19th-Century Toilet Letter: A Delight from Start to Fin(n)ish!

Delightful things keep happening! Being keen Dane enthusiasts we're prone, at the Privy Counsel, to sing the praises of Hamlet's countrymen and their toilets. The question is, though, if we haven't discovered a new favourite people: the Finns! We spent a very festive evening in the company of a whole cohort of Finnish historians recently, and have concluded that they know an astonishing amount of drinking songs. Other delightful things have also happened: we were sent, for instance, a charming example of the 19th-century earth-closet-obsession!

Woof! Yes, it's true! An intelligent and delightful friend of ours, who has spent inordinate amounts of time going through the Malmö City archives recently, came across these amusing toilet-related writings, and sent them to us post-haste!

An enterprising Swedish agriculturalist by the name of Mathias Weibull wrote, in 1889, to Malmö City Council to seek permission to erect "simple but neat" "cleanliness kiosks", provided with "self-operating peat-dust machines". Mathias Weibull expressed concern with the dangerous evaporations of human waste products, and the epidemics they may give rise to if left untended. Weibull generously offered to arrange for the carting away of the waste and the peat, and explained that he intended to charge the public 5 öre for use of the peat closets, and 2 öre for the pissoirs. The author even got the professor we love to hate, Seved Ribbing (his opinions on peat toilets may be sound, but his views on syphilitic women were shocking), to write an endorsement of the hygienic suitability of the plan!

Whether the cleanliness kiosks were ever erected we don't know, but wasn't it a spiffing idea!

Letter from Mathias Weibull to Malmö Council, 1889.

Transcription:

Inom de flesta större samhällen i utlandet, liksom i flera af Sveriges städer, har det visat sig vara ett oafvisligt behof att vid starkt trafikerade platser upprätta offentliga s.k. kabinett till allmänhetens beqvämlighet och gagn, hvilka dock, sådana de hittills varit inrättade, kunna medföra verklig fara genom smittämnenas spridning vid möjligen inträffade farsoter. Numera torde det emellertid icke vara obekant, hvilket mäktigt hjelpmedel torfmullen, på rätt sätt använd, erbjuder samhällsmyndigheterna i deras sträfvan att upphäfva de stora obehag och sanitära vådor som åtfölja nuvarande renhållningsväsende hvad särskilt latriner angår. För att bereda allmänheten, särskilt den stora mängd trafikerande, som dagligen besöker Malmö [...]

[...] ofvan antydda beqvämlighet på samma gång som faran af dess begagnande fullständigt upphäfves derigenom, att exkrementerna omedelbart efter uttömningen aföstes med ett tillräckligt tjockt lager torfmull, tillåter jag mig vördsamt anhålla om tillstånd att på egen bekostnad till en början få å plainen eller å vestra sidan af stortorget i Malmö, som deraf synes vara i stort behof, samt hvar öfrigt det kan finnas vara behöfligt, uppföra enkla, men prydliga Renhållningskiosker, af sten och trä, i hvilket afseende bifogas en förslagsvis uppgjord ritning. Dessa kiosker skola inrymma sjelfverkande torfmullsapparater af konstruktionen "Ceres" (patent no 1742) jemte torfströpissoirer samt förses med värmeledning, toiletter, dricksvattenfilterapparater och vad öfrigt kan befinnas för ändamålet nödigt och lämpligt, emot en afgift för klosetterna af [...] och 5 öre och för pissoirer af 2 öre [missing text] bortförslingen av torfmullspudretten att besörjas af undertecknad. Intyg af professor Seved Ribbing, med doktor Anders Bergstrand och Emil Södervall biläggas.  

Malmö den 31 December 1889. 

Mathias Weibull

The endorsement by professor Seved Ribbing, notorious syphilitic-woman-hater:

Att undertecknad efter noggrant pröfvande af de "sjelfverkande torfmullsapparater", hvilka torfmullsaktiebolaget Ceres i Malmö söker införa i städer, enskilda hem och offentliga anstalter, funnit desamma fullt tillfredsställande, och att jag anser deras allmänna användning medföra betydande sanitära fördelar, är mig ett nöje att få intyga. 

Lund den 11 November 1889. 

Seved Ribbing 

Professor

Flag of Skåne.
Image from Wikipedia.

Mathias Weibull was most likely a shrewd agriculturalist and businessman; human excrement mixed with peat powder was, Lantmannens uppslagsbok informs us, widely used as fertiliser. (A council debate on whether to create a peat powder factory in Sundsvall led to a violent debate in 1907.) However, according to Riksarkivet Mathias Weibull, who ran the farm Sofieholm in Fosie, went bankrupt in 1904. Weibull then started the amusingly named pig-breeding company AB Särimner, which also went bust, and died in 1906. According to his nephew, the historian Lauritz Weibull, Mathias Weibull was the first to use the red and yellow Scanian flag.


