Monday Washing Lines

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West End Washing Line

Unlike many participants in Andrew’s Monday Washing Lines theme, I don’t have a stash of pictures of artfully draped laundry on balconies in exotic locations. However, I spotted this line in an unusually visible back garden on one of my recent Glasgow West End wanders. This also prompted some childhood memories of wash day.

Ma sheen
Pegging out

On the left, above, I am standing in the kitchen of my first home, aged about 2½ years. The washer behind me was, as I remember, red and white, and lifting off the lid revealed a mangle folded beneath. I was unable to say the word machine and referred to it as the sheen. My mother said to me one day: Anabel, don’t say sheen, say MAchine. I looked at her very seriously and replied: But Mummy, it’s not MA sheen. It’s YOUR sheen! Mum sent this anecdote to a women’s magazine which published it on its readers’ letters page – we still have the magazine to prove it!

Perched on my shoulder is a budgie named, in retrospect unfortunately, Boris. A few years later, he provided my first encounter with death. I’m not sure how the concept was explained to me, but I still remember being completely puzzled as to why he was put in a flower bed.

Fast forward a few more years, and two houses, and I am now about 7 or 8. I find it odd that I am posing in my bathing suit and my sister is wearing a cardigan, given that I was usually the child shivering in her coat on the beach as everyone else cavorted around half naked. However, posed or not, here is visible proof that I have pegged out a washing at least once in my life. I’m not sure if we still had the same washing machine, or had moved on to a twin tub by then. I remember that, then a huge, heavy top-loader, and a spin-drier that danced across the floor if you didn’t load it right. Thank goodness for modern conveniences: I’m leaving you right now to unload my automatic washer!

Scotland, UK ,

79 Comments »

  1. Anabel, so interesting to read your memories of doing the wash in your early years. In my early childhood, my Mom used a wringer washer, which had to be rolled into the middle of the kitchen and the hose attached to the faucet. We were not allowed to go near it because Mom was worried we get our hands caught in the wringers. She pinned the wet clothes out on the clothes line, and in minus 30 or minus 40 temperatures, the frozen clothes would be brought indoors and stacked like boards to thaw. I don’t know how she did it, especially in the years of diapers.

    Jude

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  3. Hi Anabel – I remember it well hanging out washing many times in my life – but I have no photos to prove it! Love those early photos of you … and your Boris …
    I wrote about the finials that have been rescued from the washing lines built into Basil Jellicoe’s St Pancras and Humanist Housing development in the late 1800s – the finials are on display in the foyer basement of the British Library. Jellicoe is a well known housing reformer, who died very young. No clothes though …

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  5. You might not have photos of washing lines in exotic locations, but you do have some incredible memories and photos of the past! And that’s more entertaining (to me) than colorful clothes lines in the Med. 🙂 Love that anecdote from when you were a child as well. I was scratching my head as to how you could possibly remember all this. The proof in the magazine might have something to do with that!

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  9. These photos are great, and thank you for evoking childhood memories in me too. Did your mother insist that washing was hung out in a particular way? Certain things on certain parts of the line, socks with the soles facing the sun to help clean them, pillowcases positioned perfectly to allow the wind to blow them open and speed up the drying? 😀

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  10. Liked the old photos. I was spared hanging out washing as a kid (far too small to reach the line anyway) but I do remember all the 1960s kitchen gadgets. I’ve watched all the Back in Time series on TV and there’s definitely a kind of mental alchemy that occurs with nostalgia that you can almost bottle. Memories/things/people that you haven’t thought about for many, many decades are suddenly recalled instantly by a visual object in a house.

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  11. When I was just a tad younger, my mother had a washing machine with a hand turned wringer on top. The Wringer had cogs. Some one recently put a picture of one such machine on Facebook and asked if anyone remembered a machine like this,. I said that I did and still had the scar to prove it
    It never occurred to me ( I think I was about 6 ) that it would cause damage to my finger. I actually thought sticking my finger in the cog would cause the machine to stop – a good joke to play on my mum. So that’s what I did.. We wont go into what followed I leave that to your fertile imagination. Did that cure me of being silly? Not really, I tried to electrocute myself – but that’s another story.

