The placing of the tanning yards were usually on the outskirts of a town, close to a water supply but downstream to ease the stench. Grease scraped from carcasses was rendered and boiled into a stinking lye by the soapmakers. Thrifty housewives also rendered their own version of household soap using fats mixed with traditional herbs like lavender.The fashion for ruffs and stiff linen collars was a high laundry priority and the process of sizing and starching fabric an art in itself. Here were found the sticks and props to stretch out the linens to dry, taut in the wind and sun.
Brides were presented with specially cut sticks to dry out nappies in anticipation of a happy event.Then there was the whole process of soapmaking. Ready-bleached fabrics were the sign of wealth and prestige, so any tricks to upgrade the whiteness of a collar were eagerly sought.It was to the garden that the thrifty housewife resorted to find other lye solutions made from burnt hen or pigeon dung, wild flowers. Even a modest household was judged by the freshness of its linen. Whiteness was achieved by bleaching agents such as sunshine and urine. She observed how the dried ferns were burned into ashes, mixed with grease and turned into lye balls. These were soaked overnight in rainwater: strained through muslin to provide the scouring liquid to be poured over the layered linens in the buck and left to soak through.Never let it be said that Tudor or Stuart women did not take pride in pristine linen Only the most destitute did not attempt some hand-scrubbing. These were placed downwards to catch the force of the detergent.
“Leying the buck” was the traditional way of letting nature pre-soak away gathered grime but the result was only as good as the lye solution used.
When Celia Fiennes made her intrepid journey on horseback across Britain in the mid-17th century she saw fit to comment in her diary about the lye-making industry in the forest of Cannock Chase. The first washing machines were primitive affairs: just a barrel or buck with a false bottom and a spigot. Heavy household linens were layered carefully into the buck, propped by sturdy garden twigs that would carry the weight of sodden cloth, allowing the washing solution to course its way down over cuffs, ruffs and collars, already dipped in lye. Long before the “whiter than white” virtues of Oxydol over Rinso wooed housewives from their copper boilers to the twin tub, there were devices trying to make the weekly wash less time-consuming and cumbersome.
DOWN THE ages traditional English laundry skills have always been the preserve of women. Small wonder then that he finally received an international award for his comic strip work at the 1971 Comics Convention in Lucca, Italy.Leon Falk, writer and producer: born St Louis, Missouri 1905; twice married (one son, two daughters); died New York 13 March 1999.. Falk also wrote two musical plays, Happy Dollar and one featuring his top comic-strip hero, Mandrake the Magician and the Enchantress.In his spare time from mapping out 14 strips every week and writing and producing plays, Falk launched into a series of novels featuring his other hero, the Phantom. These included Dame May Whitty in Emlyn Williams’s masterpiece, Night Must Fall, and Charlton Heston in Bell Book and Candle. Many of his productions were staged at Nassau in the Bahamas, and he is said to have produced some 300 plays. This was 1943, and some years later, in 1996, a full-length feature film was made of the same title.Falk served in the Department of Secret Intelligence, a branch of the Office of War Information, during the Second World War, and later began to write and produce for the theatre. Once again Hollywood called, and with the banner line “The Most Fantastic, Most Exciting Serial Ever Made”, Columbia Pictures leapt into action with Tom Tyler, who once played the Mummy, billed as “America’s favourite cartoon hero now on the screen!” Second-billed was Ace the Wonder Dog as Devil, the Phantom’s four-legged friend.
His secret: he was really Christopher Standish, latest in a long line of stalwart sons, who inherited their title and powers from the original Phantom all those hundreds of years ago.Falk’s artist for the Phantom was another friend from his home town. Ray Moore drew the simplistic but visually appealing strip until he entered the US Air Force in 1942. The Phantom was then taken over full-time by his former assistant, Wilson McCoy. Clad in a one piece skin-tight suit with a hood, plus a tight black eye-mask which revealed a startling lack of pupils, the Phantom was not just a man, he was a living legend, 400 years old. Men called him “The Ghost Who Walks”, and he had been walking around the jungles of India since the 16th century. On 17 February 1936, King Features launched his new strip, the Phantom.