Isn’t it just typical? You spend years trying to stop children talking about toilets, and then you run into somebody like Hamish Wood. For Hamish has precisely the opposite ambition - he wants more toilet talk, not less.

“Going to the toilet is one of the most common of bodily functions,” he says. “Yet we are so reluctant to talk about it.” He then points out that the toilet has almost certainly saved more lives than penicillin. But his serious mood is shattered when a woman’s voice suddenly bawls out: “Gardy loo!” and the contents of a slop-pail are heard to hit the floor within feet of where he stands.

They are not real slops, of course, and the woman who empties her bucket from an upstairs window is a dummy. But Hamish ducks anyway. Which is surprising when you consider that he himself is responsible for this graphic demonstration of city life in the days before plumbing.

Perhaps we can forgive his nervousness. As manager of the Gladstone Working Pottery Museum at Stoke on Trent, Hamish has spent years planning a remarkable exhibition called “Flushed With Pride - The Story of the Toilet”, and the public is now about to give its verdict.

The museum is housed in a Victorian china works that was saved from the bulldozers in 1971. With steam-powered workshops and bottle-shaped ovens (Stoke once had hundreds of these brick structures), it provides a unique environment where children and adults can learn about the history of the “the ceramic capital of the world”, and have a go at throwing a pot or pressing a tile.

But when Hamish arrived five years ago, one thing seemed to be missing. Although the city is as famous for its WCs as for its tableware, little effort had been made to present that aspect of the town’s history to the public. “We had a collection of sanitary ware on open display,” says Hamish. “But it was just a pile of objects doing nothing.”

He and his team got down to business, in every sense of the word. With pound;1 million of lottery money, pound;350,000 from the European Regional Development Fund, grants from the city council and pound;80,000 in exhibits from local firms such as Twyford and Armitage Shanks, they gutted the factory’s former toilet block and installed an exhibition that they hoped would get people talking about toilets.

But toilets - from earth closets to the futuristic NutraSure, which analyses users’ excreta, assesses their dietary needs and then orders the most appropriate foods via the internet - are only part of the story. “Flushed With Pride” offers a walk-through history of sanitation. And if that sounds dry, just step this way.

Smell something funny? You’re in the backyard of an 1840s slum, and about to stumble into the most disgusting privvy you’ve ever seen. A heap of horribly realistic entrails putrefies in the corner, while a pig roots through the filth surrounding a shared water-tap. And there’s something nasty in the air.

“We’re not trying to sicken people,” says Hamish, “just get the message across that if you didn’t have a loo, and there was no organised way of getting rid of waste, things could get quite unpleasant.” He indicates a list of diseases painted on the sloping roof. They are conditions most commonly associated with poor hygiene, and they end with the word “death”. Inside a dank mock-up of a Victorian brick sewer, a woman’s voice takes up the grim story. “In 1840 alone,” she says, “100,000 orphans ended up in workhouses because their parents died of disease; 40 per cent of babies died before they reached their fifth birthday, and a quarter of all children lost at least one parent by the time they were 15I Ancient China, Greece and Rome used running water to remove waste. So why weren’t we using sewers here by the 1800s?” The video relates the story of our emergence from this slough of despond, starting with Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 report on the sanitary conditions of the labouring population. Spurred on by the 1848 cholera epidemic that killed 70,000 came the first of the Public Health Acts, which were to require all householders to install water closets that emptied into public sewers.

But it was only when those sewers were built, together with reservoirs and water mains and a network of sewage treatment plants, that the death rate fell, and episodes such as London’s Big Stink in 1858 could finally be consigned to the dung heap of history. If anybody still doubted the need for publicly funded sanitation, the exceptionally hot summer of that year was to set them right. So appalling was the smell of fermenting sewage in the Thames that MPs refused to sit at Westminster. It was the final straw.

With the building of sewers, the development of the WC went into overdrive, and nowhere was better equipped to take advantage of the boom than Stoke on Trent. Since the 18th century, tableware manufacturers such as Wedgwood, Spode, Minton and Doulton had included ornate items of sanitary ware in their catalogues, as well as a variety of ingenious if less-than-perfect flushing mechanisms (Hamish delights in demonstrating the Bramah hinged valve and its successor, the Cummings sliding valve).

But now it was all cisterns go! With ample supplies of water and a U-bend in place to keep smells at bay, the modern wash-down toilet bowl with siphonic flush mechanism was born. And if anyone is still not clear about the inner workings of the siphon system (compulsory in Britain until recently, it now faces competition from continental-style button-operated cisterns), Hamish commissioned a craftsman to make the world’s first all-glass WC.

A see-through toilet is just one of the novel ways in which this exhibition combines education with entertainment. Next to an immaculate example of a Thomas Crapper WC (Hamish pulls the chain to prove that it’s fully plumbed in), there’s a board debunking all the Crapper myths, while a television screen cunningly disguised as a mirror tells the story of colour in the bathroom (the museum is the proud owner of the last “avocado” suite in existence, one of many exhibits from the Armitage Shanks collection).

Sit on this toilet seat and you will hear a recording from an oral history project called Ceramic Century. Reach into the giant toilet roll and you will feel one of many substances that have been used as toilet paper. (Don’t worry, it’s just a handful of moss!) Wall-mounted flaps in the shape of mini-toilet-seat lids lift to reveal “Did you know?” panels at regular intervals (“People in medieval castles saved urine. It contains ammonia, a natural softening agent for leather”), while examples of porcelain products range from the Oracle, the Rapidus and Shanks Patent Compactum to the Bourdaloue, a sort of over-blown sauce-boat used by 18th century French ladies in emergencies and apparently named after Louis Bourdaloue, a court priest “whose sermons were bladder-strainingly long”.

From chamber pots to water conservation to the public convenience, there’s hardly an inch of toilet history that’s not covered. But however much visitors enjoy the show, they should refrain from telling Hamish they were “fully engaged” or “bowled over” - he might want people to talk about toilets, but there can’t be a single joke he hasn’t heard.

“Flushed With Pride”, which is a new, permanent exhibition, opens on October 6. The Gladstone Working Pottery Museum is at: Uttoxeter Road, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs, ST3 1PQ. Call Joy McKenna on: 01782 319 232311378; or e-mail:gladstone@civic2.stoke.gov.uk

THOMAS CRAPPER

If you think you know all about the most famous name in toilet history, think again. The museum asked the Thomas Crapper Toilet Company to dispel a few myths about their founder, and here’s what they came up with.

It’s a popular misconception that he invented the toilet. He didn’t. Nor did he invent the flushing siphon system - he simply improved it. And as for the notion that the word “crap” was taken from his name - well, the truth is more complicated than that. In fact, “crap” was an Old English word for rubbish. While it went out of use in 16th century England, early settlers took it to America, where it later became slang for faeces.

During the First World War, American soldiers visiting London saw cisterns with the name “Crapper” on them in large letters. They found this highly amusing and began referring to the entire toilet suite as “the crapper”. The subsequent influence of American culture caused the word “crap” to return to the language in England, having crossed the Atlantic not once but twice.

CURRICULUM LINKS

Science

At both key stages, children should be taught the knowledge, skills and understanding of science through a range of domestic and environmental contexts that are familiar and are of interest to them. They should look at the part science has played in the development of many useful things. They should learn that eating the right types and amount of food helps humans to keep healthy.

Design and technology

At both key stages, children should investigate and evaluate a range of familiar products, thinking about how they work, how they are used and the views of the people who use them. They should generate ideas for products, develop, plan and communicate design ideas, including uses and purposes - and aesthetic qualities!