Pottering around the Potteries: A bitter sweet visit to a potbank

Our hosts on our recent visit up North arranged a trip to the Gladstone Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent and we were glad that they did. It hit the spot at many levels, both sweet and bitter.

The museum is the last untouched example of a North Staffordshire potbank – the small earthenware and china works which dominated the six towns of Stoke-on-Trent for more than two centuries. The six towns – Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton – grew up close to the outcrops of tarry coal that provided the fuel for the bottle ovens which loomed over their rooftops and choked them with ash and soot. Life in the shadow of the potbanks was hard, as was the work within them. Entire families would toil for long hours in dangerous conditions driving the many complex processes that were required to make the wares.

Thrower, turner, fettler, sponger, one legged dancer, dipper; the names of jobs in the potbank have an earthy resonance, displaying a grim humour in the face of hardship. My favourite; saggar maker’s bottom knocker is the name of the boy who bashed out lumps of coarse local clay inside an iron hoop to form the base of the saggar, a large clay vessel used to contain the ware when it was fired. It was the saggar maker himself who paid the bottom knocker a weekly wage of a pound out of his own pay, which could be as much as six pounds, but the bottom knocker had little hope of earning more for the only route to promotion was through a dead man’s shoes.

Not that he would have had long to wait, up until as late as 1900 the average age of an adult at death was 46. Thick choking smog, flint and clay dust, lead poisoning and extreme heat from the ovens all took their toll on the workers but life started to improve in the late nineteenth century as various pieces of legislation were brought in to protect the workers. Finally in 1952, the Clean Air Act  forced the smoky bottle ovens to close and changed the landscape around Stoke-on-Trent forever.

Fascinating though the technical aspects of the pottery were, there was a very sombre undercurrent that could not be ignored. That was the lives and working conditions of those who laboured there. They were abysmal and hooray for those who strived to improve the lot of the workers. In the main, these were not the owners or politicians but outsiders who were appalled by what was going on. Of course, things are immeasurably better today but let's not be so complacent as to ignore the iniquities  of some modern working practices. I'm thinking of zero hour contracts, sub-minimum wage jobs, unpaid internships, the gradual erosion of terms and conditions of employment and the demonisation of those who agitate for employees rights. All of these are echoes from the past and all of them, now as then, are for the benefit of the owners and shareholders. It still makes me angry. And I'm glad it does as it would be terrible not to be stirred by it.

A view of some of the brick-built bottle ovens at the Gladstone Potteries Museum. They are called bottle ovens because of their shape, not because bottles are made within them. What you see is the outer skin called the hovel. This provides the updraught for the oven feeding the inner kiln, it also funnels away the smoke and provides weather protection for the kiln. There were many hundreds of these in Stoke at the height of the pottery industry, each belching out smoke and fumes. Imagine that, if you can, without coughing in sympathy.

A collection of old tools in the Engine House. The notice on the wall for the wares of William Boulton, Engineer was an introduction into a word lover's paradise: the vocabulary of the Pottery. Dull would he be of soul who could not be entranced by words like blunger, sifter and jigger?

Each individual task in the process of making the various products of the pottery had its own terminology, meanings now lost to general use but kept alive with working museums such as this one.  Just Google 'pottery terms' if you want to find out more. I wonder if any other keen eyes can spot the spelling mistake on this poster? Once an editor, always on editor!

Saggars stacked vertically in a kiln, ready for firing.  Every inch of space was used as the more that could be fired simultaneously, the higher the productivity and, as most of the workers were on piece work, the higher the take home pay.

The vertical stacks were known as bungs and might have had as many as 20 saggars, one on top of the other. It's when you see this that you realise how important it was that the saggar maker produced something that was flat and which enabled efficient stacking.  The man who placed the saggars in the kiln was called, mmm, a placer. The formal oven process normally allowed 48 hours after firing temperatures (some 1200 - 1500 degrees C) had been reached before the placers went back in to take the fired goods out, but it was not unknown for the supervisors to insist that the placers went in before this and when the temperatures were still high and the goods still very hot. 

I had a teeny weeny taste of what the placers must have gone through when I had a student job on the coking ovens at Bedwas Plant. It was hot work and we had very little in the way of protective clothing provided by the management. In fact all we were given were steel rimmed wooden clogs as normal footware would soon burn off. That's me in the photograph, sweeping stray coal into an oven. Happy days.

The inner part of the hovel is the kiln proper. It is a round structure with a domed roof, called the Crown, and its walls are typically around a foot thick. The coal fires are lit below the central chamber and it requires about 14 tons of coal for every firing of the kiln. Because the heat causes the brickwork to expand and contract, the walls are strengthened with wrought iron straps called bonts, placed a couple of feet apart.

Just a few of the many moulds made for pieces such as vases, tea pots and other items too intricate to be made directly from clay and needing to made from clay suspension or slip.

Colouring the pottery and the glazes was an exact science, and had to be for reproducibility. An old fashioned chemistry lab dealt with the mixing and dispensing of the necessary. Actually, it was probably more like an apothecary's.

The Colour Store where all the pigments were kept. All stored, appropriately, in porcelain jars.

A visit to the Pottery Museum has the bonus of an exhibition called 'Flushed with Pride'. Located in the bowels of the site, it offers an intriguing gallery, with a touch of potty humour, dedicated to the history of the toilet. In its way it lifts the lid on the role that potters played in the development of the khazi and there one can follow the story of the WC from the time of Queen Elizabeth 1 through to the toilet of our future. 

Possibly the grossest game I've ever played. "What did people use before toilet paper? - Feel the clue for removing your poo."  Put your hand into the closed toilet roll and see what you can feel - sponges, feathers, bits of old cloth, soft twigs etc. I'm sure I could adapt this and make a Xmas game for the grandchildren.

Getting right up to date and addressing one of the big issues of our times: Stand. Sit or Squat. I went through the motions of studying this carefully, even though the display was at the rear of the exhibition.

Entitled 'The Miner's Bathtime', this exhibit of a tin bath was quite poignant and very familiar to those of my generation. My nan had one hanging by her back door and it was used for baths in front of her coal fire. It had been used by my grandfather when he was alive and when he came home from the mine covered in coal dust. Although there were showers at the pit head, many miners preferred to clean up at home.

And that's me sporting a very stylish knotted hankie on my head as I enjoy a dip in my nan's tin bath with my aunty Phyll. Taken in July 1949, I was just under two years old. How time flies.

And finally: the young lady at the back is the one legged dancer. And if you are wondering why she is called a one legged dancer it is because when small girls worked the large wheel to keep the potter’s wheel turning they would have to stand up high on one leg to reach the top.