It is somewhat ironic that in the Year of the Women, the International Convention of Women at Grahamstown in December 1975 took over the “Gents”, and that the Argus Newspapers should show the below picture over the caption “Mens last bastion against the advancing forces of Women’s Lib has fallen”. It is ironic because, as all historians of the plumbing art will know, the influence of women is integral to the development of the urinal over the ages. In ancient Rome, where plumbing was taken very seriously, and where there was a God for everything, they elected a woman to be the Goddess of the sewers, by name Venus Cloacina. And in more recent times it was Queen Elizabeth I of England whose “sensitive nose” led her to grant an annual stipend to John Harington until he successfully perfected his invention – the modern water closet, where at she promptly knighted him. At Brasenose College, Oxford, the original gentelmens latrines were built from funds given by a Lady Long – and to this day her influence in the urinal is given the imaginative tribute of describing the latrines as “The longs”.
Most gentlemen today have at one time or another gone to “powder their nose”: at the turn of the century the normal expression was to go and “pick a daisy”. Well done Ladies, all you did in Grahamstown was to remind us of the part you have played in the Gents – and, as Steven Slag would say….. “at least its made of stainless steel”.
