Part 5

Strange as it may seem to us, what sounds the very common business of making rough earthenware milk-bowls and butter-pots and plates was often half shrouded in mystery, and went near to being something of a secret.

Pottery was yet in its beginnings--not yet an art--and it could only grow and come to perfection by someone giving to it deep thought and long, patient, painstaking experiments. For instance, one man might pore over the matter and discover something new or come to some conclusion. He might find one substance, a clay or a soil, that when mixed with a second substance produced a third thing--something new. He might begin to work this out in his pottery, and immediately all the workmen in the place knew the secret of how he did it. The knowledge spread, and while he believed it was still all his own, other men had seized on his discovery; other potteries were turning out his ware and selling it.

So keen were men to find out the discoveries of other men, and so closely have these secrets been kept, that sometimes a master would prefer to employ idiots, when he could get them, to turn his wheel. If one workman appeared more skilled than the others he was shut up while at work. The door was locked, the windows were blinded, and when he came out he was carefully searched. Men have been known to pretend to be idiots just that they might get inside a noted pottery; even to put up with kicks and blows for their stupidity; to make intentional mistakes to encourage the falsehood; to hold on to this perhaps as long as two whole years; while night after night they crept home and there wrote down carefully every item of what they had seen, and so made the secrets their own.

In Josiah's boyhood there was much of this sort of thing carried on. A strict secrecy--a protection of themselves--as merchant vessels on the high seas in olden days guarded themselves from the pirates who, ready to pounce upon them, roamed the waters.

But as a man--a great, large-hearted, open-minded man--and one of the greatest inventors of his time, Wedgwood never followed this line of action. Rather was he nobly willing that others should be the better for his brains. And so during his long life he took out only one patent, as we call that which makes an invention all a man's own and prevents others touching it.

At the time we write of there was just beginning to dawn on Josiah's boyish mind what was by-and-by to raise him to the very top of his calling.

He took to pondering and considering and making experiments with the clay that lay about the doors. How to make the black mottled ware more delicate--the ruddy-coloured of a fairer hue--how to mould rough edges more smoothly--how to introduce fresh colours and glazes.

The whole thing threw over the boy a great glamour of fascination. They show in Burslem yet a teapot--an ornamented thing made of the ochreous clay of the district--as "Josiah Wedgwood's first teapot."

But the elder brother, brought up to the cut-and-dried routine of the potteries life, had little patience with what he looked on as the younger's shiftless dreamings. He had brothers and sisters to keep, and money to make, and if Josiah were not more practical he wanted him no longer.

And so the honest but short-sighted brother, his eyes blinded by the present need of ready money, failed to realise that there was something greater, and that the young brother would one day leave him and his plodding ways far behind.

But while his brother looked upon the boy as an unpractical dreamer, there were others in Burslem who saw the beauty of the patient, uncomplaining, steadfast life, and more than one father in the place called on his sons to take a pattern from Josiah Wedgwood.

But in the midst of his patient inquiries, and while he was yet little more than a boy, a swift blow descended upon the Wedgwoods. The mother who had for so long been father and mother in one to them was taken from them. They laid her in the quiet little church of Burslem, and the brothers and sisters went on living together.

It was not till he had reached the age of twenty-two that Josiah cut the knot that bound him to home and went out into the great world to seek his fortune, as eager youths will do to the end of time. He took with him his little all--his father's legacy of £20, a pair of capable hands, and a wonderful brain.

His boyhood was over. Manhood lay before him--rough places at first in the world, puzzles, difficulties, trials, but in the end name, fame, riches. If we could follow him past boyhood and just peep at the future, I should like to tell you how he let some of these fancies his brother had despised have free play; how he invented a new green earthenware, forming plates in the shape of ornamental leaves; how he coloured snuff-boxes and toilet vessels to imitate precious stones, and how the London jewellers eagerly bought these up. How he made flowered cups and saucers, familiar enough to us to-day, but strange and beautiful to people then. Under him things took a step forward. People even at their meals saw things of beauty. These became an education to them--an art. Besides this they found other improvements. Lids fitted, spouts poured, handles could be held! These were small beginnings, but from these Josiah made great strides.

And one of the secrets of these strides was that he bent his _whole mind_ upon his work. At night, after a day of hard work, he would sit down and write out every smallest detail of his experiments and discoveries. No pains were too great for him to take. Neither would he trust to memory, so often in pain and weariness, but with a perseverance that was never daunted, he would make his evening notes.

To him no trouble seemed too great, no detail too small. The boyhood rarely fails to show the stuff the man is made of, and it was no ordinary stuff the great potter was made of. So we are not surprised that step by step he moved upwards and onwards. Hands and brain were never idle. Often prostrate with pain and weakness, he would still read and think and plan. Indeed, so much did he get into the habit of planning that many a night it robbed him of his sleep, for he never lay down at nights without making in his head a programme for the coming day.

