Staffordshire pottery and its history

by Josiah C. Wedgwood

John Turner, of Lane End, was another competitor of Wedgwood. He was almost as confirmed an experimenter, and produced a jasper ware very close on Wedgwood’s heels. He was born in 1738,[114] and started his own works at Lane End in 1762, and his chief productions were the fashionable cream colour and a cane-coloured stoneware. He was one of the first to appreciate the value of the newly discovered china stone for the cream-coloured body, and he therefore took an active part in opposing the extension of Cookworthy’s patent. Afterwards, in 1775, he joined Wedgwood in leasing some of the Cornish clay mines. A discovery of a good local clay at Green Dock, close by Longton Cemetery, led to his most characteristic production—the cane-coloured stoneware, ornamented with embossed decoration in the same colour. The material was also found very suitable for busts and statuettes. It is recorded that he could, in this material, make a most life-like representation of pie-crust, and that once, as a tour de force, he reproduced exactly an entire banquet with everything, from the roast beef to the custards, realistically translated into stoneware. It will be understood from this that there was room for a revival of taste in pottery. Turner’s jasper is quite different to that of Wedgwood, or of those who made it when the secret of the mixture had become known. Its ground is an unfortunate slaty blue, which does not improve the appearance of the ware, and the designs of the bas-reliefs are rococo, which is worse than neo-classical.

THOMAS MINTON

c. 1765-1836

John Turner died in 1786, and was succeeded by his two sons, John and William, who continued to produce black basalt as well as this strange jasper. Their business was ruined by the French wars, and in 1803 they were compelled to close down. John Turner, jun., became manager to Thomas Minton, then starting his historic factory in Stoke.

We have seen that Turner went to Lane End in 1762. “About 1750,” says Shaw, but probably some years later, “Mr John Barker, with his brother and Mr Robert Garner, commenced the manufacture of shining black and white stoneware salt glaze at the Row Houses, near the Foley, Fenton, where afterwards they made tolerable cream colour. They realized a good property here; and Mr R. Garner erected a separate manufactory and the best house of the time in Lane End, near the old Turnpike Gate.”[115] This was after 1762, for among the Wedgwood MSS. is an account of that date from Messrs Robert Garner and J. Barker jointly for brown china tea-pots and pineapple jars supplied to Wedgwood at Burslem,[116] doubtless to complete an order. Roger Woods too is said to have built in 1756 a factory, afterwards known as Sampson Bridgwoods, by the brook at the Lower Market Place in Longton. And about the same time Thomas and Joseph Johnson started making good salt glaze just opposite Lane End church.[117]

In this manner potting spread to the Longton end of the Potteries. In 1756 there are said to have only been 100 houses in Longton and Lane End, and even by 1773 an old estate map of the Heathcotes’ shows but 180 houses, or a population of less than 1,000.

As early as 1770 we obtain a familiar glimpse of the working of the factory system. Some of the master-potters in that year tried, for the first time on record, to form a ring to keep up prices. The bond runs as follows: “We whose hands are hereunto subscribed do bind ourselves ... in £50 ... not to sell ... under the within specified prices, as witness our hands: John Platt, John Lowe, John Taylor, John Cobb, Robt. Bucknall, John Daniel, Thos. Daniel jun., Richd. Adams, Saml. Chatterley, Thos. Lowe, John Allen, Wm. Parrott, Jacob Warburton, Warburton and Stone, Jos. Smith, Joshua Heath, John Bourn, Jos. Stephens, Wm. Smith, Jos. Simpson, John Weatherby, J. and Rd. Mare, Nic. Pool, John Yates, Chas. Hassells, Ann Warburton and son, Thos. Warburton, Wm. Meir.” A list of prices for dishes, tureens, saucers, etc., is given; and manufacturers of the present day will be interested to see the first attempt at checking those “rebates” which have successfully broken down this and all subsequent attempts to keep prices artificially high. “To allow no more than 5 per cent for breakage, and 5 per cent for ready money.” Then follows a sentence which misled Shaw and made him think that these potters made salt-glaze stoneware: “To sell to the manufacturers of earthenware at the above prices, and to allow no more than 7½ per cent, beside discount for breakage and prompt payment.”[118] It was the custom of many, particularly the larger manufacturers, to buy ware from other makers, either to decorate, or, more usually, to complete orders in lines which they did not happen to have in hand; (orders were far more all-embracing in those days). Thus we find William Greatbach starting a works at Lower Lane in 1762 under an agreement with Wedgwood to be paid by him fixed prices for his ware.[119] In any case Shaw is obviously wrong in calling these men salt-glaze potters, for makers of salt glaze did not usually apply it to the baking dishes and chamber pots whose prices were under discussion; and it is only in common and standard lines that prices can ever be regulated by a ring. Makers of ornamental salt glaze would have been the last people to combine, and the only ones known to have been making salt glaze at this time, Christopher Whitehead and the Baddeleys, do not appear on this list of Shaw’s at all.

The most notable potters on this list of 1770 were the Warburtons and the Daniels of Cobridge. When the art of enamelling became localized at Hot Lane about 1750, John and Ann Warburton were among the most successful. They were potters of old standing, for a Warburton appears as a master-potter in the Burslem district in 1710-15. They did most of the enamelling for Wedgwood in his early days, and their son, Jacob Warburton (1740-1826), became a potter of great repute, above all on the Continent where his business was very extensive.[120] He spent many years travelling abroad and was a strange man among the rough potters of that day—a Roman Catholic, a great linguist, a famous skater; and for some reason he was always known as Captain Warburton. He was an intimate friend of Wedgwood, and in 1771 acted as his arbitrator in his case against Palmer.[121] When Enoch Booth invented the fluid glaze, the Warburtons were among the first to take it up, and their cream-coloured ware, enamelled with all their exceptional artistic skill, is often confounded with Wedgwood’s best productions.

But to Jacob Warburton the Potteries are chiefly indebted for the revival of Littler’s attempt to introduce the manufacture of hard paste porcelain into Staffordshire. It will be remembered that Richard Champion of Bristol had in 1775 obtained an extension of his monopoly of the use of china clay and china stone in the manufacture of porcelain. In spite of this monopoly he met with but little success in Bristol, and in 1781 he sold his patent to a company in Staffordshire—the first instance recorded of a potting company. Of this company Jacob Warburton was the moving spirit. After John Turner, of Lane End, and Anthony Keeling, of the Phœnix Works in Tunstall, had withdrawn from the scheme, the company—consisting then of Warburton, Sam. Hollins (the red china potter of Shelton) and two financiers—settled their manufactory at Shelton New Hall.[122] Their porcelain is always spoken of as “New Hall China,” but it was of little importance or artistic merit. John Daniel, son of that Richard Daniel who had introduced plaster of Paris moulds from France, was appointed manager and became a partner some years before his death in 1821.[123] Jacob Warburton himself died at Rushton in the old Abbey Grange in 1826, but even before that time the manufacture of hard paste porcelain at the New Hall had ceased.[124]