The ware produced was sold to the travelling packmen, and, at great cost, distributed on horseback throughout the country. Everything was coarse and elementary. There were no turning lathes to give neatness to the thrown article; there was no white body or ground upon which to enamel colours; there were no moulds for any but the smallest ornamental “spriggs”; no enamel paints; and there was practically no means of getting to a market.
Such was the state of the Staffordshire potting trade in the year 1693, when those mysterious foreigners, John Philip Elers and David Elers, appeared upon the scene, like Cortez among the Mexicans, and broke up for ever the placid uneventful course of the old peasant industry.
CHAPTER III.
ELERS AND ART.
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 family of Saxony—their father an ambassador, their grandfather an admiral! However that may be, the first notice we have of them is in a note in the Philosophical Transactions of 1693 by Dr Martin Lister. He says: “I have this to add, that this clay Haematites, is as good, if not better, than that which is brought from the East Indies. Witness the teapots now to be sold at the potters in the Poultry in Cheapside, which not only for art, but for beautiful colour too, are far beyond any we have from China; these are made from the English Haematites in Staffordshire, as I take it, by two Dutchmen incomparable artists.”[16] We too may call them incomparable artists if we compare this evidence with Plot’s account of fifteen years before, or their teapots sold at a guinea a time,[17] with the almost barbaric puzzle-jars of the native potter.
It has hitherto been assumed from this statement of Dr Lister’s that the Elers were in Staffordshire in 1693. It does not follow from the extract that the teapots were made in Staffordshire, only that the clay came from thence. In the same year, 1693, they were sued by Dwight of Fulham for copying his red teapots, and in the suit they are described as “of Fulham.” Moreover Dr Martin Lister, writing again in 1698 in his “Account of a Journey to Paris in the Year 1698,” says, after speaking of the porcelain made at St Cloud, “As for the red ware of China, that has been and is done in England.... But we are in this particular beholden to two Dutchmen who wrought in Staffordshire, as I have been told, and were not long since in Hammersmith.”[18] This, it will be seen, confirms the supposition that they first made their teapots and stoneware in Fulham or Hammersmith.
The important Chancery Suit, discovered by Prof. Church, in which Dwight sued his copyists at Fulham, Nottingham and Burslem is as follows:
June 20, 1693. The complaint of John Dwight of Fulham in the County of Middlesex, gentleman, showing that the complainant having ... invented and set up at Fulham several new manufactures of earthenwares called White Gorges, marbled porcelaine vessells, statues and figures and fine stone gorges and vessells never before made in England or elsewhere, and alsoe discovered the mystery of opacous red and dark coloured porcelaine and china ... obtained lettres patent dated June 12, 1684 ... he and his servants have for several years past used ... said invention ... and sold them.... But having formerly hired one John Chandler of Fulham ... and employed him in the making ... thereupon John Elers and David Elers, both of Fulham (who are forreigners and by trade silversmiths) together with James Morley of Nottingham and also Aaron Wedgwood Thomas Wedgwood and Richard Wedgwood of Berslem in the County of Stafford and Matthew Garner ... did insinuate themselves into the acquaintance of the said John Chandler and ... inticed him to instruct them ... and to desert the complainant’s service to enter into partnership together with them to make and sell the said wares ... but far inferior to them.... And the said confederates, “the better to colour their said unjust and injurious practises,” pretend that the earthenwares made and sold by them are in no way like those invented by the complainant but differ from them in form and figure and have several additions and improvements ... whereas the truth is they are made in imitation of the complainants wares ... prays that writs of subpena be directed to John Chandler, John Elers, David Elers, Aaron Wedgwood, Thomas Wedgwood, Richard Wedgwood and Matthew Garner and James Morley.