On 27 January 1910, Thomas Crapper died. He had run a successful sanitary engineering business and left two enduring myths.
The first is that he invented the flushing toilet. He didn’t. Credit usually goes to Sir John Harington, whom Elizabeth I called “my witty godson”. He loved his epigrams, of which the most famous is:
Treason doth never prosper? What’s the reason?
for if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
In Harington’s time, slang for a privy was a “jakes”; Harington installed his device at his home and then penned or punned a descriptive tract called A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax. In it, he instructs:
You shal make a false bottome to that privie that you are annoyed with, either of lead or stone, the which bottome shall haue a sluce of brasse to let out all the filth, which if it be close plaistered all about it, and renced with water as oft as occasion serves, but specially at noone and at night, wil keepe your privie as sweet as your parlour…
He closes with the advice:
To keepe your houses sweet, cleanse privy vaults,
To keepe your soules as sweet, mend privie faults.
Given the pun on a jakes, it is fitting that the slang “the john” is for Harington.
The second myth is that Crapper gave us crap and crapper. He didn’t. The OED gives two entries from 1846 when Crapper was a child. The first is the exchange “‘Fenced in a dunninken’ … ‘What? Fenced in a crapping ken?’”. Ken is “house”; crap appears to have started etymological life as chaff and moved more generally to refuse. With “dunninken” already established as the outhouse – the dung home – the leap from refuse to excrement is clear enough.
By the way, “dunny” as a toilet is widely used Australian slang and the academy puts the 1830s as entry into colonial language. I say “Australian”. In honour of the punning Sir John, I ought say “Down Under”.
