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Women who visited some of the city’s wash-houses were among historians and authors sharing stories at a memories session at the Lee Jones Centre, on Limekiln Lane.
The first wash-house for poor people in Liverpool, and Britain, was started by Kitty Wilkinson on Upper Frederick Street.
Irish-born Kitty, who came to Liverpool as a child, pioneered the communal wash-houses during the 1832 Cholera epidemic.
Known as the “Saint of the Slums”, she and her husband Tom had a boiler fitted in the scullery of their home in Denison Street to create the first wash-house.
Maria Francis, 83, from Bootle, remembers swinging on a lamp- post outside a wash-house in Dingle as a child.
Mrs Francis said: “My sister and I used to hang around outside swinging on the lamp-post waiting for someone to give us a penny to watch their washing.
“We used to sit on the piles of washing so they didn’t lose their place in the queue.
“There were 13 children in our house and our mum used to go the wash-house for a bit of time on her own and have a good gossip with the other women.”
The wash-house idea took off around the country in the 1840s, with Liverpool being used as an exemplar of how they should be run.
Author Mike Kelly, who wrote The Life and Times of Kitty Wilkinson, said: “People lived in small, cramped houses with little or no running water.
“In 1828, they built courts houses where eight houses shared two toilets, with no running water and one pipe that lasted for 15 minutes. No wonder cholera was rife. History cites a doctor as discovering cholera was waterborne, but it was Kitty who found that many years earlier.”
Kitty died in 1860, aged 73. Rich and poor attended her burial at St James Cemetery, Liverpool.
Source:
Liverpool Daily Post
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