My toilet from the first house I remember circa 1955

Ronni

Ronni

Well-known Member
Location
Nashville TN
This is a pretty good representation of the toilet in the very first house I can remember living in as a child. We moved to it when I was 2. The toilet was outside, down the back stairs and along a pathway bordered by rose bushes.

I don't see the chain that you have to pull to make the toilet flush. Also in our toilet, there was a hook next to the seat on which were skewered torn pieces of newspaper. That was our toilet paper.

Things sure have changed😂

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Ronni said:
This is a pretty good representation of the toilet in the very first house I can remember living in as a child. We moved to it when I was 2. The toilet was outside, down the back stairs and along a pathway bordered by rose bushes.

I don't see the chain that you have to pull to make the toilet flush. Also in our toilet, there was a hook next to the seat on which were skewered torn pieces of newspaper. That was our toilet paper.

Things sure have changed😂

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yep exactly the same as the ones that were shared by the tenants in the slum testaments in the city where I was born.....not my house.. but over on the other side of the city where my grandparents lived...everyone had to share one toilet which was on the landing. One toilet between 5 families on each landing..

My grandfather's flat was on the ground floor and they were the only ones to have their own personal inside toilet..

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The ones below were outside toilets shared by some houses...

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Now you are seeing reproductions of these toilets being put in. Some years ago I was at a restaurant where they were trying to redo the entire building in original period style. The porcelain wasn't this fancy, but it had all brass plumbing. What they had done with using the original tin ceilings was beautiful.

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Lilac said:
Now you are seeing reproductions of these toilets being put in. Some years ago I was at a restaurant where they were trying to redo the entire building in original period style. The porcelain wasn't this fancy, but it had all brass plumbing. What they had done with using the original tin ceilings was beautiful.

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the high cistern toilet has become extremely fashionable again

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We grew up with an outhouse......and boy was it cold in winter...it had a two hole bench type sitdown,,,,dunno why as two of us never went in at same time.....:poop:
 
I had that toilet in one of the old tenements I lived in in NYC. The toilet was in the hall, outside the apartment. It was locked and private but was outside the living area.
 
My grandparents had an outhouse when they first built (1920s) in the area where I grew up. City sewer didn't go out there until the 30s. Grandpa built a "two-seater", one was low for the kids & the other was adult size.
 
If it wasn't for redoing the plumbing in the house now, I would put one of the reproductions in. It wasn't available when we built in 1990.
 
To give some perspective to those shared toilets in the slum tenements... here's the back yard ( they were called Back courts ) They were filthy, rat ridden, places where the middens were , and the only place for families to hang out washing and the children to play. These tenements were still standing as late as the 80's... so not a century ago as you might imagine..

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Looking at the picture.. the middle windows above the back court door.. are the windows on each landing...and where each outside toilet was situated..

The slum tenements looked like this from the front...

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Ronni said:
This is a pretty good representation of the toilet in the very first house I can remember living in as a child. We moved to it when I was 2. The toilet was outside, down the back stairs and along a pathway bordered by rose bushes.

I don't see the chain that you have to pull to make the toilet flush. Also in our toilet, there was a hook next to the seat on which were skewered torn pieces of newspaper. That was our toilet paper.

Things sure have changed😂

View attachment 301051
Click to expand...
Strangely, it feels nostalgic. Ours was outside. I remember on freezing cold nights and days making that trek.
Yet we accepted things as they were.
 
hollydolly said:
WE grew up with a High cistern toilet... not a shared one..... and I had one in this house for the first 20 years.... more modern than those old ones in the previous pictures
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The thing is they worked fine. I don't recall any blockages or failure to flush.

Now is unbelievable luxury. The bathroom next to our bedroom, all carpets and warmth. We are so very very lucky.
 
Looking back at that loo reminds of ripping newspapers into squares making a hole in them for the string to go through and hung on the toilet door.
Then we had Izal medicated toilet paper (bit like tracing paper in look and dreadful on the bum :LOL: ). We had the square variety rather than the rolls. I can still smell them now I'm talking about them.
Toilet paper today is SUCH a luxury from those days.

Ooooh, and another memory of those days. The men always used to sit for hours on the loo reading the newspaper, smoking a fag and then chucking it down the loo, that was always left floating around after the toilet was flushed :LOL:
 

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