ootside toilets....first home and all that..ha

We shared a toilet with 3 families no bathroom just the tin bath on Sundays .

I lived in one of them as a student! In Dundee in the 60s. Mattress on the floor in the kitchen alcove.....three in two rooms

But I also remember being shown an outside privy in Wales with two seats, by my mum who had one when she was young - and was glad of the company in the night!

When my eldest son was a year old, 45 years ago, we lived in a house with a toilet in a row outside the yard. Outside the back gate, there was a tenfoot for the coal lorries to get down. Each house had a coalshed with a toilet next door. Needless to say we used a bucket inside at night.
We only lived there for six months over winter. Didn't need a fridge.
There was one electric point in the house, and a cold tap. We had an oven for cooking in, next to the fire. You pulled out a damper to get the heat to swirl round the outside of the oven.
No bathroom.We used to go over the road to Ken's parents on a Sunday to have a bath.
Beamish Museum makes me feel quite at home.

For the first four years of my life I lived in an old farm cottage with an outside toilet. I can remember a lot about the cottage but not the toilet! My parents had to leave because it was a tied cottage and after waiting in vain for a council house they decided to take the plunge into home ownership - the first of their families to ever do such a thing! My mum thought she had died and gone to heaven when she moved into her brand new semi with an indoor bathroom. It became a bit of a ritual that relatives would come for Sunday tea and have a bath while they were there!

I lived in a tenement flat as a student in London, with a toilet in the corner of the kitchen (yuk). It was grim.

I had a "netty" geordie for outside toilet until I was 23, very difficult trying to potty train toddlers when you live in a upstairs flat

Hence the bucket in the upstairs bedroom, Hebrideanlady. I didn't use the word netty because I wasn't sure how many would understand.
Concrete floors and no carpets wasn't much fun, either. I can understand why women were not expected to go out to work when they had young kids. Housework took much longer then.
At least Nappisan had been invented, so we could wash nappies out in cold water and hang them on the line to solidify in the snow.

When we were children we had a jerry under the bed, posh people had chamber pots.

Both my grandmothers had outside loos. Little nan's was in a row at the bottom of the yard. The yard was shared by the 5 other terraced houses. Big nan was posh she had a private garden with her own outside loo. They didn't move from their respective properties until mid 60's

I've asked this before but how come newspaper didn't block the pipes? Oh the arguements that shared outside loos caused when I was little.

We were married in 1963, lived in a terraced cottage, row of 5, plus a shop, 3 toilets in the yard that we shared. It IS strange Tegan, that newspaper didn`t block the pipes then, when it doesn`t take much to block everything nowadays. I remember one night, we had visitors, SIL and her hubby and son, me and her were in the kitchen and I need the toilet, neither of us fancied the yard in the dark, didn`t like to ask hubby in front of BIL, so she suggested I "go" on the plastic bucket. I was 8 months pregnant, and the bucket split!! So had a wet floor to mop, and a new bucket to buy!

The cistern froze every winter no matter how many time the chain was pulled, a candle in a flower pot sometimes helped

Our first flat had an outside netty in 1976, proved very tricky getting down the steep steps in the heavy frost pregnant. We had to go to the parents for a bath.

We had an outside toilet that was cold, damp and full of spiders. Our neighbour used newspaper but had a roll of soft paper for visitors. The only problem was that the soft paper would start to disintegrate because of the damp and just crumpled into soggy pieces if anyone tried to pull it off the roll.

In my parents first house we had an outside toilet I just don't know how my poor mum managed to get us toilet trained she had four under 7yrs,my twin brother always beat me to the toilet in the mornings and he was a typical boy never put the seat up,I will never forgive him for that and make sure he remembers it to this day.

vampirequeen Surely you don't mean soft toilet paper? I seem to remember horrid hard, non absorbent paper - was it Izal or Jeyes? Made good tracing paper but not much good for the intended purpose

Yogagran, you probably mean IZAL, my auntie and step-sister worked at their factory in Chapeltown, near Sheffield, so we got it for free, it was considered a luxury after newspaper!

We had IZAL in our toilet but our neighbour had real soft paper. It was very very expensive hence it was only for visitors.

I remember when the college I went to was closing down that the bursar found a stock of shiny loopaper and put it in all the toilets. We all used to make sure we had our own so there was still lots left, which presumably had to be sent to the main college at Lincoln.

We had an outside toilet as well in the '50s.It was at the bottom of the back yard and my parents put a pariffin stove in in winter to stop it freezing.
We also had no bathroom, the actual bath was under the kitchen bench which lifted up.Two of my sisters and myself would all get in together to save water.We would always fight about whose turn it was to be last out so we could lie down in the water-what luxury.
My mother used to cut up the tissue paper the bread was wrapped in for toilet paper or use newspaper, it never blocked the pipes either.Sometimes she bought toilet paper, but it was always the hard shiny kind, Izal or Bronco.

Yes, my Mum did that with bread wrappings, and also orange wrappings, so the outside lav had bread and oranges adding to the other pongs. We had both an outside and indoor lav at our council house: Dad always used the outside one - he thought we were mucky if we used the indoor one for anything but nighttime. Mostly, the rest of us ignored him on that matter!

Before we got the council house we lived in an old mill house and shared the lav with the couple next door. When his wife died he started getting visits from prostitutes, so Mum forbade us from using the shared lav - we had a commode in the scullery (an unused room) which she emptied into the lav. The council house must have seemed like the ultimate luxury to Mum: I was only 5 and probably didn't appreciate it all.

When I joined the Civil Service in 1961, the very shiny hard toilet paper was stamped "Government Property".

The entrance to our Andersons shelter built in the back-yard, was about four feet from the entrance to the outside toilet - very convenient(!) during an air-raid. The only toilet we had. The tin bath we bathed in was put in front of the fire in winter, and would get roasting hot on one side (Don't touch!) and cold on the other. The washing was done once a week on the boiler which was duly stoked with firewood first thing Monday morning.

We lived in a tied cottage (1950's) and had electricity, running water and an inside bathroom. My dad had to come from work briefly when I came home from school to light the gas lights.

Most years I went on holiday to my granddad's farm in Ireland-an outside loo not very close to the house. We had to pump the water we required, carry it to the house and heat as needed. There was a potty under my bed but thankfully in those days I did not need to go to the loo several times a night!

When I first came to London in 1968, I used to visit my aunt and her friend who lived in a tenement block off Shaftesbury Avenue and there was a loo on every second floor. We had to take our own IZAL paper. The block was demolished I think in 1971 and they moved to a council block with their own bathroom, -sheer bliss.

We never had problems with newspaper blocking pipes. I just wish we had had pipes to block. Our toilet was in the back yard, wooden seat with room for two (but for some reason my mother had screwed a cover on one so no company) and everything went into a bucket which when it was full to almost overflowing my dad took out, dug a shallow hole in the orchard and tipped it in. Years later we found the well where we got all our water from and yes it was in the orchard ! The water came through lead pipes too and had to be pumped by hand into the cistern. Maybe that is why we are all pretty healthy.
( And IZAL was considered posh !)