Dresdner Seniorenakademie Wissenschaft und Kunst e.V. / EFOS-Projekt / VECU Alltagskultur

A look into the past- the thing with the jakes

Seven decades ago in a train station a little verse made me familiar with modern toilet culture. This I read: "If your endeavor was successful, you have to pull the chain . . ." In this place they already had the modern toilet with flushing that I did not know until then. But even my relatives in Leipzig and Dresden still had so- called dry closets.

Problems with water and the "sewage"

Everybody knows that in order to build in flushing a great amount of running water is needed, and must be especially available in the loo. After all, the watery "basic product" has to be disposed from the toilet.
In bigger cities, a hundred years ago the water already came out "through the wall". In the villages until the previous century water was fetched out one's own well or it ran from a higher positioned well down to the ground floor where it was caught in a water container. In those times house owners started building hand-operated water pumps at first from wood and later on from cast iron. But in frosty weather the only thing that worked was the bucket attached to the rope. It was not until the 20ties of the last century that it was possible to use electric pumps that could transport the water from the well or water container into the "house-system" and, if necessary, could fill flushing tanks.

In city areas without canalization excreta were once collected in an in-house excreta pit and brought to the sewage works. Farmers today still use manure that flows from the stables to the pit as natural fertilizer on their fields. Thus, the pit has to be emptied periodically. Once, the peasants carried the manure in a tub (a conical wooden barrel for about five buckets of liquid), a barrel carried by two rods, even to the surroundings of the living quarters and used it to fertilize their grass and garden. With a flushing toilet the effort for "manuring" would have increased considerably. Furthermore, the flushing water would have lessened the "worth" of the manure as a liquid fertilizer. This is the reason why in the villages, way into the last century, all of the raw water (wash water, bath water, water for cooking) was not disposed of into the manure pits but was led into springs and rivers via a drain. Only with the development of drain pipes and sewage works (starting in the GDR in 1950/60) it got possible to stop the contamination of waters in the country.

The classical jakes

The elder of us still know it: the dry closet, also known as the jakes. It still exists in a few houses but also in numerous bowers.
The dry closet was attached to that side of the building where on could find the attached manure pit. Thus, the inhabitants' excreta could fall right into the pit through a vertical clay pipe. At a farm, the pets' liquid excreta also -and mainly- flowed into that pit. In case the cattle, horses and pigs were situated outside of the house the pit was also kept next to the stables. Consequently, the loo was also outside of the house and only visited for great necessity during rain or snow storms.

For the classical jakes one square meter did suffice. The thick down pipe was build to stick out 40 centimeters. The carpenter built on it a wooden bench suitable for sitting whose surface was called "toilet seat". A wooden lid was used to close the hole. Whenever the lid was let down a dull bang could be heard in the house and announced that the toilet was unoccupied. Sitting on the seat was very uncomfortable and it was bad luck if the wallet fell "down" out of the pocket. It even could not be saved with a magnet attached to a rope.
According to airing conditions, the manure pit could cause a nasty smell in the whole house. The odor trouble was one of the reasons why the cities toilets were preferably build in the stairway.

In the second half of the century the wooden seat was often replaced with porcelain or stone ware one. The mouthpiece of those bowls was shut with a flexible lid. After using these luxurious jakes one had to shortly open the bowl exit with a hand lever similar to a hand break.

For practical and hygienic reasons farmers preferably installed their toilets on the upper floor. There is a hardly known history for that.

A "wild" ancestor of the jakes

On old pictures form villages in the Erzgebirge (as well as from other places) one can see a kind of architecturally simple oriel in the upper store of farm houses. These annexes were the special outside toilets. From there, the human excreta fell, in a free fall, into a wooden cone that was attached to an opening of the manure pit. But it only worked if the calculated "flight path" was not changed by a strong breeze. Also, in the winters it surely got very cold in such airy heights. Because these toilets strained nature hygienically and aesthetically they had to be detached at the beginning of the previous century. After constructional changes the loo was moved a meter into the house. A thick pipe then provided an in-house "department" for the falling materials.
Personally, I never got to know this kind of "open-air" toilet. What is left is stories of nasty boys that once used to stand below and terrorize inhabitants using a manual nozzle.

In the recent past water supply and waste water treatment have also changed fundamentally in the country. Nobody using the toilet today thinks of its history and of the valuable water coming from a dam, flushing into the toilet bowl, and working as a means of transportation and cleaning. In the siphon of the bowl the water also acts as a sealant against the unpleasing odor from the drains.