Bob the Brit

To spend a penny, while the phrase has fallen into disuse in recent years as a result of inflation, was once a common (and rather coy) euphemism for using a public lavatory.

While men’s urinals have always been free, there was a one penny charge to use a proper ‘sit down’ lavatory, and the cubicle doors were coin operated.

The first of these locks were first introduced, at a public toilet outside the Royal Exchange, London, in the 1850s. That was quite an investment in those days – a penny was a not insignificant sum.

The term itself is thought to be more recent, it was first used in print in H. Lewis’s Strange Story, 1945:

“‘Us girls,’ she said, ‘are going to spend a penny!’”

Bear in mind that this was an ‘old’ – pre decimal – penny, so 1/240th of a pound. The charge didn’t change, to the best of my recollection, through the sixties, until decimalisation in 1971.

The Daily Telegraph famously published an article in 1977 “2p to spend a penny” – but in all honesty the choice of the 2p coin over the 1p was probably more a matter of mechanics – the lock mechanisms weren’t sophisticated and a 1p probably wouldn’t have the weight to activate a clunky lock.