Tippler toilets
 

Breaktime office banter in the soft South and nobody here had heard of Tippler Toilets. They took some convincing until I found this link on the Ramsbottom Heritage site

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Have they heard of 'thunderboxes' ?

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..and garderobes
Garderobe

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So when we had moved on to tipplers they were still emptying their potties out of the upstairs windows onto passers by? Or nipping round the back to use the pit loo.

Poor devils, glad you're educating them.

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I was the works engineer at Ducketts of Burnley in the early 60's but they had ceased to make the tipplers by then, there were a few old bits and pieces in an out building there.
The main product was earthenware sewer pipes and the old gents urinals which were made by slicing a large pipe down the middle and hand shaping it before glazing it white.

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I am not telling em' yet that back in the early 50's when visiting my maternal Great Grandmother up in Barley Mow, County Durham we had to use an earth privy.
I'll save the graphic description of that until lunchtime ;)

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Preferably while they're eating!

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Precisely GB :cool:

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i note that this was posted by D the Pee.

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I thought "Tippler" meant it was something to do with this:
http://www.dvdreams.co.uk/webcam/2013-12-04.GIF

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Uneducated oiks down yon "D";):D just glad theres someone wi sense to educate the numpties.

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First time I brought some Cissy Green's down here Ol, I think they thought they was some kind of roadkill pie...."ooo whats that shiny stuff on top" said one "Is it fat?" :)

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I remember our tippler toilet on Stonebridge Lane in the early 70's, it was proper disgusting. In winter it use to freeze up and we used to use long cane sticks to un jam it and then in summer it stunk to high heaven, never again lol.

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When I was a child we used to spend weekends at a farm in Ingleton with no mains drains - I have used one - it had a double holed wooden board over the short drop to the pile - YUK!

Why seating for two? - it wasn't as though you would need conversation whilst you did it - anyways you can't converse whilst holding your breath.

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Our caving hostel was at Braida Garth,Kingsdale Margaret, we had a chemical bog but as callow youths who was gonna chip in any beer money for any Elsan Blue? Les in the Marton Arms got first dibs on our brass, & there were times in high summer when whosoever was elected to empty it had to use a demand valve and diving bottle to breathe as he carried it out.

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There were no chemicals for the one I spoke of.
'Cleaning' was a shovel parked outside - for use when the pile was high enough to reach your bum.

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Elsan Blue- happy memories.
The first time I was a rally marshal for our caravan club we had a farmers field in Gisburn.
No site toilets so every caravan used its Elsan toilet all weekend-basically a bucket with a seat on and another bucket inside with Elsan in it.
One marshal dug a large hole at the bottom of the field to empty the toilets in. On the Sunday night as everyone left the other marshals asked me( the newbie) to tidy up the site and fill the hole etc.
It was a lovely night but very windy.
When I got round to filling the hole( now a big blue pond with various floating things) I realized how big it was and how much soil I was going to have to shovel.I was going to be there all night.
Right, I thought, big fit lad, big shovel, get stuck in.
I dug deep in the pile of soil, swung hard and sent a good load into the pond.
As I said it was a windy night and not being an expert at this -I was standing downwind!

As the soil flew up it flashed into my mind what I had just done and what was about to happen! It did.

The poo, paper etc soon washed off and I changed clothes but I still had the pond to fill in- that took a long while.
However, Elsan Blue is a very strong dye and word soon went round the offices the next day-'Come and see the blue boss'. I looked like an ancient Briton.
It took all week to get the blue off my face and I couldn't get near my wife for days.

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My Grandma and Grandad had a two hole lavvy out in the yard.
There was an adult size hole and then a much smaller one - I guess for a child.
They also had a flush lavvy in the house.
I didn't like the flush lavvy - it made such a noise when it was flushed(i thought something was going to come up the bowl and grab hold of me)...but I didn't like the outside lavvy either.

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Think there's another thread about smells that stay with you?

At my Great Grandmothers your privy "doings's" as she called em' were covered with ash from the coal fire. Now and again some hot ash still in there sizzled and sparked as it came into contact with the doings's.
I've always thought thats how the word hum became associated with smells.

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Back in the 60's people were getting grants to have a bathroom fitted especially in terraced houses, I was an apprentice plumber then and this meant it was my job to dig out the old tippler and then either fit a flush toilet in its place or concrete over after filling in the hole. It took a day to do this and 3 days to get over the sewer gas smell!

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We had a Tippler when I was growing up in Great Harwood. We didn't have toilet paper so we use cut up newspapers. They came in handy in the winter when I used to light a bundle with a match and throw them down. That warmed things up but I finished up with a smoky bum !

