World Toilet Day, 2025

Noting 2025’s World Toilet Day with a photo of one of Peter Fagan’s Colourbox collection, decorated here with a WaterAid badge, and its 'Decent Toilets Change lives' slogan and some Swachh Bharat  spectacles – “Swachh Bharat is a large-scale sanitation and cleanliness campaign launched by the Indian government in 2014 to achieve a "Clean India". 

The type of sanitation shown through the plaster cast model of an English ‘bottom of the garden’ pit privy is still remembered by friends from visiting elderly relatives years back. It shows a ‘privy toilet’ of the ‘earth closet type’ where, ideally, after each use a dose of dry earth was thrown on the contents (de-odourising and starting the decomposition). When the pail was full, the door at the front in this case (often at the rear, through the back wall) could give access to the bucket so that it could be taken out and emptied somewhere in the garden. Reportedly the roses bloomed!

Sharing this on World Toilet Day to remind us that even in high-income countries the transition from ‘Bucket and chuckit’ to ‘flush and forget’ toilets is relatively recent and that different approaches are needed in the transition to improved sanitation for all. Which is our SDG 6.2 goal. However, history reminds us that it can take a surprisingly long time to make that transition.

In Ampthill Rural District – there is an upcoming journal paper, sharing more of the story – in areas where there were no gardens, agricultural labourer’s cottages having been built on the verges of roads and streets with no back yards, emptying the pails became a problem.

In 1914 the Medical Officer of Health reported that “The Parish Council of Flitwick were asked to consider the matter of a system of scavenging [pail emptying] for that parish. After debating the matter they came to the conclusion that it was not necessary, but asked that a Committee of the District Council should visit and view the proposed scavenging area. It was proved beyond all doubt that a scavenging system was necessary. This will, I believe, be started some time during the year.” In reality, war intervened and it took until 1919 for pail emptying to commence.

Pail closet emptying is nowadays referred to as container-based sanitation after the other titles of ‘bucket latrines’ or ‘night soil emptying’ were seen to be derogatory, both to the process and to the emptiers.

A further village, Westoning, commenced its scavenging in 1921, the average weekly costs per household, for the periods recorded are Toddington averaging $0.71, per HH per week (2020 USD PPP prices) over the twenty-four year record, Flitwick, $0.86 & Westoning, $1.25 averaging over seven and four year periods respectively (2020 prices).

To give some level of comparator, weekly wages of agricultural workers in 1912 were reported in MOH, 1912: “The wages of the agricultural labourer in this District is in most cases about 14/- [$105], and 2/- a week [$15] is as much as he is able to pay in rent.”

There were no direct charges to households for the scavenging services which remained ‘free at the point of collection.’ The local Parish Council had to fund that emptying from the local property taxes (rates) that they collected. This ‘progressive’ local taxation, based on land (early years only) and housing values, had to fund all aspects of the services – which started simply with a contractor’s horse and cart and a farmer’s field which needed fertilizer.

Notwithstanding his earlier optimism in 1910, by 1925 MOH could only report that “Over the whole district: the ordinary privy vault [what we would term today a ‘pit latrine’] is gradually being replaced by the pail and earth type of closet in all the villages. I am unable to give the exact number of each.” And for one village: “At present a large proportion of the wells are polluted, mainly owing to the soil being highly manured around this village [Flitwick], and the large number of cesspools in use.” This even after scavenging had commenced in that village in 1919.

Meanwhile the Chairman of the Rural District Council, now also a resident of Flitwick, had commented that ‘The present [pail emptying] system was the most beastly, stinky job it was possible to imagine’ (LN&BA, 9th December 1926). However, this sentiment was not reflected in the Sanitary Inspector’s reports and not by the single available, though later, account of a tanker operator whose job was to collect from the closet and then empty pails into a hopper on the back of his vehicle: ‘Generally speaking, Ivan enjoyed his job on the tankers. He was able to work out of doors, meet a lot of nice people and have a day-shift job, unlike many men doing similar work at night. One thing Ivan is convinced about - there is no healthier occupation. He cannot remember ever catching so much as a cold’ (Bidwell, 2000).

It is remarkable, at least to me, that the process of pail-emptying continued until ‘rural sewerage for all’, at least in the main part of the villages, was completed in this Rural District in the early 1970’s. The transition happening as economic wealth grew from a GDP per person of $7,800 in 1900 (2020 $USD prices) to $11,700 in 1950, when pail-collecting was established in all 29 villages in the District whilst near universal rural sewerage was reached at $21,900 in 1975.