As an extension to the ground floor’s back addition, which was the single scullery, the lavatory was three feet wide and five feet in depth. It provided a fixed, full width seat of scrubbed wood.
Covering the space between the toilet’s brick walls, it provided the appropriate hole needed to access a brown glazed earthenware lavatory bowl. Complementing this wooden bench and providing some relief to the white washed walls, large squares of cut newspaper tied together by string were often thumbed through to look for some lost article of interest. With plenty of spare toilet paper in the shape of another newspaper, it was always possible to read the news once again if contemplating the rapid movement of insects over the ground became boring.
Overhead the cast iron water cistern’s metal chain provided the means to flush the bowl, but only if jerked in a manner to allow its corroded pin to rotate.
Scrubbed each day, the fixed seat would often lead to complaints about the careless use of this amenity. So much so that the careful and judicious use of the toilet was an important part of any child’s training in Wendon Street.
With each mother being measured by her own child’s ability to leave the seat dry, a visiting child would immediately report any discrepancy found before use to a now embarrassed hostess.

Yes it was different in our neck of the woods but alas most have gone