Kitty Wilkinson’s story is classic Victorian Liverpool: born Catherine Seaward, in Londonderry, Ireland in 1786, she moved to Liverpool with her parents when she was just 8 years old. Tragically her father and sister were drowned at the end of the crossing when their ferry hit the Hoyle Bank off Hoylake.
She then lived with her mother in Liverpool, where they were both in domestic service, and married a sailor, Emanuel Demontee. Although her mother continued to live with her the shock had left her without her sight or reason. In order to maintain her mother, Kitty opened a private adventure school but tragically after her husband was also drowned at sea, and left with two children, she was destitute and had to move to smaller premises impacting on her school income. Returning to domestic service, she was nursing a Mrs Braik in Pitt Street, Liverpool. When the lady died her husband, as a token of gratitude, gifted Kitty with a mangle which she used to set herself up as a laundress, opening her house to anyone who needed help. One of the services this entrepreneurial woman took on was to allow people to use her house and yard to wash their clothes for a penny a time. In 1823, she married Tom Wilkinson, a warehouse porter, as they continued to live at the Denison Street house that she rented. During the years following their marriage the Wilkinson home became a refuge for all sorts of unwanted children and aged folk who had no one to care for them.During a cholera outbreak in 1832 she offered her scullery boiler to all who wished to wash their clothes and linen, showing them how to use a chloride of lime to get them clean as boiling killed the cholera bacteria. Day and night she flitted in and out of the houses of the sick and dying and, apart from fearlessly nursing the sick and helping the overworked doctors, she made sufficient porridge every morning to feed 60 children and gave up her own bedroom so that 20 children whose parents had the fever might be washed and tended there.
So it was that in her kitchen the idea of a public wash-house first originated. None of those who worked there became infected by cholera, so effective were her disinfection efforts, that this led directly to the opening of the first public wash house. Convinced of the importance of cleanliness in combating disease, she had pushed for the establishment of public baths where the poor could bathe. Subsequently in 1842 the combined public baths and wash house was opened in Upper Frederick Street in 1914.
Given support by the District Provident Society and William Rathbone and his wife, Kitty was made superintendent of the baths, and through the newspapers was crowned ‘Saint of the Slums’.
In 1846 Kitty was summoned to Carnatic Hall where she found many people gathered to do her honour. The Lady Mayoress presented her with a silver tea service, on which was inscribed, 'The Queen, the Queen Dowager and the Ladies of Liverpool to Catherine Wilkinson, 1846.' For four years Kitty and her son looked after the Frederick Street wash house until in 1852 it was pulled down in order to erect a larger and better equipped one on the same site.
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| Statue in St, Georges Hall |
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| Lady Chapel Window |
Liverpool's last public wash-house, the Fred Robinson laundry in Everton, closed in October 1995. The Upper Frederick Street building was a monument to her efforts, and in a sense the rest of the wash houses were also. In less concrete terms she also affected the human landscape of Liverpool. For the first time there was a place to go to clean your clothes properly, and the effects on stemming the spread of disease through the city are a legacy of Kitty Wilkinson’s generosity and hard work. This woman was a testament to fact that even those born into the poorest levels of society can make a massive difference to the built and experienced landscape. Kitty died, aged 73 years, on 11th November, 1860. Her memory and that of all poor helpers of the poor was perpetuated in the staircase window of the Lady Chapel of Liverpool Cathedral and she is buried just a few hundred yards away from the Chapel in St. James’ Cemetery.
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