Reckitt's Crown Blue (Blueing tablet) - Pack of 10

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Henry Chance Newton, mentioned in the preceding excerpt, uses the phrase several times in Idols of the "Halls": Being My Music Hall Memories (1928): City of Moorabbin Historical Society (Operating the Box Cottage Museum) Education kit, Department of Veterans Affairs, Schooling, service and the Great War, 2014

One of the most common issues when using eco laundry products such as soapnuts or soapwort, is getting whites looking really white. After a few natural washes white clothing and bedding can become more grey and yellow, even when they are clean. It is more pronounced with hard water. The yellowy-grey is the actual colour of the fabric and up to now soapnuts users have resigned themselves to having off-whites. However we do now have the number one eco solution to make your whites dazzling even when using natural laundry products and thought that you’d like to know. We can now get our whites looking like new with our traditional totally natural blue indigo laundry bluing! Bluing, laundry blue, dolly blue or washing blue is a household product used to improve the appearance of textiles, especially white fabrics. Used during laundering, it adds a trace of blue dye (often synthetic ultramarine, sometimes Prussian blue) to the fabric. It is impossible for art, with the tiniest "a," to thrive very long in our music-halls under existing conditions. It may occasionally come as a surprise, and for that reason even please for a time ; but it cannot and will not find a home there until the "Blue Bag" yields to the "Blue Pencil." I am not narrow-minded. If certain blasé individuals with jaded palates want spice, give it to them—let them wallow in it ; but see that it is in a place set apart, not in a hall where each programme contains a dead-letter footnote, requesting the audience to report to the management anything objectionable in the entertainment. Let the prurient-minded have a hall to themselves. Call it the Obscenity, but for the sake of the majority—the lovers of clean, wholesome amusement—make it an offense, punishable at law, for anyone to encroach on the prerogative of those engaged in pandering to the tastes of the Dirty and Depraved.

One of the traditional ways of rousing laughter in illegitimate drama is by innuendo. The technique is not by any means new nor is it confined to illegitimate drama—it is to be found in Elizabethan plays of four hundred years ago. In the music hall, precisely what is assumed is left to the imagination of each member of the audience, but the implication is invariably of a kind delightfully described by Chance Newton as "cerulean," or "a touch of the blue bag." It was a favorite comic device of Max Miller's. By means of stressed rhymes he would lead an audience to expect a blue joke, but would so time what he said that he could rely on being interrupted by the loud laughter of the audience before he reached the significant word. He would then feel free to upbraid the audience vigorously for having dirty minds and giving him a bad name—and this technique was far from peculiar to Max Miller. And earlier still, from Albert Chevalier, Before I Forget: The Autobiography of a Chevalier D'industrie (1901): Maugham was a very successful playwright and very familiar with the theatre; and “blue bag” was certainly used in this sense among theatre people during WW II, not that long after Cakes and Ale was published. Here’s actress Naomi Jacob (b. 1884, so about ten years younger than Maugham) writing about her work with E.N.S.A. productions for the troops:

Context suggests that what Maugham means is off-color or bawdy jokes. Note that Mrs. Hudson's use of the blue bag is contrasted with her ‘propriety’: Many well remember that some of the smart ditties that our Marie warbled ere more or less tinged with squeezes from what the dear girl herself called " the blue bag." There was a well known intellectual property dispute between two manufactures of this type of product. The legal action arising from this is still cited in English law disputes. (Ironically, the two companies later merged with each other!)Conventional washing powders and fabric conditioners contain chemicals of the stilbene group ‘optical brighteners’ – to whiten whites. These chemicals change light from the invisible ultraviolet and violet spectrum and re-emits it in the blue range of the visible spectrum by fluorescent emission. The blue light coming from the whites balances the yellowy-grey colour of the fabric and it looks white.

As others have noted, "blue-bag" has been used in connection with laundry bluing since at least the 1860s. From " Purple Dyeing, Ancient and Modern," translated from a German article in Aus der Natur (not later than 1864) and printed in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution for the Year 1863 (1872): I imagine this is show-biz slang, borrowing the name of the familiar domestic article and humorously parsing it in the sense of “blue” jokes. E.N.S.A. shows are blue!” So are many of the shows given in music-halls in England. No E.N.S.A. show is blue at its final rehearsal at Drury Lane, that I can swear. Each show is vetted and vetted most carefully. Manuscripts have to be submitted, and the blue pencil is not spared when objectionable matter is found. If, after the show has gone out, either at home or overseas, the “blue bag” is used too freely that is the fault of the party manager, or going further, the fault of any E.N.S.A. officer who sees the show and hears “smut” and does not prohibit it. Dirt is not wished for, it is not permitted and if everyone concerned did their duty as they should do it it would all be eliminated. Remember there will always be “comics” who like to push in a dirty gag and get a cheap laugh . . . Storage & organisation Furniture Textiles Kitchenware & tableware Kitchens Lighting Decoration Rugs, mats & flooring Beds & mattresses Baby & children Smart home Bathroom products Laundry & cleaning Plants & plant pots Home electronics Home improvement Outdoor living Food & beverages Christmas Shop Shop by room

What did people use to whiten their white laundry in the past?

Many washerwomen—charring-women, notably—have an immense fondness for blue, for they can hide for the tome being, by its aid, any carelessness they have been guilty of as regards washing thoroughly. Blue covers up the yellow hue consequent upon this. Very blue clothes, too, look bad, but a slight colouring of it adds to the beauty of well-washed garments. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. There came a time at last, however, when even at the "Pav.," where such "shadiness" of song and jest seemed to be encouraged in those days, Marie was "warned" by the management, but not until that management had been "warned" by others, including your humble memoriser. Ultramarine is used not only to produce a blue, but also a white. Every housewife well knows that blue of some kind must be used to counteract that yellowish tinge which linen and cotton goods acquire when washed. This use of the blue color is familiarly called using the blue-bag, but using the whitening bag would, in truth, be the more appropriate phrase. As a general thing, the blue-bag is used far too freely. The effect should not be, as it generally is, to leave a blue tinge, but only to neutralize that yellow tinge with which we unavoidably associate the idea of imperfect cleansing.