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  12. Enjoyed the photos and stories of your early days washing machines. There was a period in my life when we hung our wash out to dry, but it didn’t last long.

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  13. Fashionista hanger of washing 🙂 I agree with Jo that us kids did look very different compared to the kids nowadays. Not many if any fashion labels about to give companies free advertising 🙂

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  16. No photos of washing days form my childhood, though my memories are very similar to yours. The closest I have to shots of washing on the line are a few “family snaps” my mum took of us all sitting in the garden. She never managed to point the camera in the right place, and shots tended to include the tops of our heads, sometime’s Dad’s whole head, and whatever was on the washing line.

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  17. I don’t think our early masheen was red and white, but it had a mangle that folded down (or up) and it ran on gas!
    And you at 2 look very like me at 1 – I ex[ect it’s just the luscious locks.
    Um… is that a real dog in the other picture?

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  19. Oh wonderful! The memories and the photos. I remember having a toy washing machine in which I could actually wash my dolls clothes. No photos though.

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      • Incidentally, we also had an old fashioned washing machine with a mangle. One day my mother got distracted and my youngest brother, who can’t have been more than 2, decided to have a closer look and his arm got pulled through. It necessitated a trip to hospital. Fortunately, no bones broken – probably as he was so young. The sheen was off to the tip pronto after that. Don’t think we could afford a more modern one for a while, though.

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        • That’s horrific – and actually, I remember something similar happening to a child we knew. Mangles must have been lethal. Back to the washboard for your mum, then? That’s all one of my grannies ever had. Used over the wooden bath, a phenomenon I have never come across anywhere else.

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          • The mangles on these machines weren’t guarded – but if they were that would surely have been “‘elf and safety gone mad”.
            I think my mum resorted to handwashing and the launderette until my parents could afford a modern machine. But I was very young myself so the memories are hazy. I remember the arm going into the mangle well enough as well as the rush to hospital. The same brother also got run over by an ambulance when a young teenager.
            My other brother once bit a neighbour’s dog on its nose.
            What a family 😂

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      • I’ve been very conservative so far Anabel! Had the same theme more or less since I set the blog up. Have been absent for a little while as sadly we’ve had a family bereavement in the UK. My brother in law passed away last week – not unexpected but nevertheless a shock and obviously like many other families we have been dealing with things from afar. Hope all is well with you – things seem to be opening up a bit more now. Cautious steps forward I guess.

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  24. I love your photos. I inherited a twin tub when I got married. I always managed to soak the floor.

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  25. Aw what fab photos and memories. Love little Boris on your shoulder. Is the dog real or a toy in the second photo. I don’t think I have any photos of me on washing day but we have some old cini film with my gran hanging out the washing on a blowy day at the farm. She had a clothes mangle. X

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    • It’s a toy dog which belonged to my sister. I’m sure it had a name, but I can’t remember what it was. The cine film sounds a wonderful thing to have. My uncle made a cine film of me when I was a little older than the first photo. I know I have a video copy somewhere in my files, I’ll need to find it and see if I can post it.

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  27. A great post which prompted some memories of my own and also gave me a giggle. I remember my mum having a similar type of washing machine with the mangle (or wringers as she called it) folded down inside it. It was cream trimmed with green and as far as I can remember it was a Hoover. She also had a Flatley drier, an electric cabinet about the same size as the washing machine – the washing was hung on wooden rods which fitted into slots just inside at the top.

    Now I know the death of a pet isn’t funny, especially when you’re a child, but your sentence about Boris being put in the flower bed made me laugh 🙂 And quite coincidentally, I’m just about to rescue my washing from the machine 🙂

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    • Thanks, Eunice. We had a Flatley too, I should have added that! Also useful for standing next to to keep warm in a pre-central heating house. The budgie in the flower bed seemed very weird, but if that’s what your Daddy tells you he’s doing I guess at that age you just accept it without question.

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  28. I don’t have many either Anabel of the artfully draped washing, but I too remember wash days and had my own little line to peg out some hankies or socks. Great retro photos, I’ve got many like that with the essential knitted cardigan

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