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one of the linked parts of an article published on Malcolm Shifrin's website Victorian Turkish Baths: their origin, development, and gradual decline
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1: The Turkish
bath as a procedure
This paper looks, briefly, at a few examples of how today’s
view of the Victorian Turkish bath is being changed so that it
already differs from how it was seen by the
Victorians; at how the largely unfulfilled visions of those who
reintroduced it to the British Isles are nowhere to be seen; and
at how a new view of this fast-vanishing Victorian institution is
being constructed.
People see a variety of different images when the words
Victorian Turkish baths
are uttered.
It seems important, therefore, to start by indicating what is
meant—and what the Victorians meant—by the term Turkish bath.
The Victorian Turkish bath, then, is a type of bath in which
bathers spend time in a series of rooms, usually two or three,
each one hotter than the previous one, until they sweat profusely. After a scrub and massage—together called shampooing—they
gently relax with a coffee in the cooling-room.
In the British Isles today, most so-called Turkish baths are
actually vapour baths, or Russian steam rooms. But the
distinguishing feature of the Victorian Turkish bath is that the
hot rooms are heated by air which is DRY.
2000 years ago, the Romans, and later the Ottoman Turks, used an
underfloor hypocaust which heated the air in each room to a level
dependent on its distance from the furnace.
The hypocaust was also
used in many early Victorian baths, while others used flues or
pipes behind the walls, or a central radiator.
In a later development, a continuous stream of air was heated as
it flowed around the furnace, before passing through each room in
turn, cooling as it went.
This method of heating the rooms is
still considered the most satisfactory because the freshly heated
air continuously replaces air which has become stale and
sweat-laden.
The
twenty-one Turkish baths which remain open in the British
Isles (seven of them wholly, or in part, Victorian, and fourteen built
after this period) all use one or other of these methods to ensure
that the hot air is dry.
So bathing in varying degrees of dry heat, followed by
shampooing,
and a final period of relaxation in a cooling-room,
is
what Victorian bathers understood by the phrase Turkish bath when
used to describe a process, or set of procedures.
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The original
page includes thumbnail pictures which can be enlarged. Air flow through the hot rooms Central radiator at Alloa Constantine's Convoluted Stove cooling-room at Drumsheugh Baths Club, Edinburgh cooling-room at GWR Medical Fund Turkish baths, Swindon Hypocaust in the Roman baths at Bath Plan of Erasmus Wilson's bath at Richmond Hill, showing underseat flues Plan of the Turkish baths at the Old Kent Road Baths, London Royal Turkish Baths, Harrogate: shampooing room Shampooing at York Hall in the 1920s Trier: tunnel to hypocaust Two men in hot room at Glossop Road, Sheffield Women's day in the hot room, York Hall, London, 1990 |
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