Dolly Blue Monday

Cherry

By Turlough

Thu, 20 Nov 2025
  • 52 reads
8 comments
 

 

Dolly Blue Monday

 

Herr Fahrenheit’s scale’s

Pushed to extremes

As Monday morning’s kitchen

Steam billows in clouds

Drenching windows, bairns and walls

While Anaglypta clings for dear life

Bystanders watch in fear

 

Fairy battered collars and cuffs

Of last week’s grimy workers’ shirts

Join sheets and shifts and underclothes

Plunged to scalding soapy depths

Agitated, beaten, blued

By the ultramarine and washing soda

Encased in Reckitt’s magic bomb

 

Biceps she’s had these sixty years

Tense and tighten, take the strain

New-fangled mangle heaved into place

From the latest model’s hidey hole

It’s an English Electric, don’t you know?

They make warplanes also, don’t you know?

As Woolworth’s clothes line soldiers on

 

Sunday’s spuds come out to fry

With bowls of veg and mutton saved

From a cold shoulder expertly pared

Her pantry’s labour-saving scheme

For the feeding of the five or six or seven

On our Nan’s busiest ever day

Until next week

 

Image:

My dear old Nan, photographed on a washing day about sixty years ago when she was about sixty years old.

 

 

Certificate U
Poem
Poetry in Commotion
Autobiography

Comments

Submitted by GlosKat on

Was Dolly her name, or is it a reference to a washing dolly, one of those wooden lumps on a handle that women used to pound up and down in a tub before washing machines were invented ?  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posser

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Ahh, she had a wooden washing dolly and a zinc peggy tub in the back of her shed, but they'd been there since before I was born so I never saw them in action. Her English Electric washing machine was state of the art stuff and the envy of the street. The last time I went to York Castle Museum they had one there and I felt old enough to become an exhibit myself. 

A Dolly Blue was a little block made by Reckitt's that she'd buy from the shop and put in the boiling water with her whites to make them extra white. I didn't know what it contained at the time but I googled it the other day to discover it was a mixture of ultramarine and washing soda.

But her name was Grace. 

Turlough

Submitted by skinner_jennifer on

Hi Turlough,

what a memory of your Nan Grace. I only recall the old hand driven mangle my mum used. Poor mum mangled her finger once and it was never the same once fixed, but appeared twested just around the nail area.

I bet my mum got her clothes line from Woolworths, as we had one in our village during the 50s and used to play cowboys and indians down the lane behind the shop.

Some lovely memories here in your poem of your hard working Nan.

Jenny.

 

Submitted by Turlough on

I could write pages and pages about my Nan. I've thought about doing so but I don't really know where to start. Perhaps this is the start that I need. She really was a hard worker who had had a rough life having been born in Sunderland in 1905 and having lost her father when she was a baby. She was one of the two most influential of my family members. 

I would have loved to have had a go with her mangle but never did. Probably because of the potential for mangled fingers that you said your mother suffered,

Many thanks to you for your lovely comment Jenny.

Turlough

Submitted by GlosKat on

My nan nearly mangled her finger off too !  She went off to the chemist and they just bandaged it up and it was wonky all her life. No A&E in those days. Such a  hard life, not safe even in the home.  

I do remember blue bags being put in the wash, but hadn't heard of blocks called Dolly Blue.

Amazing how daily life has changed just in our lifetime.

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Nans (and folks generally) were tougher people in those days. My uncle had a finger cut off at the knuckle by a mooring cable winch when he worked on Merchant Navy ships sailing up to Murmansk in the Arctic convoys during World War Two. He said he saw it roll across the deck and then fall into the sea while his mates wrapped up in a rag the stumpy bit that remained. 

The Dolly Blue blocks were inside a blue bag so what you remember is probably the same thing.

It's a cliché, I know, but try describing our lives back then to the kids of today. 

Turlough

Submitted by Rhiannonw on

When we were married (just 53 years ago!), we couldn't afford a washing machine for a while. We had a washing line across part of the little garden, and one frosty day I discovered the huge thick towel with a fringe we'd had as a wedding present had icicles hanging from each bit of the fringe! When I told an older lady about it she offered me her old mangle.

I don't think | actually got around to using it, as we managed to buy a twin tub quite soon!

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Hello Rhiannon.

We had a second hand twin tub when we were just married almost forty years ago, but we eventually replaced it with an automatic washing machine. My Nan was horrified, describing it as a complete and utter waste of money, when she discovered that the new machine didn't have a setting for boiling clothes. She had no complaints about the absence of a mangle though.

Turlough