PLYMOUTH SALT-CELLAR.
At Victoria and Albert Museum.
V
PLYMOUTH
The name of Plymouth stands high in the records of English china factories. Its porcelain was the first hard porcelain produced in this country. Other English chinas melted when placed inside the pieces in the Plymouth kilns.
Not so well known as Josiah Wedgwood, of the Staffordshire potteries, William Cookworthy, of Plymouth, Quaker, chemist, porcelain maker, is worthy of a niche in the gallery of dead princes of ceramic art, and his is a name that will never be forgotten by those who know the history behind the old Plymouth vases and mugs and statues.
It is true the enterprise was a failure. It only ran fourteen years, and was, in 1774, transferred to Bristol. It is true that Lord Camelford, one of his partners, laments the three thousand pounds expended on it. But it is more than true that the results of William Cookworthy’s efforts were no failure.
The brief life history of the Quaker dreamer (we know he must have been a dreamer, for he translated some of Swedenborg’s works into English) is remarkable. At the age of fourteen, the eldest of a family of six fatherless children, he tramped from Plymouth up to London and commenced his apprenticeship to a chemist. His mother battled on, eking out her slender means by dressmaking. Later on, when William Cookworthy came home, his mother lived under his roof and became a leading favourite with the great people he knew. The poor Devon lad who wearily tramped to London over down and dale, dreaming golden dreams, came home to entertain Dr. Wolcot, the famous “Peter Pindar” of vitriolic pen, Sir Joseph Banks, Captain Cook, and the fighting Earl St. Vincent, who remarked, “whoever was in Mr. Cookworthy’s company was the wiser and better for having been in it”; while Smeaton, the builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse, was an inmate of his house during the erection of the lighthouse.