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Blue Plaque 6 - The Mangle House
This plaque commemorates the use, at this house in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, of a box mangle, and the house still bears that name. The house, which stands below Park House orchard and opposite Andrew Close entrance, was previously a much smaller dwelling but nonetheless at one time housed a huge mangle. The house was, for some time occupied by an old couple by the names of Sarah and Willoughby Privey, she dying in 1888.
The box mangle was invented in the 1 8th Century. This type of mangle seems not to have been for squeezing water from freshly washed clothes or linen but for polishing dry or damp dry laundry. The person using the machine folded the smaller items of clothing inside larger ones such as sheets and tablecloths. These items were then all wound round a large wooden roller and two of these were put into the bottom of the mangle. Over the rollers was a wooden box heavily weighted with as many stones as it could hold. A large handle operating on other gear wheels enabled the operator to move the box to and fro and the weight of the stone laden box smoothed and polished the clothes. The operator, meanwhile was preparing other rollers of laundry for loading. Box mangles were very efficient. The large items, it seems, needed no further ironing and the small ones only final pressing. Street and village laundries thus found them very useful. Box mangles remained in use well into the twentieth century. Indeed, the writer's copy of the Army and Navy Stores Mail Order Catalogue of 1907 shows that the seven foot model could be purchased for the cost then of 259/- (£12.95p now). The length of the room required to accommodate the machine when in use was stated as twelve feet four inches. The Stoke Golding mangle was in use well into this century and until a few years ago it was, the writer is informed, in pieces in a local farmer's barn, from where it was removed to Stowmarket museum. Examples of the box mangle can be seen locally in the Oakham County Museum. It is not known as this time whether or not it is proposed to restore and display the old Stoke Golding Box Mangle. Let us hope it is not lost for ever.
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