FACTORALY - E12 TOILETS

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

It's a fact of life. When you've got to go, you've got to go, and the best place to go is always to the Factoraly podcast! This one is full of toilet humour. And Toilet facts. More than you ever wanted to know about, as Kermode and Mayo call it, 'Trying hard'. We're looking to get to number 1, but we'd be happy with number 2 in the charts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello! Hello everybody! One and all, welcome to Factorily. Hello Bruce. Hello Simon. Today you may spot a bit of toilet humour. It won't be a crap episode. No, but you might be flushed at the end. No, that's all I've got. So, the more astute of our listeners may have noticed that we're talking about toilets today. That we are. That'll be fun.

If you're new to this, if you're uninitiated, Bruce and I love random facts and useless knowledge. And each week we pick a subject that you really wouldn't think would have any interesting stuff involved in it. We pick the most mundane topics. We pick them apart and it turns out they're quite interesting. Well, generally speaking, it seems that the more boring the subject matter seems to be on the surface, the more interesting it is when you scratch that surface and have a look underneath. The more boring the subject matter seems to be on the surface, the more interesting it is when you scratch that surface and have a look underneath.

Yes, absolutely. Unless, of course, it's a toilet where if you scratch the surface, it's not very pleasant. That's something very different, yes. Yeah. To quote Blackadder, How lucky you English are to find the toilet so amusing. For us, it's a mundane and functional item. For you, the basis of an entire culture.

So that is the culture that we shall explore today. Yes. So when did this culture of toilets start, do we think? Well, it depends how one defines a toilet. Mankind, animal kind, have been defecating for a very long time. We've done it out in the open. We've used nearby rivers to carry our waste away. So we've been going to the toilet, in adverted commas, in one form or another, forever. But the idea of an enclosed area, a specific space that is used for that purpose, as most things do, it goes back to greeks it goes back to the romans it goes back quite a way to the egyptians i think as well oh really i didn't

read that i suppose it would wouldn't it yeah yeah yes they um they they use the nile apparently as a as a system to carry away their waste okay Hopefully they weren't in denial because that would be messy. Do you know anything about the toilets of those eras? I understand that they were sort of very public, sort of communal things. I mean, you know, these days we have like walls between each stall. Yes.

Whereas then they just had like a plank of wood with holes in it that dropped down somewhere. And there were various different ways, either into a pit or into a gully with running water. Yes, in some sort of stream. But it was a very sociable place to go and have a chat. You'd all sort of sit next to each other, right close up next to each other, cheek by jowl. So to speak. So to speak.

But they were quite healthy places, weren't they? In terms of cleanliness and so on, yeah. So they weren't just doing their business in an open pit or anything. Like you said, there was a plank of wood. Everything was sort of slightly covered over. They cleaned themselves with a sponge on the end of a stick, which they then dipped into a gully of fresh flowing water to rinse

and then handed it to the next person to use. Whether that's clean by today's standards. So would you hand it to them, I guess, by the handle? You would hope so, yeah. There are some who say that that's where we get the phrase to grab the wrong end of the stick. Right. Yeah, you wouldn't want to do that. That would be a bad thing. You really wouldn't want to do that. I read

somewhere that some, if you're like an emperor or somebody very posh, they used swan's necks. Really? Yes. Were they dead? No. Oh. Oh, the poor swan.

Yes. But then the swan could go swimming and dive in and kind of do that thing that swans do where they kind of like an undulation to get rid of whatever was on their neck. Well, that's a bizarre image, isn't it? So, yes, that was the romans um and then sort of from from then on people just used whatever space was available they might have a hole out in the out in the field they might just you know as we've said sort of go and use a nearby river um come the medieval period you sort of used a pot, which is the origin of the potty, sort of the chamber pot type thing. That would have been in the bedroom, wouldn't it? Because it's a chamber.

