'She's so deliciously low — so horribly dirty.'
Professor Henry Higgins, talking about the Cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle in Shaw's play "Pygmalion" (1913)
'What you thinking of, goin' with a bloody woman? You're gettin' soft. Don't you know that women smell and give you diseases?'
Gangster and homosexual Ronnie Kray, scolding his brother Reggie in 1957 for womanising when they had set up a successful nightclub in London's East End. Quoted in John Pearson's 'The Profession Of Violence' (1972, Collins revised edition 2015)
'Women simply are not clean - absolutely filthy, the whole lot of them. Englishwomen simply do not wash and scrub enough.'
Prolific lover Ian Fleming, interviewed for the Evening Standard in April 1960. Quoted in John Pearson's 'The life of Ian Fleming' (1966)
The real and fictional East End women will have had plenty of excuse for not attaining twenty-first century standards of hygiene. Even public baths came late to Britain - for example, the Moseley Road Baths in Birmingham were built in 1907 (the men's were divided into first and second class) and it would be a long time before most working-class people's houses had indoor lavatories, let alone baths and showers. Besides, Ronnie Kray's sexual orientation may have conditioned him into an instinctive dislike of female hormones.
What excuse Fleming's posher lovers had, I don't know. Or maybe, as with Ronnie, it was merely his perception, having spent his formative years at a boys-only public school, Eton College; it seems not to have put him off women, though he never spent the whole night with them when he was a single man. His creation James Bond is struck by the superior cleanliness in the USA (in, I think, 'Thunderball') when he sees the seat of the lavatory in his hotel room has a strip of paper across it confirming that it has been 'sanitised.'
How like the English, though, to look down their noses at their social inferiors and refer to them as 'the great unwashed,' as though it was the latter's choice to be shabby and unclean. George Orwell in 'The road to Wigan Pier' (1937) noted how hard it was for a miner to wash all over, where there were no pit-head baths:
'Probably a large majority of miners are completely black from the waist down for at least six days a week. It is almost impossible for them to wash all over in their own homes. Every drop of water has got to be heated up, and in a tiny living-room which contains, apart from the kitchen range and a quantity of furniture, a wife, some children, and probably a dog, there is simply not room to have a proper bath. Even with a basin one is bound to splash the furniture. Middle-class people are fond of saying that the miners would not wash themselves properly even if they could, but this is nonsense, as is shown by the fact that where pithead baths exist practically all the men use them.'
I knew an Englishwoman who went to marry a Cypriot after WWII and on the voyage there she met a Levantine man who explained, ' I do not wash. I perfume.' Today we have much better plumbing.
Bertrand Russell exploded the way that some romanticise the working class as a compensation - a cheaper one than alleviating their conditions - for their misfortune, in his essay 'The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed' (1937):
'If it were indeed the case that bad nourishment, little education, lack of air and sunshine, unhealthy housing conditions, and overwork produce better people than are produced by good nourishment, open air, adequate education and housing, and a reasonable amount of leisure, the whole case for economic reconstruction would collapse, and we could rejoice that such a large percentage of the population enjoys the conditions that make for virtue.'
- https://criticathink.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/the-superior-virtue-of-the-oppressed-bertrand-russell/
There's still work to do.
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