Josiah C. Wedgwood

“ But potting is such a specialized industry, so confined to and associated with North Staffordshire, that it is possible to study very clearly in the case of this industry the cause of its localization, and its gradual change from a home to a factory business. The rise of capitalism, the attempts at revolt on the part of the workers, the increase of machinery and steam power, all these can be studied very closely in the potting industry, just [x] because the history of the district is the history of potting and of the inhabitants’ whole lives. ”

“ When earthenware or salt glaze was enamelled at Hot Lane it required artists to do the work. But the eighteenth century was the age of mechanical invention, and the hand artists were continually being superseded by mechanical processes. Saddler and Green, for instance, invented the method of printing designs on top of the glaze, so that the artist had only to fill in the outline with colours. But there was something hard and crude about the effect of the on-glaze printing, which prevented it ever really competing with the best hand-painted ware. ”

“ First there was Astbury’s new white body, made with a fixed mixture of powdered flint and Devon clay, imported on horseback from the sea-port of Chester. Twenty years earlier the idea of bringing clay from Devon would have been regarded as madness, and, even in 1720, carts could not get to Burslem, and the clay must have been brought inland on pack saddles. But the invention of the calcined flint body meant also the invention of that terrible disease known as “potter’s asthma” or “potter’s rot,” which used to cause an even greater mortality than lead poisoning. ”

“ The sober border decorations of his tea and dinner ware, which is to some tastes the very best part of his work, were done at Chelsea by these artists. His most successful patterns are mere enamelled borders, perfectly enamelled on perfectly potted plates.
But this was “useful” ware, and all the time he was aiming at the development of his ornamental ware along classical lines. The black basalt—plain; the black basalt—decorated with encaustic red paintings unglazed, after the manner of the Etruscans; the jasper vases and plaques; all are attempts to reproduce the survivals of Greece and Rome. ”

“ M. L. Solon, whose special work—pâte-sur-pâte decoration—still holds the public taste and deserves to become classical. In this process white slip clay-paste is painted on to a dark clay body, and the varying thickness and transparency of the layers of paint produce an effect which differs completely from either plain enamelling or the high relief of jasper. At the same time it lends itself to the individual taste of the artist and can never become merely mechanical. ”

“ It is only of quite recent years that the agate and marble, perfected later by Wedgwood, or the quaint cottage chimney ornaments and tortoiseshell ware of Whieldon, Wedgwood and Ralph Wood, have come to be valued as a native and genuine Staffordshire art. When Whieldon found that his market had left him he made no attempt to follow in the wake of his pupils, and about 1780 retired from business. His factory was just south of the present railway station at Stoke, and he built and lived in the house which still looks down upon the Trent and the railway. ”

“ They are in marked contrast to the slip decorated and marbled Staffordshire ware of the same time. They have been turned in the lathe after throwing, and thus made thin and light. The clay body is homogeneous and smooth, showing greater care in the preparation of the body. The ornamentation is delicate and artistic, and has been made by sealing a soft piece of the clay on to the ware with a metal seal pressed over the soft clay. There is no glaze, but a high fire has produced a ware so hard as to be almost forged solid. ”

“ Ware, besides being thrown, moulded or cast, and coated with the transparent glaze of salt or lead, requires decoration. This decoration could be given by coloured clay slips, after the manner of the old Toft dishes, or after the manner of Ralph Shaw’s “graffiato” ware, or as what is called “scratched blue.” But decoration could also be given by means of enamelling paints. Paints that is which are mixed with glass, and, on being heated, fuse into the glaze and become fast. This enamelling was in the early days a special trade and no part of the potter’s business. ”

“ Even a thirteenth century reference to Walsall will expose harness; it is difficult to trace pots in the Potteries before 1650; you find only bloom-smithies and sea-coal mines. Potting is neither so ancient here, nor so exclusive as to have made the name. The real reason of the place-name, the Potteries, is that [2] no man who valued time could say Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke and Longton, whenever he wanted to refer to one place—the place where men made pots—and few people outside the five towns ever wanted to speak of them separately, or could even distinguish one from others. ”

