NEXT TO GODLINESS SIR,—It would be interesting if the writer
of this article could tell us who was the benefactor who first introduced the modern bath into this country, or at about what date bathrooms became universally regarded, at least among the upper and middle classes, as essential adjuncts 'o every house. I fancy the latter cannot have been before the last decade of the nineteenth century or the beginning of the twentieth. I was born in 1871 and I have no recollection of a bathroom in my childhood days, or until, when I was 15, we moved into a more spacious Rectory in North London, and I have a vague idea that even here my father had to get it installed himself. At Cambridge in the first half of the 'nineties we had no such amenities in Emmanuel College, and the early morning tub consisted of splashing in a large tin saucer on the bedroom floor, the saucer being filled with cold water by the bedmaker the night before, with the result that in the winter it often entailed breaking the ice first. When I was married in 19oo I took a house in Chelsea, and managed to persuade the owner to partition off part of a landing to provide room for a bath with h. and c., and I well remember that when we returned from our Irish honeymoon and drove from Euston through Eaton Square I remarked to my wife that I had heard that some of the big houses in that fashionable quarter had not yet got bathrooms.—Yours faithfully,
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