In this space age, the importance of a good brush or broom has diminished. There was an art to making a broom but, even so, the wages and living conditions of the people who made them were pretty dire.
If someone wanted a good quality broom, they made their way to Kent Street, off Long Lane, which was home to the brushmakers. With the many tanneries, Bermondsey was awash with animal by-products so broom-making was a natural industry for the area.
Brooms were once called besoms and full of superstitions.
For example, you should never buy a brush in May or you’ll brush one of the family away – that’s something worth remembering when Granny’s giving you the hump.
A new broom should also first be used to sweep into the house, otherwise the luck of the household would go out with the dust.
Brushes should never be used after dark or ever be borrowed, lent or burned, and fastening a broomstick to the mast of a ship signified it was up for sale.
Kent Street was a backwater full of little houses, shops and cottage industries that nestled amid smoky, crowded industrial spaces.
The snobbish Victorians employed maids for all of their grotty tasks, which always required a decent brush of some kind. There were street sweepers, chimney sweeps and factory sweepers all wanting specific types of brushes, too.
Despite demand, the brushmakers always found it hard to scrape a decent wage together; they lived in overcrowded, poorly ventilated rooms where the whole family would join in making a few brushes for a crust.
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You could tell which houses contained brush families by the huge brooms they’d hang outside to signify their trade. The windows of the houses were stained with a bronze patina, which resulted from the steam of pitch pots that bubbled inside. What a dangerous place to bring up a child!
There was a guild of brushmakers but those who dwelled in Kent Street were not members of this elite group. They could not call themselves master craftsmen as they were seen as outsiders trying to make a living and hadn’t done the five-year apprenticeship.
People looking to buy a decent new broom visited Kent Street – the workspace was called a pan shop and those who worked there were panhandlers. Those who shaped a brush, inserting bristles into a peg frame, were known as “brush finishers”.
When a good brushmaker had finished a broom, the pile of the bristles would have the feel of velvet. All this work was known as “hand drawing” and to hand-draw a good hairbrush would take a day’s work.
The sign of a top-quality brush is still the four small brass screws to be found in its back.
In 1780 the brushmakers were given a new challenge when a chap named William Addis invented the toothbrush.
In those early days, the handles of the toothbrushes were made of bone to ensure they didn’t damage the teeth and gums – after all, who wants a mouthful of splinters?
The handles came from cattle shinbones, which may explain the large amount found on an archaeological dig a few years ago. (The diggers also found a floor made entirely of animal knucklebones!)
You’d get about four toothbrush handles per leg bone, apparently, and material would have been abundant around the tanneries.
As toothbrushes had to be hand drawn in the same way as other small brushes, most of the work for this was done by women – it was a very fiddly business and they had the necessary small fingers to carry it out.
As the Victorian age gave way to the Edwardian, the brushmaker’s industry began to wane. Many of the kids who had helped Mum and Dad make the brushes were now clothed, shod and learning new skills at the board schools.
Ways were being found to make everyone’s jobs a bit easier and, by the First World War, all those tasks done by servants were abandoned as men went off to war and women took over their roles.
Little chores such as brushing up the crumbs or doing a bit of hairdressing had to be done by the lady of the house herself and, before long, the cocktail age was upon us – and the vacuum arrived.
At the same time, a big effort was put into clearing the slums of the district – with the brushmaker’s little hovels being top of the list.
So they really were swept away…
