“The Purchaser may be accommodated with a very good Dwelling-House, Gardens, Stable, and some Pasture Ground, close to the Works.
“The present Proprietor accidentally became possessed of the Works, and is settled in a very different Way of Business, at a 100 Miles distance; which is the Reason of the Premises being disposed of.
“Further Particulars may be had by applying to Mr. John Miers, Merchant, in London; Messrs. J. and W. Cave, Merchants, in Bristol; Mr. Edward Coles, on the Premises; or Mr. John Coles, at the Iron Warehouse, Glocester.”
Later on, probably after the sale, Mr. Haynes became sole proprietor, and by him and his partners, under the firm of “Haynes & Co.,” the works were much enlarged, and were by them styled the “Cambrian Pottery.”
In the year 1800, when Donovan wrote his excursions in South Wales and Monmouthshire, the works, then carried on by G. Haynes & Co., of which he gives an extended account, were considered to be extensive, and to be producing wares of a superior class; the buildings being said to be arranged on the same plan as those of Josiah Wedgwood, at Etruria. In 1802 Mr. Haynes sold his works, moulds, models, stock, &c., to Mr. Lewis Weston Dillwyn, and by him the buildings were very greatly enlarged, and the business considerably extended.
At first, only the ordinary descriptions of common earthenware were made at these works; but the manufacture was gradually improved by Mr. Haynes, who produced a fine white earthenware, a cream-coloured ware, an “opaque china,” and other varieties, as well as a very passable kind of biscuit ware. This “opaque china,” a fine, hard, compact, and beautiful body, is doubtless the “porcelain” ware spoken of by Donovan, on which so much unnecessary stress was laid by a recent writer in attempting to prove that veritable porcelain was made at Swansea before the time when Mr. Dillwyn commenced it; the same writer forgetting to notice that in the same paragraph in which Donovan speaks of the Swansea “porcelain” he speaks also of it and other wares bidding fair some day to vie with “Sieve pottery.”
In 1790, one of the “throwers” was Charles Stevens, who had been an apprentice (at the same time as William Taylor) at the Worcester China Works. In that year he applied to be employed at the Derby China Works, sending as his address “The Pot Work, Swansea,” and next “at Mr. Bothwell’s, engraver, in the Strand, Swansea.”
In the body of the Swansea wares, “the North Devon or Bideford clays seem to have been early employed; as also the Dorset or Poole clays, the last still continuing to be used. Cornish Kaolin and China stone likewise formed a portion of the porcelain body.”
Upon the works passing into the hands of Mr. Lewis Weston Dillwyn, in 1802, the opaque china was much improved, and the decorations assumed a much more artistic character. Mr. Lewis Weston Dillwyn, who was a Fellow of the Linnæan Society, was the author of “A Synopsis of British Confervæ, Coloured from Nature, with Descriptions;” “A Description of Recent Shells;” and “Catalogue of the more rare Plants found in the neighbourhood of Dover;” and, in conjunction with Dawson Turner, of “The Botanist’s Guide through England and Wales.”
