Kitty Wilkinson

Catherine ("Kitty") Wilkinson (24 October 1785–1860)[2][3] was an Irish migrant and "wife of a labourer", who became known as the 'Saint of the Slums' due to her pioneering the public wash house movement.

Wilkinson was born Catherine Seaward to a skilled working class family in Londonderry, Northern Ireland on 24 October 1785.

During the passage, their ship's mast snapped in a severe storm and the vessel ran aground on Hoyle Bank at the mouth of the river Mersey.

Wilkinson's father and younger sister died, leaving Mrs Seaward to arrive in Liverpool a widow with two young children.

Wilkinson took the initiative to offer the use of her boiler, house and yard to neighbours to wash their clothes, at a charge of 1 penny per week,[6] and she showed them how to use a chloride of lime to get them clean.

John Dobie, a trained historian and a civil servant in the education system, drew on extensive primary material such as town council records to show that the first baths and wash-house opened in 1842, several years before the one which the Wilkinsons supervised, and that the legend of "Catherine of Liverpool" was bult up over generations, starting with William Rathbone.

[17] In 2000, a fuller biography, The Life of Kitty Wilkinson, was written by Liverpool author and civic historian Michael Kelly.

Kelly also starred in a short documentary about Wilkinson's life, produced by a group of students at Edge Hill University in 2014, with the title Kitty: The Saint of the Slums.