’t appear widely until the 1750s, and by Victorian times, dinner tables were completely overdressed; one manufacturer listed no fewer than 146 types of flatware for the table alone. But this new activity of dining at table was not something everyone understood. John Jacob Astor, one of the richest men in America, astounded his guests by leaning over and wiping his hands on the skirts of the lady next door to him. Table manners were a totally new concept. Dining finally became an evening meal in the 1850s, and the word luncheon derived from the need to eat a smaller meal at midday which was literally a ‘lump’ or ‘portion’ of food.

Stairs are interesting – the Roman Vitruvius talks about the importance of well lit stairs, but it wasn’t until the 18^th century that a Frenchman actually worked out the correct proportions between a rise and a tread, thus preventing people from tripping when they walked up and down!

Similarly, wallpaper really only took off in the 1830s, but unfortunately 80% of it contained arsenic, which meant that people sent to convalesce in bed were often made worse by the air they breathed.

Think about this. Spring mattresses were not invented until 1865! Prior to that, if you had a bed frame at all (as opposed to sleeping on   the floor), support was on a lattice of ropes, which were tightened with a key when they began to sag – hence the expression ‘sleep tight’. Beds were the most expensive thing people owned – in William Shakespeare’s day, a canopied bed cost £5, half the annual salary of a typical schoolmaster. And because they were such important items, they were often kept where everyone could see them – in the living room! Privacy was not a given – and sharing beds with strangers in inns was common! Imagine that in a Premier Inn!

Babies were born at home with no medical intervention – and indeed, if you were royalty of someone of note, there would be members of court standing round the bed watching the whole proceedings to ensure that the baby really was yours and did come out of you, as opposed to being a usurper.

So bedrooms as we know then – ie. separate rooms where you expect to be left alone, are a recent phenomenon. And in fact the word cabinet used to refer to the most private box where precious things would be kept, hence the modern meaning of the Prime Ministers cabinet, an inner sanctum where no one else can intrude.

We all know that the Romans and Greeks loved washing, but practically the only thing we adopted from them was the practice of communal loos (common until the 1700s). Other than that, Britons hated washing, period. The eleventh Duke of Norfolk was so violently opposed to washing that his servants had to wait until he was dead to scrub him clean.

It was not until the 1700s that bathing became popular. Early sea bathing was done naked, until the invention of bathing machines. And it was really the Victorians that adopted bathing, but only because they had a penchant for self torment, and loved to relay how they had to break the ice in their washbasins in order to get clean.

Early showers were also so ferocious that you had to wear protective headgear before getting in, lest you be beaten senseless by your own plumbing. But it was the Victorian Thomas Crapper who invented the flushing loo, exhibited to thousands of fascinated middle class people at the Great Exhibition of 1851. So popular were they, that 200,000 were installed in London homes as a result, but that in itself caused a disaster -  London’s sewers couldn’t cope with the deluge of human waste, cholera epidemics became rife and in the 1850s, Parliament actually had to be closed, as MPs could not bear the stench rising from the Thames. Even more baffling, The Midland Hotel in St Pancras, the most expensive hotel in the world, costing £300 million in todays’s money, had only four bathrooms to be shared between 600 bedrooms. It failed.

It wasn’t until 1940 that bathroom ware became efficient and affordable. And even as late as 1950, the journalist Katherine Whitehorn recalled that she and her colleagues on Woman’s own were not allowed to do features on bathrooms, as not enough homes had them and it was thought it would induce envy.

So…

Next time you turn on a tap, turn on a light, or prance in front of your bedroom mirror in the privacy of your room, think again – only a century or so ago  – your great grandparents’ time in fact – none of this would have been possible.

Home as we know it today is a place of refuge and comfort, and even without the 60”flat screen, trust me, we’ve never had it so good.