Top 10 toilet horrors: Times readers kick up a stink

There’s always been one good outlet when life feels as if it’s going down the drain: write a letter to the The Times. To celebrate World Toilet Day, Ellen Przepasniak has scoured the Archive for ten particularly choice missives from readers who’ve got themselves in a lather about lavatories [click on the links to read the originals].

1. It seems railway lavatories have never been clean. In August 1886, a reader signing himself Viator Infelix shared his noisome experience aboard the Transcontinental Express. The stench of a lavatory in the stagnant August heat can’t have been pleasant, but the language is what makes this letter especially, shall we say, pungent: “The so-called lavatory, a pandemonium of stinks, some six feet square, with water-closet, urinal, and washing apparatus cheek by jowl, was apparently never cleansed; and neither in this one in the Pullman were there any antiseptics to deaden the sickening effluvium.”