{"id":454,"date":"2017-05-04T19:02:46","date_gmt":"2017-05-04T18:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brandonheritage.org.uk\/?p=454"},"modified":"2017-05-04T19:02:46","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T18:02:46","slug":"454-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/?p=454","title":{"rendered":"Wash day in Thetford Road"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cherry Rogers remembers her mum and nan on wash day …<\/p>\n

\"\"
Nana with some dry washing, she doesn’t look very pleased. Background the land Newell’s sawmill was on next door.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Monday was washday.\u00a0 Tuesday ironing.\u00a0 Wednesday bedrooms.\u00a0 Thursday front room, which was only used at Christmas, so why it needed cleaning every week I don\u2019t know – a quick dust and that would have been it, blinking freezing in there anyway! \u00a0 The only good thing was I could dust the piano and pretend to be Winnie Atwell, giving it a real good bash.\u00a0 Friday was living room – mats were taken outside to shake, hung up and had the living daylights bashed out of them.\u00a0 Lino round the sides of the mats was polished.\u00a0 The dusters were washed and knitwear and hand washing was done.\u00a0 Nothing was ever done on a Sunday as it was a day of rest – a walk round Tip and home via the Plough or down Fengate Drove and round Weeting in the afternoon.\u00a0 Chapel in the evening.\u00a0 Sunday tea, and if you were posh a tin of fruit with Nestle\u2019s cream from a tin which you had to shake like the clappers to re-mix it and get it thick.\u00a0 My Dad always ate bread and butter with his and wanted me to, but no thank you.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Monday was washday.\u00a0 We had a big scullery at Thetford Road with a ‘Dutch oven’ and a copper in it, but I don\u2019t remember Mum using them.\u00a0 Dad kept tins of paint in the Dutch oven and Mum had a gas copper which you fitted on the side of the cooker.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t use it much, just for the bath water because she went down to help Nana and they did the washing together.\u00a0 Nana lit the fire under the copper in the wash house and Mum brought her washing down from Thetford Road balanced on my bike in a wicker basket.\u00a0 She tried to ride with it a couple of times … with disastrous consequences.\u00a0 They filled the copper with buckets of water and got it boiling.\u00a0 Two tin baths were filled with water for rinsing and a small bath with Recketts blue bag to make the washing whiter and another small one with starch.\u00a0 Washing was sorted into piles – anything with stains was scrubbed with a bar of soap on the washboard, sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, tea towels and white terry towels all went in to boil.\u00a0 Sometimes towels were done separately, depending on the quantity of washing.\u00a0 They were poked and prodded with the copper stick – an old broom handle cut down a bit and boiled so much it was white at the end and frayed.\u00a0 When the whites came out the coloureds went in the hot water but were not boiled.<\/p>\n

The mangle was wheeled forward, the wing nut tightened and linen was mangled.\u00a0 It was rinsed twice, put in blue bag and or starched, being mangled between each process.\u00a0 The last process was mangling two or three times tightening it up each time.<\/p>\n

Washing was hung out, mangle rollers dried and loosened baths emptied.\u00a0 The water in the copper was used to scrub the wash house floor and the path between the wash house and the house.\u00a0 Then Mum wheeled her washing home to dry.
\nBelow Nana with some dry washing, she doesn’t look very pleased. Background the land Newell’s sawmill was on next door.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cherry Rogers remembers her mum and nan on wash day … Monday was washday.\u00a0 Tuesday ironing.\u00a0 Wednesday bedrooms.\u00a0 Thursday front room, which was only used at Christmas, so why it needed cleaning every week I don\u2019t know – a quick dust and that would have been it, blinking freezing in there anyway! \u00a0 The only<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":455,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[104,111,199,282,299],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memories","tag-cherry-rogers","tag-copper","tag-mangle","tag-thetford-road","tag-wash-day","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandonheritage.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}