Tag: housework

Categories
1900-1949 Adverts

Liquid Lino, 1932

Hull Daily Mail, 4th May 1932

Brighten up your lino by painting it with “Darkaline” stain.

Hull Daily Mail, 4th May 1932
Hull Daily Mail, 4th May 1932

Judging by a number of posts about attempting to remove 1930s “Darkaline” stain from wooden beams and the like, on DIY talk boards, it seems it did indeed provide a very lasting, highly-polished finish. It possibly contained shellac to give the hard-wearing shininess.

For other shiny floor options, why not just spray some wax on your floor?

Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949
Yorkshire Post, 30th December 1949

The modern equivalent for me is attempting to cover shoes with “protector spray” from the shoe shop, which provides a helpfully lethal, friction-free surface coating for the floor.

Anyway – no wonder a public information film had to be circulated about the dangers of the “fatal floor”. “Polish a floor? You may as well set a man trap.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vt016gTNp_k

 

Categories
1900-1949 Women

How to Do Your Laundry, 1938

Titbits Book of Wrinkles, 1938

My washing machine is slightly on the blink at the minute. The drying cycle keeps stopping every 20 minutes so you have to keep pushing the button again. And sometimes I forget that I need to do this so it can take hours to get a load dry. Plus, since having a second child my laundry pile has grown so fast! I’m washing every day and yet there’s still a full basket of towels, babygros and felt-tip covered school shirts pretty much all the time.

“Well, boo bloody hoo!” I can hear a 1930s housewife called Elsie saying to me, quite tetchily.

These were the days when you had to have an entire day a week to get your washing sorted – Tuesday is recommended as you’re clearing up after the weekend on a Monday. Soap flakes, blue to get the whites white, cracked hands and all, this is how to do it 1938-style, from Titbits Book of Wrinkles.

Not that they’re grumbling – this is a positive piece emphasising how things have got so much easier for the housewife these days. I dread to think how much harder it must have been before their “labour-savers” were developed. Although reading the piece I’m not entirely sure what they are – soap? A mangle? I remember my Grandma’s mangle, sat on the end of the worktop in her tiny kitchen in Morecambe. I was fascinated by it, and I wish I had it now. But, oh, my RSI-impaired wrist is aching just at the thought of all this effort…