Another secret of his success was his courage. Was it long familiarity with pain--for his knee broke out again and again, and gave him weary hours of suffering--that taught him to endure and resolutely refuse to be overcome? Was it this made him say with Napoleon, "Nothing is impossible"?

He met all difficulties alike with patience and with a steadfast purpose to overcome them. He had two special ones. His workmen--often lazy, indolent, drunken--were a trouble to him, as were also the furnaces, where the heat had to be of a certain degree to fire his ware, and where sometimes the work and labour of months would be destroyed in a few hours. By patience he won the hearts of the first, and they came to trust him, and by patience, too, he gradually righted the second. He pulled down and he built up till the kilns were right.

"It must be done," he used to say of any difficult enterprise, "let what may stand in the way."

He had great ambition for his beloved calling. He wanted to make it an art. England had been long famed for cheapness but not for beauty, and so he set himself to study the designs of the ancients and of the Greeks, copying them on china and porcelain.

And yet it seemed that even as he took step after step there were ever on each round of the ladder new difficulties. There was a long-standing one--the wretched state of the roads in Staffordshire, and the difficulty of getting the ware carried to other places for sale, and of getting necessaries for the work brought into the county.

The backs of horses and donkeys, these were the only mode of conveyance--miserable underfed creatures that tottered and stumbled along and not seldom stuck in the muddy lanes or fell in the ruts and rugged roads, and often broke their legs and their wares, and had to be shot where they lay--a happy release for the poor animals. Josiah saw all this, and realised that something must be done to remedy the evil. So in the midst of his watchful care and constant thought for his beloved potteries he made time to push the grand scheme of a canal that began gradually to see daylight. It was not pack-horses that would labour slowly to Birmingham and Sheffield, but a broad waterway to carry goods to Liverpool and other seaports. This was what his native county wanted. And so he subscribed largely to this, and helped to push a Bill through Parliament.

"I scarcely know," he wrote, "whether I am a landed gentleman, an engineer, or a potter, for indeed I am all three and many other characters by turns."

In time Burslem, to which he had come back after absence, could hold him no longer, so he bought a place near and called it Etruria, because for long he had admired the beautiful work of the Etruscans away north of the Tiber in Italy.

By his wonderful enterprise he made this bare place blooming and fruitful, and from a lonely wilderness converted it into a place with thousands of flourishing houses and workmen. And he himself was the mainspring of it all--the moving spirit.

Now the inventions of his brain were selling all over the country, and indeed all over the world. His delicate china had attracted the notice of the Queen--Charlotte, the wife of George III. It was the full development of that "cream" ware whose first beginnings had dawned on his brain as a boy. She ordered a set of it, and henceforth it was known the "Queen's Ware," and she sent to Josiah Wedgwood and said he might call himself "Potter to the Queen."

And now his name was made, and soon a fortune followed. He discovered a "jasper dip," and he invented a special kind of ware of which he made vases, and for a time it seemed as if the country went mad for Wedgwood's vases. "A violent vase mania," he called it himself. The mania spread to Ireland and the Continent. Before this he had opened showrooms in London, and the Wedgwood vases were wont to draw crowds as great as the pictures in the Royal Academy. Nor did he confine himself to vases. He made portraits in china of great men, and fashioned beautiful chimney-pieces. His heart went out in burning indignation against the curse of slavery, and he produced a model of a negro chained in a supplicating attitude, with this motto round the figure: "Am I not a Man and a Brother?"

Now he had made his fortune, but the man remained the same, much as he had been as a boy--hard-working, conscientious, painstaking. As a grand foundation to all his work he had made the surface of the earth a mighty study, and when he died he left 7,000 specimens of soils and clays labelled and classified.

Even when rich and famous he still took minute note of details. He would visit each department of his works himself. He would have nothing "scamped." Well did the workmen know the "thud" of his wooden leg on the floor that announced his coming, and with his stick he would break any article he did not think perfect.

"That won't do for Josiah Wedgwood!" he would say.

As life advanced, while it brought him joys, it brought him also clouds and sorrows. His knee grew so tormenting that he was forced to have it taken off. After this he used a wooden leg, or rather many wooden legs, for he was very particular about having it often renewed. Partial blindness attacked him, general ill-health, but his pluck, his perseverance never failed.

As he withdrew a little from active life he took to gardening, but his family noted his failing powers--not of mind, but of body. Asthma was added to his other sufferings.

"I am becoming an old man," he wrote. "Age and infirmity overtake me, and more than whisper in my ear that it is time to diminish rather than increase the objects of my attention."

