“We have many children coming here who have no idea how water gets into an automatic washing machine, that it comes through two pipes. There again, you get many who think you heat a steam iron by pouring hot water into it!” The laundry project at Normanby Hall near Scunthorpe has provided Sally Bailey, the borough council’s museum education officer, with endless amusement and insight into the idiosyncratic ways schoolchildren view domestic labour, both of today and of the past.

The Normanby Hall Victorian laundry, set out solely for the use of school parties, is intended to demonstrate how both rich and poor dispatched the weekly washing before modern electrical appliances brought relief from the intense physical labour.

The laundry’s success in meeting the requirements of national curriculum history and the resource needs of teachers and children has earned it a Sandford Award from the Heritage Education Trust, which recognises outstanding contributions to education in the heritage field. The well-designed teacher’s resource pack was especially commended.

The laundry is set out in the only remaining part of a huge domestic wing erected by the Sheffield family, which owns the hall, in the first decade of this century. The wing was demolished to avoid tax debts and the family vacated the hall in 1964. It is now leased to Scunthorpe borough council as a museum and conference centre.

The laundry was to be converted into office space until Mrs Bailey proposed it as an ideal site for a hands-on schools history project.

Since the basic layout of the laundry remained intact, Mrs Bailey joined forces with Susan Hopkinson, Scunthorpe museums’ keeper of social history and Miss Ivy Winterton who, now in her nineties and still living in the village of Normanby, was employed in the laundry by the Sheffields, and together they fitted it out with authentic appliances. An enormous aid to reconstruction was a photograph of the laundry in action in 1890, at its peak, when it would have been taking in linen from the Sheffield’s London as well as Scottish houses.

Schoolchildren coming into the laundry are greeted with dolly tubs and dolly sticks, mangles, wooden airers, flat irons, iron stoves and a large box mangle press used for flattening linen sheets, all of which would have been used to deal with the huge amounts of washing generated by country houses.

The children are divided into groups of 10. Some are required to wash clothes, grating the soap, filling the dolly tubs with water from buckets, agitating the clothing with the long dolly sticks, hanging clothes to dry and using flat irons, while others compare Victorian equipment with modern appliances.

“They work from contemporary advertisements and photographs,” says Sally Bailey. “They use maths in measuring and technology in looking at a range of irons and pegs.

“Some schools get five or six weeks’ preparatory and follow-up work out of this. The children - and accompanying adults - are fascinated. They really buzz.”

Last academic year the laundry catered for more than 60 school visits. The children are expected to come armed with a list noting all the items associated with washing at home, how much time is spent on ironing, how often the washing machine is used and who performs these tasks.

Sally Bailey says pupils often have weird and wonderful notions about the whole process. Some, for example, were unaware that washing could be hung outside to dry on a line.

o For further information contact Sally Bailey, museum education officer, Museum and Art Gallery, Oswald Road, Scunthorpe, South Humberside DN15 7BD. Tel: 0724 843533.