A new book on the illustrious Victorian lavatorial legend, Thomas Crapper - The Real Crapper Story by Richard E Doughty - includes previously unpublished material about his life and times, such as: belonging to a dynasty of seventeen plumbers including four other Thomas Crappers, not being the first Crapper to work at Sandringham, and a surprising connection between TC and Roman Abramovich.
 
Thomas Crapper came from Thorne in Yorkshire where as a child, like Captain Crapper his father, he was a scholar. For several decades Thorne had been an important transport hub for travellers from the north to London by sail and steam packet, which was a more comfortable and faster way to travel than by stage coach. Thorne was also a shipbuilding town where, in 1831, the world's second largest steam packet, the 167 ton twin 80hp engined Transit, had been built.
 
The Crappers lived next to The Rodney tavern, a staging inn by the Waterside quay, where young Thomas would have been imbued with the technology of early steam and shipbuilding, and observed the wealthy moving between the north and London. There were three plumbers in Thorne, one was James Crapper, Thomas' uncle - a plumber, glazier and painter - but, with no running water or sewage in Thorne at that time, plumbing work would have included innovative boiler systems for the steamships, and probably work installing the first class cabins toilets. Doughty speculates that 'who knows, he probably watched a Downtown's (sic) ship's closet being installed which fired up his life-long interest in sanitation'. (In Hayward Tyler's 1867 catalogue the Downton's ship closet 'for fixing below the waterline' was three times the price of any other at £11.)
 
Doughty writes that 'Thomas would also have witnessed first hand the excitement of a new boat launch when thousands attended from miles around to join in a rare day of celebration and entertainment'. The ship-owners were strong on self-promotion. Young Crapper may also have noticed the lengths to which rival stage coaches, steamships and inns all vied for business, and how the excesses of some of the claimed benefits aided their success.
 
By the 1840s railways appeared and put paid to Thorne's boating and coaching. James Crapper sold up and moved to Canada, and Thomas Crapper, now 16, moved to London 'probably aboard the schooner Fanny c1852' to where his elder brothers had moved - three to become plumbers and three mariners, and brother George in Chelsea employed young Thomas in his successful new plumbing enterprise. Incidentally, Wallace Reyburn in 'Flushed With Pride - The story of Thomas CRapper' had Thomas walking to London aged 11. Maybe he did both.
 
'The real Thomas Crapper' book continues with a well-researched picture of Victorian plumbing and sanitation, and the part in that which Thomas played, his rise to greatness, including seventeen patents and design copyrights, work at Sandringham spurred on by connections made as a freemason, and his trading partners including Sharpe, Twyford and Humpherson who is credited in 1885 with producing the first flush down pan and trap one-piece closet 'The Beaufort' (of which there are apparently only four in existence - one in the V&A). But Doughty's diligent research came up with a different claim, from William Paton Buchan of Glasgow who patented the Carmichael one-piece wash down in 1879 with a jet flush via a spreader for the American market in 1882 where he also held the patent.
 
Doughty discovered that both Thomas Crapper's wife, Maria and the mother of his sister in law, both coming from Norfolk, had been in service at Sandringham. The book quotes Crapper's son saying that Mrs Finch of the Finborough Arms, Kensington, 'told me she used to often open a bottle of champagne in the morning for him and his brother George - not an unusual custome in those days I believe' - a story I had heard before recounted with a degree of envy by the present co-owner of Thomas Crapper & Co Ltd, Mr. Simon Kirby.
 
'This impressive, hardback book contains many new facts and images regarding Crapper & Co. that were previously unknown or unpublished. Richard Doughty has invested a great deal of time and research into his subject. Furthermore it is profusely illustrated; there is a page of pictures for every page of script. Essential bathroom reading!' comments Simon Kirby.
 
Richard Doughty, an apprentice-served master plumber himself, states that 'no sanitarian during the important 1880-1900 boom period did more than Thomas Crapper to promote improvements to the nation's sanitation and bathroom facilities' - a claim which this book seems to admirably substantiate.
 
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