The Boyhood of Great Inventors

by A. Fraser Robertson

Burslem was in something of this sorry state when Josiah Wedgwood opened his eyes on the world. The people of the village for the most part had been potters for upwards of 200 years. That is, they made pots and butter-dishes and porringers—for spoons and plates were still of wood—out of the clay of which their soil was made; not fine and polished and gleaming white, as we know them to-day, but rough-hewn things, for the trade of pottery was yet in its infancy.

A potter’s work could be divided among one family. The father and sons made and fired the dishes. The mother and daughters strapped them on the backs of horses and donkeys, driving them along roads so wretched that the poor beasts often stuck in the mud or fell down in the ruts, while the women, with pipes in their mouths and rough words on their lips, urged them on with whip and lash.

It was this sort of life that lay before Josiah. But he had been born with a boy’s best blessing—a good mother—a woman who had a heart large enough for thirteen children, and who tried what she could to hand down to them by example a birthright better than riches—to make them patient, industrious, dependent on self.

When the child was little more than a baby, and able only to toddle with uncertain step, he was sent to a dame’s school, quite as much to be out of the way as to learn his A B C. For the rest he played about the door of the cottage, his greatest treat to bestride the pack-horse’s back, hoisted up by some good-natured packman. When he was seven years old he was sent to school to a place called Newcastle-under-Lyme, some three and a half miles across the fields. In long days of sunshine the walk was full of pleasure to the boy, as he came to know Nature’s beauties—her birds and flowers and sweet fragrances—as we best can know things, by close and loving intimacy. Long years afterwards, when he had reached the highest heights of his trade, it was the unforgotten faces of the wild flowers lurking in the fields between Newcastle and Burslem that rose before his mind’s eye as he decorated his china services with coloured leaves and flowers.

When Josiah was nine years old his father died, and the mother was left to struggle with her thirteen as best she could. Nor do we find that she failed. She was a woman with a large, loving heart, that rarely quailed before stress or struggle. The old potter had not been able out of his hard-won earnings to leave to his children much—£20 when they reached the age of twenty-one.

“And so,” as Josiah used to say long afterwards, “I began on the very lowest round of the ladder.”

And now the child’s scanty schooling had come to an end. He could write and he could read, and he knew something of the mysteries of arithmetic, but for the rest—that great storehouse of knowledge the world contained—he had to unlock the door of that for himself, and he did it patiently, often in weariness and pain and suffering, as the years went on.

To his eldest son Thomas the father had left the pottery, and now it fell to him to act as father to the family. Josiah, as a matter of course, went into the business, beginning, I suppose, at the humble post of turning what was called “the potter’s wheel.”

This was a wheel with a strap round it attached to a disc that revolved horizontally and beside which sat a man called “a thrower,” shaping with his fingers and hands the moist clay that was to form a bowl or plate or whatever vessel was to be made, copying a pattern in front of him.

The boy worked steadily, but hardly had he reached the stage of “thrower,” hardly had people noted and admired the wonderful deftness with which the boyish hands moulded and shaped the clay, when a cloud descended and settled on his life—a cloud that, though he struggled bravely against its depression all through life, never entirely lifted.