Obligatory festive video:


Festive video: Monty Python, Finland Song

Related Reading
Intellectual Friend's learned post on a toilet in Helsinki, with delightful Finno-Ugric suffix of negation:
Finnish Mania: Despite Negligence, We Forgive Intellectual Friend
Moule's delightful earth closet, at the Castle Museum in York:
Historical Toilets, Baths and Kitchens - a Useful and Humbling Lesson
Victorians were usually grateful if there were any toilets at all:
The Historic Toilet Tour of York
We should all, actually, be grateful for plumbing:
Plumbing: Blessed, Blessed Plumbing
Lack of plumbing leads to cholera:
Woof! Cholera Babe Parade!
We have a toilet-related beef with Malmö City Council, actually:
Venting Our Spleen (Right Down the Drain)

Finnish Mania: Despite Negligence, We Forgive Intellectual Friend

Intellectual Friend has, in a feat of unrivalled toilet negligence, still not sent us any Icelandic toilet photographs. However, he sent us a picture of a Finnish public toilet instead! Being mere lowly toilet chroniclers, we're not picky and have hardly any dignity. Therefore we forgive all and caper with joy in a most pathetic manner. Here's Intellectual Friend's intellectually valid story of a Finnish bog! Hurrah!

Helsinki public toilet, à la Minas Morgul

Fascinating how this toilet mania can spread freely and unhindered (writes Intellectual Friend). After spending just a few days in York with a (by association) occasionally toilet-aware Intellectual person (toilet-aware by association, not intellectual by association), Very Special Friend then travels to Finland for a laudably serious academic purpose and, despite being (heretofore) utterly toilet-unobsessed (as far as a Scandinavian can be that), yet dashes out to a park in Helsinki in the gloomy pre-dawn hours yesterday and sacrifices some of her precious pre-dawn stroll time to go out of her way and take a picture of this disturbing Minas Morgul-style toilet!

On account of having systematically been spoken to in Finnish by the Finns, Very Special Friend had assumed she must look Finnish; however, the explicit expectation displayed on this toilet that both sexes will use urinals made her wonder whether she can really stand up to Finnish women after all.
On account of having systematically been spoken to in Finnish by the Finns, Very Special Friend had assumed she must look Finnish; however, the explicit expectation displayed on this toilet that both sexes will use urinals made her wonder whether she can really stand up to Finnish women after all.
We alleviated this little dismay, though, by discussing the attendant linguistic evidence (just about distinguishable by zooming in). Interesting how the Finnish word, pisuaari, seems to come ostensibly from French, while the Swedish urinoar looks more akin to the English (though both are ultimately from French too, a subsequent OED-helped research reveals; urinal in 12th c. French meant "glass vessel or phial employed to receive urine for medical examination or inspection").
Quite apart from the concept of charging some toilet activities and not others, one can make out (after zooming) and ponder the two trilingual signs "Maksuton / Ingen avgift / Free of charge" and "Maksu / Avgift / Charge". This is of course the occasion to delight in this schoolbook example of the very productive and versatile Finno-Ugric suffixes of negation, in this case -ton.

We are sorely tempted to insert an appalling pun here about how linguistic analysis, like chlamydia testing (see our previous post On the Eighth Day God Created Paratroopers, but He Forgot Soap), is a piece of piss, but we hesitate to offend and upset neurotic readers still in possession of their mental faculties, and so we abstain.

Related Reading
More Negligence by Intellectual Friend: Bulgaria: An Intellectual Treat
The Icelandic photos did, eventually, arrive. And were they ever worth the wait! Woof! A Splendid Christmas Present: The Best Toilets in Iceland

Imperial Aspirations: The Chiewitz Outdoor Privy in Espoo

With the upcoming royal wedding all over the media (especially the Readers' Letters in The Press), we find ourselves harbouring a desire for imperial glamour. Toilets for ordinary mortals are all very well, but our aspirations today are towards the God-given right to sit on a really fancy loo!

Picture by Islander at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexdass.jpg?uselang=sv

This hexagonal building may look like a common-or-garden summerhouse, but actually it is a privy on an imperial scale! Designed by Georg Theodor Chiewitz, it was built at Träskända Gård in a town rather fittingly called Espoo, in Finland, solely for the comfort of Czar Alexander II, who visited in 1863. We hope he enjoyed it!

Sources:
All information and picture from Wikipedia, which in turn has used material from Nordisk Familjebok (http://runeberg.org/nfbe/0111.html).