The Perth ‘Steamies’

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The Perth ‘Steamies’  

The Story of the Fair City’s Public Washhouses (1846-1976)  

Denis Munro – Tippermuir Books 9781913836481  

Until the 1920s, Perth hadn’t spread much beyond what we call, nowadays, the ‘town centre’. In that tight space, some 30,000 people lived in small, cramped and often unsanitary conditions without the means to keep themselves and their homes clean to the standards we take for granted today. Things had been that way since medieval times. Still, the Victorians did something about it by providing, at public expense, baths and washhouses where ‘the working classes’ could, at a small cost, bathe and do their laundry in facilities supplied and run by the Town Council. In Perth, between 1846 and 1976, two such facilities existed and were well-used until they became redundant due to improved housing conditions, the physical spread of the city and rising living standards. The end, when it came, was controversial and strenuously opposed by the declining number of women who used what they affectionately called ‘The Steamie’. The rise and decline of Perth’s Steamies, the controversy surrounding their closure and the physical reshaping of the city which brought an end to that era are the subject of this book.  

Denis Munro is a Perth man who worked in the planning departments of all of Perth’s local government incarnations from the late 1960s until he retired as Director of Planning in 2003. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the closure of the last of the Perth washhouses, at Canal Street/Charles Street, was highly controversial and politically charged. Denis had a ringside view because he worked for both Perth Town Council and Perth and Kinross District Council, which had to wrestle with the issue. In 2001, Perth & Kinross Library Service published Denis’s A Vision of Perth, which, in part, is a description of how the city developed physically and, in part, a polemic against the embrace of modernist architecture. Denis has drawn on that book for the explanation, in this one, of the economic and physical changes that brought an end to the ‘Steamies’ in Perth.  

 ‘The book arose from an explanation I recently gave two American friends about the lives of their mothers who were born in Scotland in the 1950s. Like me, the mothers had spent some of their early years in the Victorian tenement at South Inch Terrace. None of the flats there had any form of internal plumbing for toilet, bathing or laundry. Bathing was done in hand-filled tubs, laundry in the two washhouses at the rear of the building. They used coal-fired boilers that had to be lit by whoever was doing a wash that day. A more popular alternative was to take the weekly wash in a pram, often with the children in tow, to the public washhouse at Canal Street. At its peak in the 1930s, the Canal Street facility was used by some 1,300 women (always women) every week. Until 1951, there was also an older washhouse at Mill Street/Murray Street that handled around 360 washes a day. Washhouses were a practical necessity for the times and were known affectionately as ‘Steamies’. Using the washing, pressing and drying equipment was hard work but, for most women, there was a strong social element to the weekly visit.  

The closure of the Canal Street washhouse in the early 1970s was fiercely opposed by a formidable, woman, Jean Hamilton (later a Labour councillor) and her militant supporters. After protracted bickering between the women and the Council, a compromise, but doomed, replacement laundrette was built on the cleared site.  

In The Perth ‘Steamies’, I have explained why these places existed and why they disappeared. In particular, I have detailed the appalling living conditions of the majority of Perth’s population between 1846 and the 1960s.  

Essentially, the end of the Steamies was brought about by the way Perth grew, higher building standards and rising disposable income.   

I hope the book brings back fond memories for readers who were taken to the Steamie by their parents and, for those too young for the experience, an insight into times they can hardly imagine.’ Denis Munro