Yeah, exactly. If you were slightly wealthier, you might have a dedicated room. I almost said a defecated room. Well, that would work as well. It would still work. Yeah. You would have a room, a private room, a privy, if you will, where you went and did your business. Some of those were rooms that sort of stuck out of the wall. If you're in the higher echelons of society in a castle, perhaps.

I was going to say, I've seen those in castles. They were called guardrobes or something. Was it guarda-robe? Yeah, so guardrobes. The area where you sort of went to the toilet was adjacent to the place where you got cleaned dressed etc so you kept your robes there so the area was called the guard robe which eventually became the wardrobe um yes and this this room would sort of jut out of the wall over a moat or a pit or whatever and and you know there you go um yeah so you had a room that was dedicated for

your ablutions and your cleaning and your getting dressed which if we look at the etymology of the word we like a little bit of etymology we do that where does this word come from the word toilet comes from the 16th century word toilette which meant a cloth or or a wrapping. And then by the 17th century, that meaning became dressing or clothing as a verb, to clothe yourself. Then by the 19th century, toilet meant the place where you performed your ablutions, you got dressed, etc. Ablutions, that's a good word. So the ablutions come from the Latin word ab, meaning away, and lue, meaning wash. So ablue, ablute, ablution, means to wash away. Ah.

So do you know who was responsible for the first actual flushing toilets? We've talked about doing it over a pit. We've talked about doing it in a pot and then throwing it away. Do you know when actively flushable water toilets came around? I don't, tell me. 1592. That's a lot earlier than I thought you were going to say, like 18th century or something. Yes, yes. But 16th century is quite early. It is quite early, isn't it? So this was a gentleman called John Harrington, who was the godson of Queen Elizabeth I. He was an author, a translator, a member of the court.

He got banished from court for, as far as I can tell, telling lewd jokes. Now, if you're going to be banished from court, obviously Queen Elizabeth, like Queen Victoria, was not amused. No, no. So much so that she threw him out. So he was banished to Somerset. What a punishment. He built himself a house near

Bath. He invented for himself an indoor toilet with what we would recognise as a cistern, really. I wonder where that went because you'd have to flush it to somewhere wouldn't you i suppose into a local river or something yeah exactly i mean we still haven't got to the point of having sewage networks but who cares where it goes once it's been flushed out of your house it's someone else's problem um but yes a box

containing water high above the place where you were doing your business um pull a lever or open a hatch water comes down flushes the waste away um in his design it was a vertical pipe so it went straight down to wherever it was that it went uh which was obviously a little bit whiffy but um that was that was his invention 1592 queen elizabeth the first eventually forgave him for his lewdness she went and visited him in his new house. She saw his toilet. She was rather impressed by it. She commissioned him to make her one.

So Queen Elizabeth I had an indoor flushing toilet. Wow. Which had velvet and lace around the general seating area and sort of dried herbs and fragrant twigs and things scattered around the place to mask the smell. Fabulous. If you'd said to me, did Elizabeth I have a flushing toilet, I would have said no. Oh, automatically, yeah, instantly. I would have said no until I researched that. It was around the Victorian era that there was something about the smells, wasn't there?

Because all of the waste, wherever the waste came from, it just drained into the Thames. Yes, in London. If you're in London. There was the thing called the Great Stink. The Great Stink. And there are great cartoons of people kind of like holding their noses whilst they're being barged across the Thames and sort of using nose gaze, which is sort of like a handkerchief dipped in very strong perfume. So you hold that to your nose. It's almost like a gas mask holding it to your face so that you can actually smell something nice rather than the disgusting effluent that was coming out of all of the pipes coming into the Thames.

