A life in letters: Shunkie

With one exception, the boys’ toilets at the primary schools I attended were uniformly miserable structures. At Carluke Primary School, for instance, the urinals were in a noxious, concrete enclosure, open to the elements, while an ill-let corridor which I never had occasion to enter gave access to dark, unhygienic stalls.

The exception was Westerton Primary School, a new building opened to pupils in January 1960 which had inside toilets, bright, white-tiled, and much less pungent.

For years I unsuccessfully consulted Scots dictionaries looking for the derivation of the word ‘Shunkie’ which was the second commonest schoolboy nomenclature for the toilet block (after ‘the bogs’.)

 Finally, in Ian Crofton’s A Dictionary of Scottish Phrase and Fable (Birlinn, 2012) I discovered that a ‘shankie’ or ‘shunkie’ was ‘a toilet bowl, so-called from Shanks of Barrhead, manufacturers of porcelain sanitary ware.’  The firm had been founded in 1878 and began manufacturing its own china-ware in 1900. In those days, toilet bowls displayed the name of their manufacturer on the inside rear, just beneath the rim.