“ As a mechanical process under-glaze printing was an unqualified success, and in course of time the artists too rediscovered their work in decorating that porcelain which, on the tables of the rich, replaced the now vulgarized earthenware. The last ten years of the eighteenth century were devoted to blue printed, but with the new century came that development of Staffordshire porcelain with which run the names of Spode, Minton and Davenport. ”

“ So we find in Burslem and Tunstall at the beginning of the seventeenth century clay, coal and the opportunity. By the end of that century the next requisite was to hand—skilled workmen. By the end of the next century the last requisite of trade was in place—the cheap water transport of the Trent and Mersey Canal.
It is well known that the safest way to test the presence in early days of particular trades or forms of employment is to study any local lists of the surnames of common people of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. ”

“ The fluid lead glazes used by the skilful potters of the latter half of the century gave a surface smoother and more suitable for food. The demand for ornamental salt glaze was small, and the enormous demand for useful ware sent all the best potters into the useful trade; while in the ornamental lines Wedgwood’s [81] Greek and Etruscan shapes entirely ruled the market. All these causes conspired to ruin the salt glaze, and by 1770 it had fallen into general disuse. The last considerable makers of salt glaze were the Baddeleys and Christopher and Charles Whitehead of the Old Hall, Hanley. ”

“ When once improvements in manufacture began, invention followed invention; and though the records during the second quarter of [56] the eighteenth century are full of entries of patents, registered for the performance of every possible and impossible pottery process, yet most of the improvements—especially the vital changes in body and glaze made by Astbury and Booth—became public property unchecked by patent law. ”

“ But the only famous potter in what might be called the old Staffordshire style was Thomas Whieldon.
Thomas Whieldon began making pots at Little Fenton about 1740. He was a better educated class of man than the ordinary potter. He potted well; enjoyed trials and experiments for their own sake; and, through his connection with both Wedgwood and Spode, he may be said to have had the same influence on the taste and education of the Staffordshire potters that Elers had unintentionally half a century before. If we are to believe Shaw, writing in 1828, he began in a very humble way. ”

“ The secret of the salt-glaze process consists in firing the ware, specially composed of clay mixed with some siliceous sand or flint, to a temperature higher than ordinary earthenware will stand, and then, when red hot, shovelling common salt on to it through the top of the furnace. The salt fumes, passing through large holes in the saggars, cover the ware with a fine coat of colourless soda glaze. This glaze can always be distinguished from lead glazes by its peculiar pock-marked roughness, which indeed makes it somewhat unsuitable for plates or dishes for ordinary use ”

“ Samuel Allen, lathe maker of Dale Hall, is the sole representative to be found in 1818 of the makers of potters’ machinery, now so important a branch of manufacture. But the “jiggers,” which exactly reproduce plates by the thousand, and the “jollies,” for the mechanical moulding and pressing of hollow ware, were the creation of a much later age. Even now these machine tools may be said to be in their infancy though they are developing under the hands of skilled engineers such as Messrs Boulton of Burslem. ”

“ Instead, however, of marbling the slip or the glaze, he marbled his clay body in the solid. Flat “bats” of clay of different colours—coloured either naturally or else artificially with manganese, cobalt or copper—were laid on each other, and pressed and sliced again and again; care being taken to preserve the same run of the grain. In this way a streaked body was produced, which, when pressed into moulds, retained the curious markings of agate or marble. This was Whieldon’s “solid agate,” with which the new trade in snuff boxes and knife handles was supplied. ”

“ Porcelain is a transparent vitreous body which fuses on being fired, and does not require any glaze. The early porcelain had been made largely of glass; Cookworthy’s porcelain, and that made at Shelton New Hall, relied solely on china clay and china stone from Cornwall. None of these bodies were certain, and they failed to become commercial successes. But when the New Hall Company ceased, the manufacture of their hard-paste porcelain in England ceased too, and an entirely new porcelain body was destined to take its place. ”