And it was so bad that the monarch commissioned somebody to actually make it better. And the person they commissioned to do that was a chap called Bazalgette. Yes. Who was tasked with coming up with a sewer system for the for the whole of London. And no small task. No, no. It's a mammoth thing to do. And it resulted in things like, for example, the Strand used to be I mean, the Strand is kind of like a beach. But if you look at where the Strand is now it's miles away from the thames and the reason it's miles away from the thames is because basiljet built these massive sewer systems running alongside the the thames and covered them over so people can actually build on the sewage

system right and and sort of made the thames a lot narrower than it once was. I'm sort of thinking of the Victoria Embankment on the north side of the Thames. That was all just constructed to cover over the sewers. Yes. So the river was started to be cleaned up. He built lots of sewage processing plants to remove all of the nasty stuff from the water and then put it back into the Thames. So, yes, so Bazalgette, from his offices in Sloane Square, which are now a private club, he created these plans.

You can see actually in this club they have some of the plans that he made to produce the sewerage system for London. And that meant that more people could have inside toilets or toilets at their house at least Yes. In Victorian London. Yes. Because I guess, you know, if you look at the Victorian sort of sprawl of housing, most of that had did have toilets, but they were actually not in the house. Okay, yes. They were sort of outhouses, weren't they? Yes. But quite a lot of it was public toilets at the end of the street. And not just in the UK,

there were public toilets everywhere. The French made an art of the public toilet with le pissoir. Tell us about the pissoir. Well, you may have seen it in L.O.L.O. It's like a round, circular metal building that you that has collectors for urine inside. For men. Yes, of course. Because most

public toilets were for men. In fact, there were no public toilets for women at all until quite late in the Victorian era. Really? So women could not go to the, unless they were visiting a friend, they could not go to the loo when they were out in public. Oh, for goodness sake. I know. Times have moved on.

They have. Thank goodness for that. And in fact, one of the first female public toilets in the world is not 300 metres from where I am now. Oh, really? It's at Britannia Junction in Camden Town. Right. And that was the very first ladies' toilet. Is that so?

Yes. Interesting. Well, that's a bit of history right there, isn't it? There's also another public toilet not far from here in primrose hill which is a recording studio so so london i know so a lot a lot of these toilets were like below ground and you sort of go down some stairs into this very tiled victorian style yeah place and they've and a lot of them when they were decommissioned were repurposed as i was storage some of them are um server farms because they're underground so there's a sort of like a constant yes um thing and also there's

flowing water so that'll a couple of them a couple of them are bars aren't there yes yes there's a bar in Kentish Town, which is a toilet. Excellent. So after you've been to the loo, I mean, whether you use a swan's neck or stick with a sponge on the end of it, these days we kind of use paper. Yes. But it's not a new thing, using toilet paper. In fact, in the second century, Chinese were using a sort of a rudimentary paper. Really? They did that for a while. But the first modern toilet paper was also in China, but it was like late 14th century. And of course, it was for the emperor's family. and each sheet of paper was perfumed and ornate and fabulous and right and

then when paper became more available like in the in the 15th 16th century it was quite expensive so they wouldn't really use it to wipe your bottom with yeah but then time passed and you get to victorians and victorians yes being victorians and being hugely inventive. There's a chap called Joseph Gaiety, which I love his name. G-A-Y-E-T-T-Y. Gaiety. Sounds like a fun fella. I know! And he created the first commercially packaged toilet paper

in 1857. Really? And these were sort of like a pack of A4, but toilet paper. So it was like loose, flat sheets of paper. He was actually loose, flat sheets of paper. He was actually American, this chap. Right. And he founded the Gaiety firm for toilet paper production in New Jersey.

And his first factory-made toilet paper was called the Therapeutic Paper. And also people called it Gaiety's Medicated Paper. Oh, that's a very Victorian name. I know, but it didn't work. Oh, why not? I think he probably had to charge so much money for it that he couldn't do it. OK. But then the British got involved.

And in 1879, a chap called Walter, another great name for somebody who's involved in the toilet business, Walter Oldcock. A bit like ball cock, but without the B. Okay, fine. So he created toilet paper on a roll. Oh, right, okay. And he was the first that used perforated toilet roll

instead of just flat sheets of toilet paper. Ah, I see. And it was amazing. I mean, suddenly toilet paper took off, and the Germans got in on the act and the French. And then it got to the point where companies like Scott, the big paper company, were making a lot of toilet paper. Yeah. Toilet paper then was quite rough.