The end came very suddenly, and while he was yet not old. A pain in his jaw was the beginning. Fever and insensibility followed, and in his sixty-fifth year Josiah Wedgwood closed his eyes on a world that he left the better for his passage through it.

He had scaled the ladder to its highest height. He was born in a humble potter's cottage. He died in a mansion, surrounded by a population he had gathered together and made to flourish. He left half a million, but he had used his riches well. He had given of them to suffering and distress. He made a poor depressed trade into one of the flourishing industries of Great Britain, and for himself a world-wide name. He was a great pioneer, and he accepted with patience the difficulties, the thanklessness, the buffetings that confront the man who in anything attempts the first beginning.

But while we admire his splendid qualities, it is the singular beauty of his nature--a nature doubtless softened and sweetened by trial--his uncomplaining bravery, his thought for others, his simple, steadfast determination to carry through his life-work, in spite of the burden of weariness and sickness and bodily pain, that most of all speak to our hearts.

GEORGE STEPHENSON.

If a town, or even a village, is of any importance nowadays it is sure to have within it or alongside it a railway station, a place that brings it into touch with the great outside world. Some seventy-five years ago there were no railways or railway-stations in Great Britain, or anywhere else, and people were content to post or coach along roads behind horses. But now times are changed, and it is not wonderful that the name of George Stephenson, the man who has opened up the country and spread lines upon it like a mighty network, is a name to-day that people look up to as one of the greatest inventors the world has ever known.

Most of us are fond of seeing the small beginnings of great endings, so it is natural enough that for us the tiny village of Wylam should be of deepest interest, for here George Stephenson first saw the light.

We cannot visit Wylam without feeling at once that we are in the heart of the colliery country. Newcastle's lofty chimneys tower some eight miles off, and chimneys closer at hand belch forth great volumes of smoke and smut, and flaming furnaces shoot out lurid lights by night far across the country.

In a common little wayside house, just a labourer's cottage, standing on the roadside, some 120 years ago a baby opened his eyes on a world that was to be rough enough at first for his young feet, though at last they were to land on the very topmost round of the ladder.

The second child of the fireman of the old pumping-engine of the colliery of Wylam, little George was born to grinding poverty. Time as it passed brought other children besides George to the Stephensons, and soon it came to be a question how the fireman and his wife and six children were to live on 12_s._ a week!

It was indeed a problem to solve and a struggle to face. When food had been got for the little mouths, what was left for clothes and schooling? Very little for the first, nothing for the second. No schooling certainly for little George, and so he spent his childhood between running errands for his mother and standing by his father's engine fire, where the boys and girls of the village loved to gather to listen to old Robert's wondrous tales, or to see the birds fed, for the old man loved birds of all kinds, and would save the crumbs from his own scant dinner to feed the robins. Here it was that baby George learned that early love of birds that lasted as long as life. As a boy he would catch and tame the blackbirds, and these would fly about the cottage all day, and at night come and roost at his bed-head. Years after, when he was an old man, he used to tell how, walking with his father one day, he parted some thick branches overhead and lifted the child in his arms that he might peep at a nest full of young blackbirds. It was a sight he never forgot.

But, baby though he was, his days were not all spent in play. At home there were seven younger brothers and sisters to be nursed and watched and kept out of the way of the heavy waggons that were dragged by horses along the tram-road in front of the house, and much of this fell to George's share.

As the years passed the Stephenson family, obliged like other colliers "to follow the work," moved to a place called Dewley Burn, and now as George had reached the age of eight he was ready to earn some money!

To show how smart and quick the child was for his years there has come down to us a pretty story.

He and his sister Nell had gone to Newcastle one day, and among their little commissions they were bent on buying Nell a new bonnet. They found the very thing she wanted in a shop, but the price was beyond their purse. It was 1_s._ 3_d._ over the mark, and the pair, sadly downcast, had to leave the shop. Standing crestfallen outside the boy suddenly exclaimed, "I have it! Wait here till I come back." Off he darted, and Nell waited while the minutes wore to hours, and still he did not come. Just as she began to think he must either have been killed or run over he dashed up breathless and thrust the coveted 1_s._ 3_d._ into her hand.

"But where did you get it?" she asked, astonished.

"By holding gentlemen's horses," was the reply.

The child's first situation at this time was with a woman who kept a farm and needed a boy to herd her cows and keep them out of the way of passing waggons. For this the little herd-boy was paid 2_d._ a day. How happy he was in long leisure hours to bird's-nest or whittle whistles out of reeds, or in company with another boy--by-and-by, like himself, to be one of the world's great engineers--to model toy engines out of clay, using hollowed corks for corves and hemlock stalks for steam pipes!

Soon George advanced a step in life. His work was still farm-work--hoeing turnips for 4_d._ a day, leading the plough horses when his little legs could hardly stride the furrows, and working in the dawning hours of day when other children slept.

