[This piece appeared in Harvard Magazine, 1988]

In Quest of Crapper

Robert H. Bell

Have you ever wondered why the word crap is almost acceptable in polite com­pany? It's because it comes from Thom­as Crapper, inventor of the flush toilet. At least that is popular lore. But did Crapper really exist, or is he a legendary figure, like Paul Bunyan?

One rainy day in the Williams Col­lege library I embarked on a quest for Crapper. A Supplement to the Oxford Eng­lish Dictionary defines crap as "excre­ment; defecation," without any mention of Thomas Crapper; its use was first recorded in 1846. A slang dic­tionary cites, for 1859, "Crapping case, a privy; or water closet."

Listed in the library's card catalogue is a biography of Thomas Crapper, by Wallace Reyburn, entitled Flushed With Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper (1969), with Crapper's dates: 1837­1910.

Wondering how a nine-year-old boy became the eponymous inventor of the privy, I was struck by the notion that the biography might be an elaborate joke. While I was unable to locate the biography, I did find four reviews, all of which took it seriously. Newsweek con­cluded that "although the book has the ring of a classic hoax, Reyburn presents ample evidence that his man not only lived but made a lasting contribution to mankind's comfort."

Yet I couldn't confirm the existence of Thomas Crapper in any reference work. Not in any encyclopedia, nor in Kane's Famous First Facts, nor in the Dictionary of National Biography, nor in Bio-Base. Not a trace. His death, if it ever occurred, was never recorded by the London Times.

Eventually I found this entry in The People's Almanac under "The History of the Toilet": Crapper is "a myth created by Wallace Reyburn." According to the Almanac, many libraries, including the Library of Congress, have fallen for the hoax and file Reyburn's spoof as history.

My colleagues disagreed on the histo­ricity of Crapper. The chairman of the history department, a specialist on Vic­torian England, insisted that the man had lived; friends in England , he said, still possessed a venerable Victorian Crapper. But he wasn't sure whether the toilet bore the inventor's name or was simply referred to as "a Crapper."

The chairman wasn't surprised that Crapper had been ignored by historians. "They wouldn't condescend to include a plumber," he said, "but he existed, all right." He remembered an article re­garding Crapper in the London Times some years before.

The Times article, dated 27 Novem­ber 1979, read: "A suggestion that a blue plaque should be erected to com­memorate a former home of the Victori­an sanitary engineer, Thomas Crapper, after earnest consideration, has been re­jected by the historic buildings commit­tee of the Greater London Council. The Committee decided that 'memora­ble though Crapper's name might be in popular terms,' evidence from the Pat­ents Office showed that he was not a notable inventor or pioneer in his field."

By now, hot on the trail of a hoax, I couldn't decide if this dispatch was de­liberately tongue in cheek or simply ambiguous. I still hadn't found Rey-burn's "biography" and wondered, Who is this author Reyburn, anyway? I looked him up in Contemporary Authors, where I noted that he had written for that bastion of spoofery, the New Yorker. Reyburn lives in London, so I called his publisher, Prentice-Hall. His editor was no longer there, but some old hands in­sisted that there really was a Thomas Crapper, although it was unclear wheth­er he had any claim to fame.

I found two other books on toilets, one called Clean and Decent, the other Cleanliness and Godliness. Neither men­tions Crapper, even in a chapter in the latter book on Victorian sanitation de­velopments, but neither is a scholarly study. Cleanliness and Godliness is a kind of mad-hatter meditation in the spirit of Tristram Shandy.

Finally I got my hands on Reyburn's Flushed With Pride. After two readings I was convinced that it was a clever ruse, a pretext for ninety pages of water-clos­et humor. There was precious little in­formation about Crapper himself, only anecdotes and jokes. There were sever­al bibliographical references and osten­sible facts, but I suspected they had been invented to give an air of plausibil­ity. For instance, Reyburn cites a grand­niece named Edith Crapper, of Bolingbroke Grove, Wandsworth Com­mon. Or an author named Jonathan Routh, who supposedly wrote The Good Loo: Where to Go in London and The Guide Porcelain: The Loos of Paris.

That seemed obviously spurious: who would write two books on loos? Jonathan Routh, that's who. Routh's books do exist, according to The British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books.

What about other facts Reyburn cites? Is there a drain marked Thos. Crapper in Westminster Abbey? Is Crapper buried in Elmer's End Ceme­tery, plot 4,165 V4, row 1? Does Crap-per hold patents numbers 4,990, 6,029, and 11,604?

I wrote to the Library of Congress asking about those British patent num­bers and for any information they could find about Crapper in London post of­fice directories of the 1890s, the so-called Kelly's Guides. I also contacted Walter Houghton, an eminent scholar of the Victorian era, who kindly dis­patched his assistant in London to the Registry of Deaths.

I awaited the results of my research, confident that I was on the verge of ex­posing the hoax of Thomas Crapper. Professor Houghton reinforced my be­lief with the information that there was no sign of Crapper at the London Reg­istry, although he added that some 5 percent of the names they look up are unrecorded.

Just as I was about to write my ex­posé, a friend at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown handed me a discon­certing item: a reference to Crapper in David Piper's The Companion Guide to London. On the King's Road in Chel­sea, writes Piper, we can find "Mr. Thomas Crapper's renowned establish­ment (lavatory maker to King George V)." I resisted the reference on the grounds that Crapper was supposed to have died the year George V ascended the throne. Perhaps Piper was including hearsay and folklore?

Then came conclusive, devastating evidence from the Library of Congress. The Post Office London Directory for 1897 lists, on page 525, numbers 50, 52, and 54 Marlboro Road: "Crapper, Thomas and Co., sanitary engineers." And in addition came corroboration of patent numbers for toilet devices, dated and in the name of Thomas Crapper.

I had been too eager to discover a hoax. Nurtured on the ironies of Swift, Franklin, and Twain, I apparently per­ceived a full-scale fraud where there was, in fact, merely whimsical elabora­tion. I forgot about Thomas Crapper and turned my attention to other mat­ters.

Until a year later. Walking down a street in London, I spied a bus with a

sign for Elmer's End. Of course I couldn't remember the plot number of Crapper's grave, so I didn't hop aboard. But it was evident that the spirit of Crapper was haunting me again, and I did remember another detail from Flushed With Pride that I could verify while I was in London. There is in Westminster Abbey, Reyburn states, a drain marked Thos. Crapper.

The next morning I went on a splen­did tour of the abbey, conducted by a famous London guide named Freddie, who has been taking people around London for fifty years. In between his fascinating anecdotes about Henry V's helmet from the battle of Agincourt and the Poet's Corner, I asked if somewhere in the abbey there wasn't a drain named for Thos. Crapper. If anyone knew, it would be Freddie.

He did, there was, and he led me straight to it. Directly in front of the deanery at Westminster Abbey, I re­lieved myself of the burden I'd been carrying so long. Satisfied, even moved, I asked forgiveness from the unquiet spirit of Thomas Crapper, sanitary engi­neer.

Yet I still have moments, sitting in the smallest room in my house, when I wonder, Did destiny or coincidence give the inventor a name that already meant excrement or defecation?

Robert H. Bell, Ph.D. '72, is professor of English at Williams College.