“ It is only within the last decade that a form of liquid gold has been discovered which requires no burnishing, and yet is fairly durable.
Another form of decoration in which gold was employed was lustre ware. Mr Burton thinks the application of a gold lustre to Staffordshire pottery was introduced first about 1792 at Etruria, and was used on Wedgwood’s “Pearl” dessert ware, made in the form of shells. If this lustre, or silver lustre, is laid on thickly, it converts the earthenware in appearance into gold or silver plate—an inartistic transformation. ”

“ It must be said however that he always stamped his imitations with his own name and not Wedgwood’s; a precaution which is not always observed at this present day, even with a patent law to enforce a man’s right to his own trade-mark. It is noticeable too that when Wedgwood did, in 1771, patent the method of painting with an encaustic red on the Black Etruscan ware, Palmer produced the same results and forced him to share the patent rights. ”

“ And it is this jasper ware that is called to mind when “Old Wedgwood” is spoken of by amateurs. A proper description is impossible here of these Jasper or Black Basalt vases, statues or plaques, in which he received the invaluable assistance of Flaxman as a modeller, and the advice of every gentleman of the period who prided himself upon his taste. Description of manufacture and details of patterns must alike be left to special monographs, such as that of Prof. Church.
To complete a bald account of Wedgwood’s career as a potter we must add the following notes. ”

“ The greatest number of male workers were flat or hollow-ware pressers and throwers. These men were paid by piece, and only for those pieces which were good. By a strange trade custom, however, they were not paid for those pieces which left their hands in good condition, but only for those that ultimately came good from the oven. In other words, they suffered for other people’s breakages and carelessness. The men could get no proof that the ware was bad at all. ”

“ As the nineteenth century advanced, steam power gradually replaced hand and water power on the pot-banks. Before 1800, steam had been introduced to drive the flint mills; the glaze-grinding mills, the pumps and lawn sifters came next. But lathes and throwers’ wheels were still driven by hand, and so were the “jiggers”—revolving moulds on which flat bats of clay were “flat-pressed” to make plates and saucers. A tramway was laid about 1815 from Longton and Fenton to the canal wharf at Stoke; but transport along both tramway and canal was still drawn by horses. ”

“ The first important manufactory of borax in the Potteries was that of Wood, Kuntz & Co., [173] a firm in which the sons of Enoch Wood were interested. Because the risk of lead poisoning is always present in the preparation and uses of the lead glazes, attempts have been made for 100 years to produce a good glaze free from lead—or rather free from unfritted lead—soluble in hydrochloric acid. Josiah Wedgwood produced such a glaze, but it gave a rough surface wherewith it was useless in those days to try to compete. ”

“ It is said that in 1750 no fewer than sixty factories were making salt glaze in the Potteries, and every Saturday, for five hours at the time of firing up, the whole country was black with the smoke of the burning salt—so black, it is said, that people groped their way through the streets of [66] Burslem. But meanwhile Enoch Booth at Tunstall had invented the fluid lead-glaze destined in time to turn plain earthenware into “cream-colour”; Josiah Wedgwood at Burslem was already devising new mixtures which should convert “cream-colour” into “Queen’s Ware” ”

“ His new factory at Brownhills is said to afford the best example of up-to-date economical [195] manufacture, and stands out in striking contrast to most of the older “artistic” works. Another factory which owes its reputation to strict specialization and the latest economical machinery is that of Samuel Gibson, in the Moorland Road, at Burslem. Here five hundred men and girls make tea-pots for the world—only tea-pots—in jet and brown and rockingham.
The china trade and the American “granite” trade had their best days from 1870 to 1876. ”

“ If this list is to be regarded as satisfactory evidence, and it must be remembered that it only professes to be a report of the fifty-year-old recollections of old men, then it would appear that Burslem was still the narrow home of the Potteries. It shows us the master potter of that day, employing 11 hands at wages not exceeding 6s. a week, working himself, and out of his single oven-full a week making a profit of 10s. As represented it is still a peasant industry. ”