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from "BAC" contains these words:

Some 'old' houses used to be, e.g. some rural councils installed underground
rainwater cisterns beneath council houses in the 1930s. These became defunct
when the houses were modernised after the second world war. Some private
rural houses were self sufficient in water, too, e.g. I know one which until
the mid 1970s used to have a well to provide drinking water to the kitchen,
and a large tank in the roof space, filled by pumping water up from the
nearby river, providing water for all non-drinking purposes.

My grandparents house had a well of drinking water in a space between
it and the house next door, served by a shared handpump. They didn't
have a flush lav so otherwise only needed washing water. For that we
used roof rainwater which collected in a huge galvanised tank outside
the kitchen. In summer the top few inches of water was always full of
wrigglers but they didn't get down to tap level very much :-).

Our neighbour at our last place had a similar roof-fed rain tank
which was his sole source of drinking water until the late 80's. He
didn't have a flush lav either, and just didn't do laundry. He had never
had a bath or shower in his life until he left that house.

When he moved unwillingly to civilisation, I inherited his big tank
and connected it up to the shed roof, giving us another hundred gallons
of standby-water. We also had a plastic 50 gallon butt of roofwater at
the back door. When our private water supply failed, we could usually
quickly draw off a last 10 gallons of proper drinking water into a
plastic barrel before the system ran dry. For everything else we used
rainwater, and if the tanks ran out there was a handy river across the
road.

Janet.