Salt glaze teapot, drab body, supposed to be by Thomas Wedgwood, died 1737. From the Stoke-on-Trent Museums.
At this Longton end, soon after 1710, there was also made white ware of a greenish type, called Crouch Ware. It was made from clay found in Derbyshire that bore this name, and survived as a fairly white ware till Astbury drove it out with his whiter body. In 1725 Thomas Astbury, the younger, set up his new factory in Fenton, and from this date we may say that the whole of the present Pottery area was engaged in the production of Earthenware.[43]
In fact all that was wanted to convert the peasant pottery of North Staffordshire into a great business was the stimulus given by the refined hand of Elers, and the new demand in the new clubs and coffee houses. When once improvements in manufacture began, invention followed invention; and though the records during the second quarter of the eighteenth century are full of entries of patents, registered for the performance of every possible and impossible pottery process, yet most of the improvements—especially the vital changes in body and glaze made by Astbury and Booth—became public property unchecked by patent law.
First there was Astbury’s new white body, made with a fixed mixture of powdered flint and Devon clay, imported on horseback from the sea-port of Chester. Twenty years earlier the idea of bringing clay from Devon would have been regarded as madness, and, even in 1720, carts could not get to Burslem, and the clay must have been brought inland on pack saddles. But the invention of the calcined flint body meant also the invention of that terrible disease known as “potter’s asthma” or “potter’s rot,” which used to cause an even greater mortality than lead poisoning. When white flints were first used they were ground and powdered in the dry state, in an atmosphere of flint dust, in underground cellars, so that the secret of this valuable new preparation should not leak out.[44] This state of things was soon partially remedied, for between 1726 and 1732 several patents were taken out—by Gallimore, Bourne, and finally by Benson—for grinding the flint stones in water.[45] Benson’s final process has survived to this day as the universal form of flint mill. A vertical shaft with four radiating arms revolves in a circular horizontal pan. The pan, with a hard stone bottom of chert, is filled with water, and similar chert blocks, pushed round by the arms, grind the flints down to a cream. Flint grinding became an industry, and in the well-watered valleys of North Staffordshire, wherever there was both water-power and flint, these flint mills sprung up and flourished. Though most of them are now closed down through the progress of railways and steam, there are some still to be seen working in the Moddershall valley, whence the creamy slip is sent in by water-cart to Longton.
About this same time a workman named Alsager perfected the potter’s throwing wheel as we know it at this day.[46] And now that potters were using these mixed ingredients, Devon clay, ground flint syrup, and native clay in special and patented proportions, the old method of evaporating the slip under the sun in an open pan had to go. It is said to have been Ralph Shaw, a most litigious personage, who began specially to mix clays in a liquid form in a fire-heated trough—locked, of course, that no neighbour might discover the “mystery.”[47] This same Ralph Shaw, of Burslem, took out a patent in 1732, professing—as was almost common form in those days—to make earthenware like Chinese Porcelain. It was to be white within, and white when required without. It was made in reality by dipping the ordinary ware in a white clay dip—just the process Astbury had invented some twenty years before. But there was this that was new to North Staffordshire; Shaw scratched away the white dip on the outside of the jug so that the blue ground became visible. He produced indeed what the mediæval Italians called “graffiato” ware, and very beautiful much of it is.[48]
Shaw, however, tried to prevent anybody using the white slip at all, and became such a nuisance to his neighbours that they united in 1736 to take up the case of John Mitchell, of Burslem Hill Top, who was prosecuted by Shaw for infringing his patent.[49] Great was the rejoicing in the Potteries when the Judge at Stafford declared, or is reported to have declared:—“Gooa whomm, potters, an’ mak what soourts o’ pots yoa leykin.” “An,” says our narrator, “when they coom ’nto’ Boslum, aw th’ bells i’ Hoositon (Wolstanton), and Stoke, and th’ tahin, wurn ringin’ loike hey go’ mad, aw th’ dey.” Ralph Shaw is said to have been so disgusted at the result that he emigrated to Paris, where he made pots for many years.[50]
Ralph Shaw’s ware was known as “bit-stone ware.” The “bit-stones” were put between two pieces of ware when they were fired in the saggars in order to keep them from sticking to each other. They were the more necessary in that Shaw’s ware was dipped in a light slip. The “bit-stones” have long since been replaced by “spurs” and “stilts” and other small earthenware objects, the special manufacture of which is now a great industry by itself. The single stilt and spur factory of Thos. Arrowsmith in Burslem employs now 230 hands on this manufacture alone.
Burslem in 1750