Dr Alice White

Brits were used to hard toilet paper and one other brand of toilet paper, its selling point was that it wouldn't give you splinters.

So briefly, there's sort of a scale of...

hardness or discomfort that we're looking at here.

And by 1956, when this market research is happening, they were writing that the market was within sight of saturation.

So basically, not everyone was buying toilet paper yet.

So the psychologists found that in Glasgow, a lot of people were still using newspaper because there was a dislike of spending money on something you were literally going to flush away or dispose of.

In Yorkshire, especially amongst men, softness was seen as unnecessary, a bit frivolous, and also a little bit worrying that it might not be up to the job of a good, solid, manly wife.

Whereas London looked quite different.

So women and more cosmopolitan consumers were much more open to the idea of soft toilet tissue.

What the research showed was that the trend everywhere was heading towards softer paper, but there were big differences in who was going to get there fastest.

Yes, the British Civil Service knew that there was an increasing demand for soft toilet tissue in its buildings, but they also knew that it was going to be really expensive to make the change, from about £370,000 a year to nearly a million.

So they commissioned some research from their scientists.

So Graham Wilson at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine led the investigations and he was extraordinarily thorough.

He carried out what is called a porosity test.

So in those experiments, a finger was pressed onto the paper with a stool sample underneath and

and then onto a petri dish.

And then they grew whatever came through the paper onto that petri dish to see, did germs come through?

Was it safe to switch?

And the conclusions are really, really stark.

Soft toilet paper, they were almost in direct contact with faecal material.