Scots Word of the Week: Stairheid lavatory By Dictionaries of the Scots Language

World Toilet Day is on the 19th, hence this week’s choice. Thankfully, for most of us, the term is now historical.

Strangely, however, it is mostly documented in late twentieth-century sources, but that probably shows how it lives on in the collective memory.

“For the common folk, the cludgie was a communal affair. The landings and half landings of tenement stairs became the lair of the loo, shared between up to six families. There are still people today telling terrifying tales of childhood late night trips to the freezing lavvy on the landing. If the locks were damaged, whistling in the dark was the only way to preserve your privacy.” (Susan Morrison, The Scotsman November 2023).

Other Scots “toilet” words are frequently incorporated in the term too, cludgie being one of them - as in this example: “Sandra laughs: ‘The kids, who are used to large bathrooms and en suite toilets, thought the “stairheid cludgie” (or shared communal toilet) was very bizarre’”. (Daily Record, 1998).

And from The Herald in 2000: “... as far as the stuff that came through the lead pipes and out of the one (cold) tap in the house and the cistern of the stairhead privy was concerned, we wouldn’t call the Queen our auntie”.

An earlier citation comes from an advertisement in the Kirkintilloch Herald in 1951, offering the following untempting property for sale: “Tenement of six houses… All have electric light, inside lavatory except 3 room and kitchen house, which has a stairhead lavatory and no hot water”.

Scots Word of the Week comes from Dictionaries of the Scots Language.

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