A Dog's Life — Stop 5
Shirley and the Night Soil Man
Shirley was out and about in the middle of the night as she was keeping the night soil man company on his rounds. It was a dirty, smelly job emptying the outside toilets but somebody had to do it and Shirley liked Benny as he was always kind to her.
They worked all night taking the buckets of slop out of the shared loos behind the terraced houses and tipping them into Benny’s cart. By 6am they had finished and Benny set off out of town to tip the waste before everyone got up for work.
They often saw the Knocker Upper out in the early morning with his big long stick, tapping on the bedroom windows to make sure that people were up in time for work at the mills. The milkman was on his rounds with his cart too, filling jugs to leave on window sills. Sometimes the pop delivery cart from Haigh and Howard on Seel Street went by, bottles rattling.
It was very dark finding their way to the toilets by lamplight and Shirley could see why people didn’t want to venture out during the night for a wee - they used a chamber pot or a ‘guzunder’ (a china potty under the bed) and emptied it in the morning. This was a common job for a child to have to do. They had to be careful not to trip. Shirley was glad of her four paws on the cobbled roads and uneven surfaces.
In the communal space behind the houses on Argyll Street she often watched the women doing their laundry outside, mashing the clothes in the dolly tub and then feeding them through the mangle to squeeze the water out before pegging them out on the shared lines. The women worked really hard but they were always laughing and cheerful and Shirley had to admit she much preferred the smell of carbolic soap over sewage!
Above the front doors on terraced houses in Mossley are often small windows - these are known as fan lights, and houses with hallways had these.
Other things to look for are coal holes to load coal down to the cellar, open back passages where outside toilets stood, and communal gardens for washing laundry.