WILLIAM COOKWORTHY OF PLYMOUTH
From the original portrait by Opie in the possession of
Edward Harrison, Esq., of Watford
I tell this story because up to a certain point it illustrates the fortunes of William Cookworthy. At the present day many hundreds of men live in ease and happiness through the discovery of china-clay by Cookworthy, but he himself reaped no advantage by what he discovered.
The town of St. Austell in Cornwall may be said to live on china-clay that is exported to the Staffordshire potteries. Before the discovery by Cookworthy, it was not known that the kaolin, the essential ingredient of porcelain, was to be found anywhere, except in China. But Cookworthy, who has put bread into the mouths of thousands, who created the manufacture of porcelain in England out of home-produced kaolin, reaped not a penny advantage from his discovery.
Kaolin is found elsewhere, in Devon, on the fringe of Dartmoor. Now, the visitor to Plymouth, as he passes by the head of the Laira, will see a milk-white stream flow past the line. It is the overflow from the kaolin works at Lee Moor. Cookworthy did not, however, discover the china-clay on the borders of Dartmoor, where it abounds.
China-clay or kaolin is obtained from highly decomposed granite, and consists of the disintegrated and metamorphosed felspar of that rock. Often on the outskirts of the granitic masses of Cornwall the rock is so decomposed by the percolation of rain-water holding carbonic acid in solution that the granite may be dug with a spade to the depth of twenty feet or more. China-stone also is found similarly composed of disintegrated granite, and contains quartz as well as kaolin. It is used in the manufacture of glaze for earthenware. From S. Austell, where three thousand persons are engaged in raising and cleaning the kaolin, something like forty thousand tons are annually exported to Staffordshire for the manufacture of porcelain. But it is employed also largely in the calico-weaving districts as the principal ingredient in sizing and loading calico. It is also used in paper manufacture for the highly glazed and smooth sheets employed for illustrations.
But to come to William Cookworthy. He belonged to a Quaker family of Kingsbridge. His grandfather, William Cookworthy, married Susanna Wearmouth in 1669, and died in 1708. His father, a weaver, also William Cookworthy, born in 1670, married Edith Dobell in 1704, and died in 1718. William the third Cookworthy was born in 1705. After the father’s death the widow was left in straitened circumstances, and received assistance from the Friends’ Monthly Meeting. Although reduced to poverty, with a family of seven children, the eldest only fourteen years old, the widow struggled bravely through her difficulties. William, the eldest son, was apprenticed after his father’s death to the firm of Bevan, chemists and druggists, London, also Quakers. At the close of his apprenticeship, with the assistance of his employers, he set up for himself as a wholesale chemist and druggist at Plymouth, the firm being entitled Bevan and Cookworthy, and the place of business was in Notte Street, and here he lived for many years, and there died.
“He was in many respects a remarkable man, and his life is one of the most illustrious examples of men who have risen of which England can boast. Emphatically self-made, he had none of the foibles which frequently mark the characters of those who have been the architects of their own fortunes. An industrious man of business, a shrewd and painstaking inventor, deeply versed in the science of the day, valued in society for his geniality and power of conversation, he was at the same time one of the simplest and devoutest of Quakers, and an enthusiastic believer in the views of Swedenborg. He was a firm believer in the divining rod, and left a treatise on its uses. In short, Cookworthy was a man of many sides, but always genial, courageous, and persevering; a man who won the respect and esteem alike of high and low by his strict integrity, wide sympathies, and varied powers; one who, having set his hand to the plough, was not ready to turn back.”[36]
In 1735, at the age of thirty, Cookworthy married Sarah Berry, of a Somerset Quaker family; and about this time he assumed the peculiar dress of the Society, a drab suit and a broad-brimmed hat, and became more accentuated in the phraseology adopted by the sect. He was an absent-minded man. One Sunday, in Exeter, on leaving the house of a friend, a physician, to go to meeting, as the rain was streaming down, he took down a cloak that was hanging in the hall and threw it over his shoulders, little noticing that this was not his own, but that of the owner of the house. In those days a physician’s walking costume was a scarlet cloak, with a gold-headed cane. In this garb Cookworthy strolled into meeting, and into the Ministers’ Gallery to the scandal of all the Friends assembled, but quite unconscious of his transformation.