1. THE ORIGIN OF THE VICTORIAN TURKISH BATH

Because there is much confusion about Victorian Turkish baths, I’ll first define them, and explain how they came to be provided for animals. We can then look at some of those serving London and Middlesex.

The Victorian Turkish bath, then, is a type of bath in which hot DRY air is used to make bathers sweat. It’s the DRYNESS of the air which distinguishes it from the steamy Islamic Hammam, the medicated vapour bath, or the steam baths usually known as Russian baths, or Banya—all of which are often incorrectly called Turkish baths.

Uniquely in the Victorian Turkish bath, bathers progress through a series of increasingly hot rooms until they sweat profusely. This can be repeated, interspersed with showers or a dip in a cold plunge pool, and then followed by a full body wash and massage. This body wash and massage, taken together, was known to Victorians as shampooing. Finally, no less important, was the concluding period of relaxation, for at least an hour, in the cooling-room.

Today, the few remaining Victorian Turkish baths are seen as places for leisure and relaxation. But originally, they were built for therapeutic use within hospitals, or hydropathic establishments—or else as standalone facilities for bathing, provided first by entrepreneurs, and later, somewhat hopefully perhaps, by local authorities, to provide inexpensive personal cleansing facilities for the majority of people who had no domestic hot or cold water.

When David Urquhart, a British diplomat serving in the Ottoman Empire, discovered the so-called ‘Turkish bath’ in the 1830s, he became a fervent proselytiser, devoting two chapters to it in his quirky 1850 travel book, The Pillars of Hercules, and campaigning thereafter to introduce it into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Richard Barter, a physician and practising hydropathist—today we would think of him as a hydrotherapist—was the proprietor of St Ann’s Hydropathic Establishment near Blarney in Co. Cork. When Barter learned about the bath from Urquhart’s book he was, he wrote, 'electrified; and resolved, if possible, to add that institution to my Establishment.'

He was already using the vapour bath to alleviate the pain of complaints such as rheumatism, for which ‘orthodox medicine’ offered no effective cure, and the commoner remedies used to alleviate pain were often themselves harmful, and sometimes dangerous. He knew, therefore, that the therapeutic value of hot air increases with its temperature, and that the human body can tolerate higher temperatures in air which is dry, rather than air which is steamy.

So he invited Urquhart to St Ann’s to help him build a Turkish bath for his patients. But Urquhart, an expert on the history, appearance, and use of the hammam, had never actually built one, and didn’t know how to obtain the high temperature needed, so their first experimental bath was a failure.

Barter, however, persevered, sending his architect—coincidentally also named Richard Barter, though not actually related to him—to study the baths of ancient Rome. Today, in their honour, such baths in Europe are often called Irish-Roman baths.

St Ann’s opened in 1843—one of the very first hydros in Ireland—and was, by the mid-1850s, very successful. Barter aimed to make it as self-sufficient as possible. So the hydro had its own carpenter's shop, saddler, and mattress maker. It had a gas-works to supply its light, and a saw-mill enabling it to erect its own buildings. Barter's belief in self-sufficiency also ensured that patients benefitted from eating fresh food, grown and reared on the hydro's home farm.

But running a farm in the mid-19th century was never plain sailing.