But his heart was really at the engine fire or in the coal shaft. It was "bred in the bone," and he gladly returned to the black, grimy life, and along with his brother became a coal-picker, separating stones and dross from the coal, and so earning 6_d._ a day.

By-and-by he was advanced to driving "the gin-horse," a horse that travels round and round at the pit's mouth drawing up and letting down by means of a rope wound round a drum, baskets of coal or buckets of water, and for this he was paid 8_d._ a day.

Long miles he had to walk every day to and from his work, "a grit-growing lad, with bare legs and feet," and I think we may be sure there was not a bird's nest on that familiar road that the little bird-lover did not know by heart.

His next rise was to a shilling a day. This was a great step up, and for this he had what was called a night shift, lading and unlading the coals as they came to the mouth of the pit, and reversing the rope to go down again. Monotonous enough work it was, but he held on to it for two years. And now another step up was at hand. It was a proud day for the boy--that Saturday afternoon when he was told that his wage had been raised to 12_s._ a week!

"I am a made man now," he exclaimed in great delight.

And now he was seventeen years old. He had really stepped beyond his father both in wage and position. But there was one thing which he had yet to master. It may seem strange to us, but George could neither read nor write. It began to dawn upon him then that things about which he wanted to know--pumps and engines and the great world of mechanics--could only be learned from between the boards of books that were closed to him. But with George to realise an evil was to try at once to mend it. Inside the boy's rough working jacket there beat a manly heart, with a great longing to make the most of his opportunities, to let no chance slip of doing his best.

So he actually went to school at nights--three times a week, spending 3_d._ out of his wages to be taught to read and write. He laboured on and made progress, and in time he wrote and read, and by-and-by he took another step and added to these arithmetic. With marvellous quickness he "caught on" to figures. In the long weary night shifts sitting by the blaze of the fire he would "work" the sums his master had "set" him or write his copies, just as years after, so eager was he to seize every opportunity that offered, he would many a time (in odd moments) chalk his sums on the sides of the coal waggons!

So little by little, by untiring labour and unwearied industry, by "neglecting nothing," he rose. The miners who were his daily companions were, many of them, a rough lot. Their life was a hard one and their pleasures few, and on Saturday afternoons--pay-day--their amusements were cock-fighting, dog-fighting, and drinking in the ale-house, while the future great engineer might be found engaged in pulling to pieces his engine, cleaning it, getting to know it as we know the character, the habits, the face of our dearest friend, all the time laying in such a store of practical knowledge as was to serve him in good stead in time to come.

Not that George did not delight in exercise. Indeed, few of his companions could equal him in athletics. There was nothing he enjoyed like challenging them to feats of strength in throwing the hammer or in lifting heavy weights. And even in comparative old age he loved to engage in a wrestle with a friend.

About this time George had a favourite dog which he taught to fetch and carry his dinner in a pitcher tied round his neck. At the appointed hour the creature used to go straight to his master, turning neither to the right nor to the left. But one day he was beset with danger in the shape of a bigger dog with murder in its eye. George's dog closed with it, and a deadly tussle began, but it beat the bully and came off victorious but bleeding. When he reached his master the pitcher was there, but the dinner was spilt; but George was prouder far, when an onlooker described the fight, of his dog's courage than he would have been of the most sumptuous feast.

But in spite of his larger wage money was scarce, and George beat about in his own mind how he was to earn a few extra shillings. With keen eye ever on the outlook for what lay nearest, he lighted on the _shoes_ of his fellow-workmen! He took to mending these, and he mended them so well that the pitmen soon got into the way of making George their cobbler. And from this he went on to making shoe-lasts for the village shoemaker. In this way it came to pass that in a fortnight's time he would sometimes make as much as £2. When he had by long and careful labour saved his first guinea great was his delight. "I am now a rich man!" he said.

Yet another source of earning money was at hand. One day the chimney of his house went on fire, and being drenched with water, the soot and water together succeeded in damaging an eight-day clock that stood in his kitchen. Money was still scarce, and the watchmaker did not work without pay, so George set to work and took the clock to pieces, cleaned it, and put it together again. Rumours of this new "handiness" spread, and colliers from far and near sent their watches and clocks to him to doctor. It was almost as if nothing came amiss to these wonderful hands or, indeed, to that wonderful brain.

A wheezy engine pump, a clock out of gear, a pair of worn-out shoes--he had a remedy for all. Painstaking, conscientious, thorough--the work of the boy shadowed forth the success of the man.

If I had space I could tell you how, after he ceased to be a boy, he became a splendid man. That divine capacity--the creative faculty for making something out of nothing--that had been struggling long within him came to the surface, and he burst on the world as an Inventor.