Coal Stored in Bathtubs (various acccounts)

[Various early twentieth-century studies of European and North American bathing habits] leave the strong impression that before the First World War routine bathing was very far from widespread among the broader public. […] Even a bathroom in the home didn’t mean that the occupants bathed. Occasional reports of poor working-class families storing coal in their bathtub might seem apocryphal but they recurred often enough to claim some truth. – Peter Ward, The Clean Body: A Modern History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 82.

I haven’t come across a first-hand account of people storing coal in their bathtub, but that is not to say it has never occurred.

The trope was prevalent from the late nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. Today it is hardly used, likely partly due to other fuels overtaking coal for home heating, and has been supplanted by other similar denigrations of the poor or, especially, immigrants and refugees, who are often characterized as being unfit for public housing. See Jan Brunvand, Too Good To Be True, rev. ed. (2014), 504-6; Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, Urban Legends: A Collection of International Tall Tales and Terrors (2007), 15-16.

An early variant appeared in the Pittsburgh Daily Post on 27 February 1898: “A woman of moderate means who has heard and read of many philanthropic plans for the housing of laborers’ families thus laments: […] ‘Why doesn't the philanthropist, who says he can make a fair profit on his money building model tenements to be rented at moderate prices, build model apartment houses for hard-working housekeepers of the better class who do not put coal in their bathtub or garbage in their sinks?’”

John J. Murphy, “Social and Economic Evils of New York Due to the Fact That Too Many Are Renters,” New York Tribune, 17 April 1921, p. 4:

“Coal in Bathtubs Of Miners Denied By Mrs. Roosevelt,” Evening Star, Washington, D.C., 30 Jan. 1936, p. A-9. “Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt indicated today that she doesn’t think there is much truth in reports that mining families at the Arthurdale, W. Va., resettlement community keep their coal in their bath tubs.”