Local History


Turning the Mangle By Roderick Martin


FOR wives and daughters in many large Victorian and Edwardian families, the washing, drying and pressing of clothes was a seemingly endless task. One of the earliest labour-saving devices to take some of the drudgery out of laundry work was the cylinder mangle originally used to press the water out of wet laundry more efficiently than by hand wringing, so it would dry more quickly on the clothes line. With minor modifications these machines were in common domestic use until the 1930s. I can remember seeing my grandmother use one in the 1950s, and I am sure in our local area there will be some of these machines still in regular use today.


The earliest version was the ‘box mangle’. It was made up of a heavy box on rollers that was painstakingly pushed across wet laundry placed on a table to press it. Since the box was typically filled with bricks or stones it often took two people to manoeuvre it over the laundry. In the early eighteenth century the first forms of cylinder mangle appeared. According to the Accrington Web, Robert Tasker, a master blacksmith with a foundry in Back Union Street, Accrington, Lancashire is credited with inventing the first geared wooden-roller mangle in about 1850. No doubt having a family of thirteen children and hence his wife, Betty, having a large amount of wet laundry to dry proved the necessary incentive for his creativity. He was a man of high ideals and religious belief who refused to patent his invention saying ‘God gives men brains to help his brother, not to line his pockets’. However it appears that he and his wife did not pass up the opportunity to charge their neighbours one penny for a visit into their back garden to use the wondrous new machine.


Mangles were heavy devices with a cast iron frame but remarkably efficient in wringing water from wet clothes after washing. By a simple cog arrangement two wooden rollers could be operated by turning a side wheel with a large crank handle, one roller turning clockwise and one roller turning anti-clockwise simultaneously. Regular use tended to bow the wooden roller but by adjusting a screw-down or by a lever-and-weight mechanism pressure could be applied to the top roller to press down on the lower roller. However mangles were heavy and cumbersome, and being difficult to trundle in and out from an outhouse on washdays, they were often left outdoors with a cover over them. There were of course some obvious health and safety concerns, principally as the result of over-enthusiastic


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Mangles in the Museum


rotation of the hand wheel resulting in flattened fingers or worse. Also there was a disadvantage that the wood of the rollers tended to leave stains on clothes, a problem which could be overcome by placing the washing in white cloth or plain linen before passing it through the rollers.


To meet popular demand mangles progressed by the 1860s into large- scale factory production. One West Yorkshire maker, W. & S. Summerscales of Covey Lane, Keighley, claimed in 1890 to be the largest manufacturer of washing, wringing and mangling machines in the world. Besides supplying appliances for the domestic market, Summerscales made a range of larger equipment including mangles operated by steam power for the so-called model laundries where for a charge the public could bring their dirty clothes to be washed, dried, pressed, ironed, and returned ready to wear. After WW2 the heavy mangles were replaced by portable light weight models with A-frames which held a


metal tub and had adjustable rollers. Soon these too became obsolete with the arrival of the washing machine, the spin dryer, and finally the tumble dryer.


the Tavistock Museum both of which have recently been restored and re- painted in original green and red colours. A nice local history feature is the name of the Tavistock Ironmonger who sold it cast on a the detachable top-brace of each of the mangles. One mangle has the name ‘W.E. Baker, Tavistock, whose shop was opposite the Church in Bedford Square, Tavistock, now the Pasty Shop. William Edwin Baker bought the


There are two cylinder mangles in


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