Outdoor drying and bleaching

Sun on the bleaching ground

When Sunlight Soap was named in the 1880s, spreading laundry in the sun was the best way of whitening it. For centuries this had worked to counteract yellowing from storage, from soaking in urine, or from certain soap ingredients.

Bleaching and drying both used to be outdoor activities, and they were closely related. The stretch of grass set aside for these jobs was called a bleaching-green or drying-ground. Whether you were spreading off-white linen on the ground to bleach in the sun, or just putting your laundry there to dry, or if you were hanging it on a breezy line, you wanted a:

"grassy corner well open to the sun,...sheltered from high winds...the attentions of wandering poultry... and the incursions of pigs, puppies and calves...they not only soil the clothes, but will tear and even eat them"
Katherine Purdon, Laundry at Home, 1902, quoted by Pamela Sambrook in The Country House Servant, 1999

Whitsters

A drying area could be communal, for a whole village perhaps, private for a large house, or owned by a cloth manufacturer. Domestic bleaching could take days. Before the 19th century, and the arrival of modern chemicals, it was sometimes done by professionals called whitsters. Whitsters visited large, prosperous households at intervals to "spring-clean" the linen, or worked on their own premises.

Household and personal linen was spread on the grass, soaked with buckets of lye at intervals, and eventually rinsed and dried. There were variations, like using plain water and no lye, and the process might last as much as three days.

Drying on a clothes line

As well as using grass, you could spread laundry on hedges and bushes. If you had poles, rope and pins/pegs you could have a clothes line. Until the 20th century clothes pins were quite simple pieces of wood: split twigs bound with wire or twine like these made by English Romanies, or very plainly-cut wood like the German ones in the photo (left).

In a recent episode of the BBC version of Cranford, a gypsy from the 1840s was selling suspiciously machine-smooth wooden pegs. Take a look at these English examples and this collection from an Austrian museum to get an idea of how simple a hand-made clothes peg could be.

Stones hold these saris flat while they're spread out to dry in Pondicherry, India. (Below right)

5 December 2007

For more on old laundry methods see:
Great wash and washdays
Bluing white laundry
Washing bats and beetles
Ashes, lye and bucking
Lye and chamber-lye
Washboards
Washing dollies
History of ironing

 

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