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Surely it's a generation thing rather than north/south. Tipplers were normal in Ossy (up until the 1960s?) and some parts without sewers had tubs that used to be emptied by hand into a council wagon - nice job. But in one of his books Spike Milligan refers to the 'night soil' lorry doing the rounds in Bexhill-on-Sea (and you can't get much further south than that). I think there were a lot more flies when we had tipplers.

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When I first arrived in Canada, I lived in Kincaid, a small village in southern Saskatchewan. Here it is ... a little smaller, but still there:



Village of Kincaid - Home

Every house had a biffy ... the only buildings with sewer and running water were the school and the hotel ... it was bad in summer (temps up to 40c) and worse in winter (temps down to -45c) ... but folks got by. On Hallow'een, the kids used to move the biffy off the hole ... more than one unsuspecting citizen fell down a hole:eek: ... and this was the late sixties. The highways weren't paved ... and most homes had their drinking water hauled in. But the folks were the children and grandchildren of homesteaders, and most could remember the dust bowl of the "dirty thirties". Farmers always carried a roll ot tp in their trucks, tractors, and combines ... when you are summer fallowing the back forty, you take a dump out in the field:D :)

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The night soil lorry would be referring to the emptying of an earth privy I reckon DBT.
Back to my Great Grandmothers in Durham they didn't have running water in the home using a communal stand pipe in the early 50's. They couldn't have had a tipples so hence the "soil privy"

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Drove from Calgary to Lake Louise severalty years ago Eric used the Bow Valley Trail Road, incredibly scenic. Stopped off at a Provincial Park to do a bit of a valley/river walk and watch some moose. Had to use the restrooms. Reckon it was a biffy :D there were more flies there than on Whinny Hill Tip.

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There were night soil lorries still around in Walsden when I was growing up.
They had a curved cover over the back which could be slid up from either side to allow the "night soil" to be tipped in from the tub.
The little stone hut at the bottom of the yard had a small door opening into the back lane where the tub could be pulled out.
One chap I remember well, Called Fred Scutt, was only small and when he lifted the tub to tip it in the lorry it was over his head, I never saw him spill any. He always wore wellies about two sizes too small.
We could only buy fireworks after the 4th November but you could bet that within an hour some one had thrown one through the small door trying to blow someone off the board over the tub.

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I think tippler toilets were one of the great moves forward in hygiene from the earth closet and the like. I think it is a north / south thing because I've never met anybody in the south who's come across them. They probably moved straight on to the next step, indoor flush toilets but it took them longer to come to terms with better sanitation.

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Down the pit in the sixties we didn't have any flush or tippler toilets apart from in the pit bottom there were Racasan toilets half filled with racasan chemicals. For every 100 people working down the pit there had to be 1 of these tubs. A certain gentleman who we named Jimmy Racasan had the luxurious job to bring them out the pit when they were full and empty them down the sewers. One Friday his wage was wrong and the pay clerk told him he would have to wait till next week for his money. Jimmy Racasan accidentally tipped a completely full tub of racasan chemicals and some other disgusting stinking smelly human crap through the pay office window. His pay was never wrong again. I must add that the photo attached bears no resemblance to the ones we had. I think we used old 5 gallon oil drums.

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We had a tippler toilet in Ossy until about 1958 when the Urban District Council started giving Grants. We then had one of the two back bedrooms converted into a bathroom with flush toilet, washbasin and bath. Prior to that it was the "old tin bath". When you were a child and not big enough to use the tippler you used a "potty" in the house. Adults also had them under the bed to use at night. You went to bed with a hot water bottle - rubber if you were a child, a stone bottle if you were an adult. Those were the days!

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It seems like only yesterday!

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Ah ... the good old "po" ... :alright:

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There must surely be a stone hot water bottle in the new Heritage Museum Judith maybe even a "gazzunder" ?

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I have both - they were my entry in photo comp#62
http://www.accringtonweb.com/gallery...1-31-86051.jpg

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When I started University in 1975 one of the first things we had to do was to search the 1971 for various facts about where we lived, one of them being the percentage of houses without an indoor toilet. When I returned with the figure for Clayton the tutor refused to believe it because it was so high. When I went back to check I did some more research and discovered that the old Clayton UDC had the second highest percentage of houses without indoor sanitation in the country. I forget exactly where the highest was but it was somewhere in the West Lancs coalfield. The thing was that it had never particularly bothered me as a kid. We didn't get an indoor bathroom or toilet until 1971 although the tippler was replaced by a flush toilet sometime in the 60's.

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Just wondering a bit, when you mentioned piling high enough to reach your bum, it reminded me of using a commode in hospital:D

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I remember that too Dave, can remember thinking at the time that I was glad I'd become an apprentice Joiner and not a plumber:D