I mean, there were splinters. No. In toilet paper. Oh, that's not not good you don't you don't want to that's a specific place where you do not want to splinter definitely so uh they they decided that it needed to be softer and there was a a paper mill in scotland that started to make uh two-ply toilet paper and much softer and today sort of two-ply toilet paper. And today, two-ply toilet paper is pretty much the standard. That's been around since the 1940s. But it's a huge industry.

Now, I remember as a child going to the toilets at school, and the toilet paper was essentially like tracing paper. Yes. It was very hard. Bronco. I remember the brand Bronco toilet paper was essentially like tracing paper yes it was very hard bronco i remember the the brand bronco toilet paper and it was like into is like folded in half and interleaved so as you picked out one another one would pop out and came out that's right but it was it was very sort of it was very rough and crunchy and uncomfortable on one one side and and sort of

really shiny and useless skiddable yes on the other side but but people used to use other sorts of paper didn't they yeah people have used all sorts of things the newspapers magazines uh again hopefully not the glossy ones um i think before your american chap uh invented his toilet paper some americans in rural America used to use corn cobs. Oh, wow. Well, that makes sense. It kind of does, doesn't it? Without getting too graphic about it.

If you picture that, that kind of does make sense. Yeah. Yeah. There'd be one use only, I would imagine. Oh, one would hope. Yeah, absolutely. But yes, people have used just any old any old rags or or bits of material they could find around um in fact there's a particular uh mention of a magazine the the farmer's almanac

which was a popular paper for farmers telling you all the latest news about farming and agriculture uh that was a regular thing that people used in place of toilet paper. And the Farmer's Almanac was so aware of the fact that that's what people used it for. Once they'd read it, you know, it was a quality production, they actually started producing it with a couple of holes drilled in to the top of the almanac. So you could put a bit of string through. Precisely, so you could hang it up. They didn't make it perforated as well.

But yes, that was in 1919. Wow. Again, it always does, but it makes me think of another Blackadder quote. They're in the trenches and George brings out a copy of King and Country and he says, you can't

deny this magazine is good for the morale of the men. Blackadder says, no, not at all. I just think something better could be achieved by giving them some real toilet paper. So it was a common thing to use magazines and papers and whatever else you could find lying around. So you can do crosswords on the toilet. People do a lot of thinking on the toilet. The other thing that people tend to do on the toilet is die.

Not where I thought we were going. But no, I mean, people have been dying on the toilet since time immemorial, practically. There was a King Edmund Ironside of England was stabbed whilst defecating in a toilet in 1016. Even in Rome, there was a chap called Elagabus who was murdered by the Praetorian Guard in a latrine in which he had taken refuge. Really? Yeah. But loads and loads.

George II. Died on the toilet. He collapsed shortly after attending to his close stool. Oh, I see. Yes, that's very much the same thing. They think probably of something like an aortic aneurysm, which if you're overstraining, that can happen to you. Judy Garland died on the toilet.

No. Really? Yep. Admittedly, she was on barbiturates, but she did die on a toilet. Okay. And obviously the most famous one eating a burger on a toilet was the king. Elvis Aaron Presley. Indeed. I mean, and most recently

back in 2022, rapper Coolio died of a heart attack on a toilet while at a friend's house. So people are continuing to die on toilets. I imagine that ambulances must be called to the toilet quite frequently because it does put a strain on your body, doesn't it, when you're going to the loo?

We have lots of names for the toilet as well, don't we? We do have a few, don't we? I wonder whether this sort of comes from our English prudishness. We don't want to call it what it is. Well, I think it's the Americans. The Americans are even more prudish than us, aren't they? We'll ask to go to the loo or the toilet in a restaurant. But Americans, excuse me, where's the restroom?

The restroom, yes. Or the washroom. Washroom, yeah. So go on, what other euphemisms do we have for the toilet? There's loads. I mean, you know, the lavatory. Yeah. The latrine. The Americans call things like the john.

