Chats on English China

by Arthur Hayden

PLYMOUTH MARKS.

BRISTOL PORCELAIN.

Under-glaze Mandarin Decoration in Blue.

BRISTOL.

For several centuries earthenware was made at Bristol, and a very fair quality of blue delft was produced there, but it is not of the old potteries of Bristol that we shall speak, but of the manufacture which was transplanted from Plymouth to Bristol. We have related the struggles of William Cookworthy to establish Plymouth porcelain. The strenuous efforts to perfect the china were carried on by Richard Champion, of Bristol, merchant, who bought Cookworthy’s patent, and established the manufactory of hard porcelain at Bristol. Champion had, it appears, been associated with Cookworthy as partner when the works were at Plymouth.

In 1775, when Champion presented a petition to the House of Commons to be granted the patent right for a further period of fourteen years to himself, he was vigorously opposed by Josiah Wedgwood, who represented that by granting a patent to Champion, it would be detrimental to trade and injurious to the public, urging, among other grounds, that “the use of the natural productions of the soil ought to be the right of all.” Wedgwood presented a memorial to Parliament, and a fierce controversy ensued. “Much might be said on both sides,” as Sir Roger De Coverley observes, and much was said on both sides.

At first blush it seems hard that Cookworthy and Champion, who found the earth and worked hard at developing the manufactory in the West, should have no protection given to their secret. But Wedgwood, who speaks with authority, urged that when he invented his Queen’s Ware he did not apply for a patent, which would have limited its public utility. “Instead of one hundred manufactories of Queen’s Ware, there would have been one; and instead of an exportation to all quarters of the world, a few pretty things would have been made for the amusement of the people of fashion in England.”

Without going further into the details of a controversy which trenches upon questions of political economy two facts stand out, and the reader can judge of them as he will. The patent was granted by Parliament to Richard Champion, who was subsequently ruined, and left England to die in South Carolina; and secondly, hard paste was made at Plymouth and Bristol (never before or since in England), while the manufacture of the less difficult soft-paste porcelain and of pottery was carried on by the Staffordshire factories and Wedgwood.