How many different names for the toilet

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My dad used to call it the library, and he would spend ages in our outside lav, reading the paper. Said it was the only place he could get any peace (shouldn't have had so many of us then!) but it was murder if you needed to go, as it was the only one available. Sunday mornings were the worst, as the paper was thicker with all the sports pages!:lol-053:

Marydot
 
Then of course there are the infamous 'starting blocks' en France!
 
The John is an American expression
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Actually it's not. Believe it or not 'The John' was the original name given to the flushing toilet after the inventor who was John Harrington in 1596. Joseph Bramah of Yorkshire patented the first practical water closet in England in 1778. However the first 'inventor' of a dry inside toilet was Sir John De Coursey by coincidence and that was where there term 'The John' really originated in Ireland (Carrickfergus Castle) in or around 1180 - 90.
Thomas Crapper was a London plumber who invented the 'ball cock' and thus made the flushing toilet popular in the 1880's.
 
I remember the "nettie" as a lad, and remember a poem about the midnight engineers who emptied the nettie's from the little door in the back lane and came home "in the morning covered in Turkish delight". Pity I can't remember who wrote it or how the rest of it went.
 
Excuse the crudity, but don't Aussies call it "sh*t house" as in the line from the Barry Humphries song "she bangs like a sh*t-house door" ? Their more polite term is "dunnie" I believe.

Thunder-box is certainly a forces name, and literal too. They used to have 10-seaters (5 seats back to back, the sides but not the front partitioned off) all above the same deep trench at some training areas. The fun was to wait until someone was sitting down - you could see their legs sticking out - then go around the other side and drop a smoke grenade or thunderflash down another sitting hole. If you got it right the victim didn't know until coloured smoke bellowed out between their legs, or they were shocked by an explosion and got a splattering from below. Happy days!
 
antiquesam said:
I remember the "nettie" as a lad, and remember a poem about the midnight engineers who emptied the nettie's from the little door in the back lane and came home "in the morning covered in Turkish delight". Pity I can't remember who wrote it or how the rest of it went.
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My father's a Midnight Mechanic
He works in the middens by night
And when he comes home in the morning
He's covered with Turkish Delight.

My grandmother (a very proper old lady) used to recite a version when I was tiny, which went:

My father's a midnight mechanic
He works like a fiend in the pit
He goes out each evening and comes home each morning
All covered all over in... then she'd sing "sweet violets, sweeter than the daisies" etc.

She had an outside loo with the pipes heavily lagged and rough 'izal' paper hanging by string on a nail, you didn't hang around there on a frosty winter morning!
 
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GeoffB said:
My father's a Midnight Mechanic
He works in the middens by night
And when he comes home in the morning
He's covered with Turkish Delight.

My grandmother (a very proper old lady) used to recite a version when I was tiny, which went:

My father's a midnight mechanic
He works like a fiend in the pit
He goes out each evening and comes home each morning
All covered all over in... then she'd sing "sweet violets, sweeter than the daisies" etc.

She had an outside loo with the pipes heavily lagged and rough 'izal' paper hanging by string on a nail, you didn't hang around there on a frosty winter morning!
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Thank you for that, it brings back happy memories, I remember Izal but usually we had newspaper squares.
 
I was brought up in a mining village in Northumberland and remember the miners cottages in long rows. The toilets were across the back lane and were called "earth closets" by the tenants as the midden men only came once a week and fathers often put a spade of earth down the hole to keep the flys down.
 
as my parents became more affluent we moved from newspaper to glossy magazine squares.posh but messy
 
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