Yeah, I have no idea why they call it the john. I don't know why either. There we go, listeners, drop it in the comments. Exactly, exactly. And then there's things like the powder room. Yes. Where ladies go to powder their noses, which is exactly not what they're doing. Definitely not.

And you mentioned the privy as well. Yes, the private space, the privy, yeah. Yeah, there's just an awful lot of words. The WC. WC, so that's the water closet. The water closet. Which is very technically accurate, isn't it? You have a box full of water in the shape of a cistern.

That makes sense. And interestingly, toilet water is not the water that goes in the toilet. Right. This toilet water is what you were talking about earlier, with toilet being where you sort of get ready to go out. So that was the water that you put on before you went out. So eau de toilette. Eau de toilette, yes.

Water of the toilet, yes. Yes. And then because the British sort of conquered the world at some point, we brought back a lot of words from other countries. We brought back some Indian words like Kazi. Really? Yes. Didn't know that.

I always assumed that was German. There are people who don't think that it was Indian. They think it was just a Cockney word for toilet. Oh, no, I think it sounds more interesting your way. Well, I like to think that as well. Do you know where we get the word loo? toilet. Oh, no, I think it sounds more interesting your way. Well, I like to think that as well. Do you know where we get the word loo? No, tell me. So loo was a Scottish term from the 1700s, gardeloo. That in itself came from an old French phrase, gardeloo, which literally translates as watch out for the water. Oh, right. Which goes back to the medieval times.

Again, you'd use a pot inside the house. You'd chuck the contents of the pot out the window. You'd want to shout down to the street below, watch out for the water. But I imagine if you were doing that as you chucked it out, that doesn't give you much of a chance to dance out of the way. It might be slightly too late, mightn't it? But then there are other countries.

The Australians call it the dunny yes uh which is something to do with daddy's donut isn't it so that there's the dunny is basically the loo seat it is shaped like a donut oh that's brilliant i like that yeah because because they used to they used to be a there's a british, dunnakin, which meant dunghouse. Oh, all right. Okay. And then people say, oh, well, the dunny comes from dunnakin. Right. I think it's the donut in Granny's Greenhouse.

It's far more enjoyable. And then at sea, of course, you don't call it the toilet. Don't you? What do you call it? You call it the head. I beg your pardon? You say, I'm going to the head. I've never heard that before.

Have you not? No. So the head was basically at the front of the ship. Because the head's the head of the ship. Right, right. And you went in, there's like, again, sort of like a hole. Yes. And as you went, it would sort of wash away down the side of the ship.

That makes perfect sense um i don't know if they still do but there was a time when americans called it the crapper but i believe they named it the crapper after an english toilet manufacturer called thomas crapper aha now i thought he invented the toilet but he obviously didn't because you talked about john john harrington that's why they call it the john going to the john brilliant that is so obvious now you've said it out loud brilliant thank you for that puts our minds at ease um yes no so crapper didn't invent the toilet um as we've already discussed they're older than that but um thomas crapper was an english um plumber i believe uh around the the mid-1800s and he he had a few patents for toilets he he modernized the the way they work slightly he he patented the ball cock that you mentioned earlier on actually um he made developments in in u-bends and s-bends and things like that to keep the whiff

away yes of course the bottom of the toilet. So yes, he didn't invent them, but he did do quite a lot to modernise them. A lot of pottery companies, a lot of places that made porcelain around the Staffordshire area, started up a sideline of making toilets. There's a wonderful pottery museum in Stafford called the Gladstone Pottery,

and they have an entire section of their museum purely dedicated to toilets. Fascinating place to go. Brilliant. I mean, toilet factories are fairly dull places, I imagine. But one of the more interesting ones is in Japan, because if we sort of bring it up to date, there's a fabulous manufacturer called Toto.

