Category: History - British
This account of the potting industry in North Staffordshire will be of interest chiefly to the people of North Staffordshire. They and their fathers before them have grown up with, lived with, made and developed the English pottery trade. The pot-bank and the shard ruck are, t...
This account of the potting industry in North Staffordshire will be of interest chiefly to the people of North Staffordshire. They and their fathers before them have grown up wi...
2. CHAPTER I.In no country is there a district so utterly associated with one trade as is the North Staffordshire Potteries. One even speaks of the Potteries in the singular as of a pure pla...
3. CHAPTER II.Dr Plot seems to have visited the Potteries in 1677. In 1686 he published his “Natural History of Staffordshire.” Although he obviously takes the most lively interest in the dan...
4. CHAPTER III.The brothers Elers are supposed to have come from Amsterdam in the train of the Prince of Orange. Jewitt has studied their pedigree and says they were originally of a noble fami...
5. CHAPTER IV.The successors of Elers—Robert Astbury, Joshua Twyford, and especially Dr Thomas Wedgwood—built up the reputation of the salt-glazed stoneware, which for fifty years was the glo...
6. CHAPTER V.The industry was entering on a new phase. The introduction of moulds had required specialized block-cutters, flat and hollow-ware pressers and casters. And the specializing in t...
7. CHAPTER VI.Such were the conditions under which the salt glaze of Staffordshire and the agate of Staffordshire were produced and perfected; and having traced these manufactures to their cl...
8. CHAPTER VII.Wedgwood’s financial success with his Jasper and Black Etruscan ware, a success hitherto quite unique in the experience of the Potteries, led every potter of any capacity to att...
9. CHAPTER VIII.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...
10. CHAPTER IX.Yet another Staffordshire family founded on “blue-printed” ware is that of Ridgway. Ralph Ridgway was a master-potter at Chell, who failed in business in 1766, and departed with...
11. CHAPTER X.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 gl...
12. CHAPTER XI.While the Copelands have continued to perfect the old Spode china, their rivals, Mintons, have tried several new fields—tiles, majolica, pâte-sur-pâte. Herbert Minton (1793-1858...
13. CHAPTER XII.But the manufacture of tiles, though economically the most important part of Minton’s work, ought not to distract attention from that great artistic development of his school, w...