The old photo of Silver Street was taken by Edwin Dodds in 1884 and gives us a rare glimpse of a nineteenth century public netty, which is the whitewashed structure in the centre, next to the wall of All Saints graveyard. The other photo shows the same view today.
‘Netty’ is a Geordie dialect word that originally referred to a toilet outside a home in a brick or wooden enclosure. Residents of Silver Street mostly lived in tenements and lodging houses so they didn’t have this luxury, and had to use a public netty. The one in the photograph was shared by around a thousand people, it was in constant demand and not a place you could relax for half an hour with a book.
It was built by Newcastle Corporation and consisted of a plank of wood with a couple of bum-sized holes and had a wooden screen between the users for privacy. Their doings dropped into a pit containing ash and cinders which were taken away on carts by scavengers who had contracts with the Corporation, and sold for fertiliser or used in local industries.
The worst time to pay a visit was first thing in the morning when the pit was filled to the brim with excrement, as chamber pots were emptied into it by people who didn’t fancy a trip there during the night. Many simply poured their pots out of windows onto the path below, rather than venture anywhere near the netty. The stench on Silver Street at that time of the day was so powerful it drew complaints from people living quarter of a mile away on Grey Street.
Geordies are more sophisticated these days and most of their homes have an indoor toilet, which they still refer to as “the netty”. There are many fanciful theories about the origins of the word: some imagine it’s from the Italian ‘gabinetti’, meaning ‘water closets’; while others claim it’s French or was brought here by the Romans. The truth is less exotic and can be found in dialect dictionaries from the nineteenth century.
These tell us that people in Yorkshire, Cumberland and County Durham used the word ‘nessy’ back then, which is short for ‘necessary house’, a place where life’s necessities were conducted. There are records of necessary houses in Newcastle, but Geordies arrived at the word ‘netty’ from a slightly different angle.
According to the 1829 edition of John Trotter Brockett’s dialect dictionary North Country Words, ‘netty’ and ‘neddy’ were used in this region, both with the same meaning. ‘Neddy’ was the local term for a ‘needy’, which Brockett says was “a place of need or necessity”. The letters ‘d’ and ‘t’ were often interchangeable in the north east of England, and ‘netty’ replaced ‘neddy’ a long time ago.
The Silver Street public netty was one of the most disgusting places in Newcastle. You’d have to be in very desperate need, to do your necessaries there.