NITS and head lice have long been associated with poor housing, although the animals themselves do not carry any class bias.

One of the problems caused by evacuation in World War Two was that some of the young evacuees were afflicted with head lice. Head lice spread easily and could quickly affect members of the rural community with whom they were housed.

In April 1940, the Romsey Advertiser published an article on how to deal with nits (the eggs) and head lice.

The article strongly advised against using paraffin or petrol because of their inflammability.

Vinegar, a popular remedy, was said to be useless as it did not dissolve the cement with which the nits were attached to human hair.

A professor at a London hospital had remarked that many of the supposed cures “would be appropriately dealt with in a work on magic”, such as vinegar.

READ MORE: Invasive banned species confirmed to be present in Winchester

Hampshire Chronicle: Well boring: Advert in Romsey Advertiser Oct 11 1940

As early as 1925 the Natural History Department of the British Museum had published a leaflet advocating Jeyes Fluid as the way to deal with the problem.

It was written with no regard for the rural housewife who had no running water in the house, let alone a supply of hot water. In many cottages water came from a well and was heated over a fire or kitchen range.

The method advocated was as follows:

First put a dessertspoonful of Jeyes Fluid into a quart of fairly hot water.

Then make all the hair wet with the solution, and “and, after rubbing the head well with a tablet of toilet soap, “shampoo” the hair, applying more of the solution with the hands to create a generous lather, which should be rubbed in for about two minutes”.

Next the head should be sponged to remove any remaining lather before repeating the shampoo and soap stage, but instead of rinsing these off, a towel should be wrapped around the head and left for a few minutes.

Finally the head should be washed again with soap and warm water, and rinsed with lukewarm water.

The hair should then be dried and combed with a very fine comb (commonly called a ‘nit comb’) and brushed over a newspaper which should be disposed of by burning.

As a final stage, the combs and brushes needed to be washed in a Jeyes Fluid solution.

All of this seems to need close on two gallons of heated water (nine litres) apart from the extra towels to be added to the week’s wash, assuming the family had that number of towels.

Nowadays there are a number of sophisticated treatments which were not around in 1940.