So, who DID have a house with an outside toilet.


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Mine was cream enamelled steel with a green rim, I think it's still under my old bed, saved me those trips to the outside toilet in the night, though being steel, it was very noisy when you had to have a discreet pee. Came in useful after too many pints of Shippoes and Grouse chasers in later years. I recall that mother always kept it germ free with a swilling of Dettol in the bottom, changed everyday, except it made my bedroom smell like a hospital ward.

Even now when I go up and stay, I'm always informed at bedtime that there's a potty under the bed and not to bother taking all that trouble to go to the toilet, bless.

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And just to add to everyone's tales of outside toilets !!  We lived in a regular terrace house from mid 1960's that had at one time like all others have an outside toilet just at the end of the kitche

What a lovely name "Cesspit Sid" just love it (bet he used to come over just to take the pi$$)   Rog

You are the poshest person I know @LizzieM we didn't have any kind of toilet until I was 14 when I had my first tom tit 

A big blue plastic one in my mums room and an orange one in my sisters, I always had a ten gallon bladder and didn't need one ......... I could do with one now though !!!

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once went to change a radiator in a st annn's bedroom ( few years old house, central heated, upstairs bog etc) and in said bedroom was a "po" or rather an 8 gallon? (about 2ft high x 18" dia) paint tub full of the yellow stuff and months of fag ends! I did a quick about turn, don't know if he ever did get the rad replaced!

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I remember my gran, when she lived on Evelyn street in beeston, had an outside loo, and, also,.. hanging on the wall by the back door a tin bath....can't say i remember living in a house with an outside loo tho....maybe thats because most of my childhood was spent abroard living in army houses.

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Back in 50s Radford the toilets were a block one per two houses always froze up in the winter and the tin bath hanging outside was standard kit. Living in the top houses we were at least 100 yards away from the block and as a child I often didn't make it.

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I see Saniflo are having a TV sales push saying you can fit a bog virtually anywhere in your house using one of their devices, what they do say is you also have to have a "normal" one in it also, know a certain spiz type who converted a house to bedsits using just saniflo's, in end he had to have them all replaced after visit by severn trent!

ps,Palius, if you still come on, my old mate off Potters Terrace has got in touch via this site, now lives in Australia!

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I can remember both sets of Grandparents having an outside loo....in Bestwood and Sneinton. I can also remember, being one of the youngest Grand children, having to wait 'till my older cousins had finished! Phew, what a smell!!!!

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Outside loos always had a smell all of their own. Not stinky I mean, just a damp brickwork kind of smell. I can still recall it, all my relatives lived in terrace houses, I think we were about the only ones in a council house.

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Spot on Kath - 'a damp, brickwork kind of smell'.

I experienced having to live with an outside loo when married young back in the sixties. It never bothered me, in fact putting up with a damp terraced house in Radford for the grand sum of: twenty five shillings a week rent - £1.25p in today's currency - gave me the opportunity to save and have my first property by the time I was 21!

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we lived on a farm and our outside bog was a bit of a bummer,it was a concrete vault, size about 7ft by 5ft and about 5ft deep,above ground was a wooden box about the same size as the vault but fixed onto the wall, it had two round holes cut in it,one for grown up bums and one for kids bums,when the bog was full a big hole was dug down the bottom of the garden and then it was all hands on deck to empty it with a big ladle like thing, buckets and a wheelbarrow, what a terrible job and what a stink, one day after the bog had been emptied , granny went for a walk down the garden, walked across where the stuff had been buried and down she went, not a very happy granny, this is what bogs were like in places where there was no water so there were no flushing toilets,we had to fetch our water from about three miles away in a old water cart towed by a tractor, who said they were good old days.

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I lived here on and off for a few years when little...the loo was down the garden...which was full of chickens.Whenever I used it 'Auntie' Flo accompanied me with a sweeping brush to ward off the worlds most vicious rooster...It made each visit a ruddy nightmare.

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I can just imagine!! Lovely building.

It's now a posh weekend retreat cottage..a couple staying there showed me the booklet printed out with a flowery history of the building.I enjoyed sending an Email to the present owners telling them how many mistakes they had in their brochure...ie the positions of windows and doors,fireplaces and staircases etc. They didn't acknowledge my mail or alter their brochure,preferring their version of history to mine. They had builders alter no end of the buildings features internally and then printed that these were all original.

Such as it being a two storey building when built...pity that seeing as my room was an attic room on the third floor with a sloping ceiling!rotfl!

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It was one of four gatehouses on a Ducal estate in the 1700s.On the sale of the estate in the 1800s it was dismantled and re-erected on it's present site on yet another estate in Cambridgeshire.This in turn no longer belongs to the aristocracy but the building remains.When I stayed there it had a single story kitchen to the left which has since disappeared.

Those Yew trees were there when I was a kid in the early fifties.I would imagine originally those square sections on the front would have had coats of arms in them.

Bit off topic but so what Eh?

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I remember the loo at the bottom of the garden switching the light on & seeing thousands of Cockroaches scared the crap out of me

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when we lived in netherfield we only had outside loo and a tin bath, whenwe moved in 63 to carlton shere luxery we now had a proper bathroom and although the toilet wasant outside you still had to go out the back kitchen door to the loo across the porch our porch had a door on so it was not quite as cold as some. then when i got married in 72 it was bach to the outside loo up top of the yardbehind the church yard, but we did at least have a bath with running hot and cold water inside. we moved from there in 1989 so not that long ago to clifton and that was pure luxery to me nice bathroom and not 1 but 2 inside loos 1 upstairs and 1 downstairs .thats the onething i would like in this house a downstairs loo your right about the smell kath always had that musty smell no matter how much you cleaned them.

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I always take a book in with me !! always have , and I don't half cop it from SWMBO when I leave 'em in there !! Yuou go in our bathroom sometimes and it's like a lending libary!!!!

Now you can take the Ipad and watch Youtube.

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My house used to have an outside bog, My bathroom im sure used to be a bedroom... i have a room just off my kitchen that still has a frosted gass window, its not huge, i assume it was a 'wash room' as iv been told their was an outdoor toilet but i have no idea where in the garden it could be, unless its what is now my 'shed' that is attached to the house and made of brick. The room off the kitchen is now more of an extention of the kitchen being used for my fridge freezer etc. Theres still houses on godfry street, netherfield that STILL have an outdoor toilet & a couple with a bathroom coming off the bedroom witch used to be a bedroom.. too, like my house.

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