Toto. Toto Toilets. Right, there's a fabulous manufacturer called Toto. Toto. Toto Toilets. Right, okay. And they're not in Kansas. They're not in Kansas anymore. No, they're not. Neither do they bless the rains down in Africa.

They might. I don't know. Yes, one of the few songs with the word Kilimanjaro in it. And Serengeti. Yes. Interesting. So Toto, you've probably heard of these toilets where you go to the loo and there's like flashing lights and a warm loo seat. Oh, yes.

And I believe, Simon, you have used one of these toilets. I have. I didn't realize they were called Toto. I didn't know that's what we were talking about. I have, yeah. There's a wonderful place in London called Japan House, which is part exhibition space, part shop, part restaurant, dedicated to the Japanese culture. Wonderful place to go. And a friend of mine took me for dinner in the restaurant at Japan House one day, and he sort of leant across the table and said, before we go, you really need to go and visit the toilet. Which I thought was slightly suspicious,

but I went to visit the toilet, i thought was slightly suspicious but i went to visit the toilet and goodness me he was right you know there's a panel on the wall full of buttons and everything was sort of led color changing lights and uh the toilet seat sort of rose up automatically the the air dryer the the jet of air to dry yourself afterwards came as a bit of a shock because I didn't know it was coming. But yes, I've never had such a luxurious visit to the bathroom. They are amazing. They are absolutely stunningly expensive. If they weren't eye-wateringly expensive, you have to be sitting down when somebody tells you the price.

And ideally, you're not sitting on the toilet. Go on then. But they are so expensive. They are thousands of pounds, these things. Really? Yeah. Really? They're ridiculous. But they are worth every penny, I believe.

Now, that's a handy little segue there. I often like to do records, the the biggest this the most expensive that the largest number of the other yes um i had a little look at uh the most expensive toilets in the world other than toto as you've just mentioned um in in japan there is a toilet which is covered in swarovski crystals and diamonds on the outside you wouldn't want to be sitting on that really you wouldn't want to be sitting on it and and probably not that practical to have the inside of the bowl studded with them either, you know, for cleanliness purposes. That's worth $128,000.

That's not the most expensive one. There's a company in China called the Hongfeng Gold Technology Company who make stuff out of gold. Of course they do. And they have an exhibition called the Hall of Gold Fame. And they have various golden artifacts in there. They have a golden toilet, which is worth $4 million. Sorry, say that again? $4 million. For a toilet? Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it's necessarily usable. I think it's there as a display of what they can

do if they really wanted to um but even that is not the most expensive toilet in the world go on then the most expensive toilet in the world is well actually it's not in the world it's on the international space station the toilet facilities on the international space station cost five million dollars and essentially it's it's a small suction device with straps that you can sort of harness onto yourself to fix it in place, and it sucks your waste out. It has a filtration system inside it to filter the water out of your waste,

clean it up, and recycle it as drinking water for the crew on the space station. Five million dollars worth of loo. That's interesting because I thought you were going to go for two million dollars. No, no, no, no, no. Why stop there? Well, see, two million dollars is just one urinal. There's a urinal worth two million dollars? There is a urinal worth two million dollars. Go on, where's that?

And it's a piece of art that was created by marcel duchamp okay in 1917 uh and it's it's just an ordinary ordinary thing but he signed it our mutt right and it's worth two million dollars it's it's it's it is a very well-known piece of art it's called fountain. OK. I can't think of anything else I really want to say about toilets. Can you? No, I'm sure there are many other things we could talk about, but I can't think of anything else I really want to talk about. But people might, so that's where they can... Well, first of all, they should like, subscribe,

and as we've mentioned several times in this episode, comment. Comment on it. Whether good or bad, it's all valued feedback. And if you've enjoyed listening to us, then good, you're our kind of person. Thank you very much. And listen again. Yeah, listen again. Tell your friends about it.

The more the merrier. So thank you for listening. Please come again. We've been Simon Wells. And we've been Bruce Fielding. And this has been Fact or Orally. Thank you. Goodbye.

Cheerio.