The technical perfection of these early eighteenth century thrown and turned wares was always a source of wonder to me. It was this cheaper pottery that my grandmother collected, and which I collect to this day, whose exquisite shapes are the basis of the Brixton Pottery forms. What cannot now be found quite so readily are examples of the millions of pieces of cheap cartouche earthenware with all their imperfections and thumbprints that quickly found their way to the spoil heaps of Stoke. These, including the Portland Vase, were the subject of a craze for all things mythological and Roman, which was taken up with enthusiasm by Josiah Wedgwood and resulted in his “Jasper Ware”, the ubiquitous blue and white stoneware cameo (or cartouche) pottery which can be found in every car boot sale. century “cartouche ware” which followed the motifs of Sir William Hamilton’s treasures from Pompeii. She also had a small collection of early 19th. She particularly liked the Wedgwood “Ivy” print, which decorated her dinner service, and had a number of individual pieces from the Ravilious era. Her collection of ceramics was chosen with a painterly eye. She and my American grandfather lived as tenants in the end of an elegant Folkestone regency house, with circuitous terraced gardens leading down to a shingle beach. My maternal grandmother, a post-impressionist painter of Russian/Polish ancestry, used to invite us as small children to stay by the sea in the summer holidays. The end result is a remarkably friendly, and generally happy, population with all family members nearby. Extended families were seldom separated by more than a mile or two, making for a constant interchange between generations.
#Railroad brush lets create pottery full
This unique geographical factor meant that factories were full of relations. You could move out of your family home and set up in another town while still being in the same city and still working in the same factory. But they offered a unique advantage to the pottery workers. They are linked by long roads of uncontrolled Victorian two storey ribbon development and it is hard to know where Fenton for example ends and Longton starts. The six towns of Stoke (Hanley, Burslem, Tunstall, Longton, Stoke-upon-Trent and Fenton) sit in close proximity to each other. I was fascinated by the uniformity on the repeated brushstrokes, aware that decades of practice were required, and knowing that the potteries were extreme examples of the much derided division of labour which I was later required to criticize while studying Marx at university.
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Stoke) and hand painted in an “Indian Tree” variant, the thick texture of the onglaze enamel standing proud of its surface. My favourite bone china was from Staffordshire (i.e. The fine china was in fact a mixture of continental porcelain and English bone china, which had accumulated over generations as my mother’s family moved from country to country in the service of their governments and banks. Our family had a set in pink, which we used for “ordinary”, the fine china being reserved for Christmas, birthdays, and the visits of machinery customers from Mexico and the USSR. And in the seconds shop one could buy deckle edged plates printed brightly with shepherdesses and their flocks. All the Euston trains stopped there, in a valley filled with smoke from the innumerable coal fires emanating from the hundreds of bottle kilns still in use.Ī huge Victorian factory overlooked the line with “Burgess and Leigh, home of Burleigh ironstone” emblazoned on its side. Stoke's six towns were on the Manchester to London railway line.
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He used to tease the county ladies of the Cheshire plain, answering their inquiries about his profession with the oft repeated one liner “I make the machinery that puts the stretch in your tights.” Stoke on Trent was about 20 miles south of Macclesfield, where in the 1950s and 60s my father was a pioneer in the textile machinery industry.