Ware it's at
A centuries-old tradition in Stoke-on-Trent
by Holly Johnson

Tea’s millennia of popularity is embodied in its symbolic and practical vessel, the teapot. And while the teapot has evolved into many forms over hundreds of years, some traditions stand true. Northwest of London in a town called Stoke-on-Trent, bone china teapots have been produced in the British tradition for nearly four centuries. As tea consumption continues to rise, Stoke’s wares give a nod to tea’s past, present and future.

Chances are if you’re at a dinner party with people from Stoke-on-Trent, you’ll see them discreetly pick up a plate, cup or saucer to read the underlying labels, proud that most of the china has been made close to home. Over the past four centuries, this district—called The Potteries, consisting of six towns in North Staffordshire, in the green hilly countryside between London and Manchester—has put England on the map as one of the world’s premier areas for the manufacturing of bone china. Spode, Royal Doulton, Wedgwood, Moorcroft, Wade, Royal Crown Derby—these are names that still survive. Their cups, saucers and other chinaware are decorated with well-loved patterns inspired by traditional Asian designs from yesteryear, Italianate fruit and flower patterns, as well as those of English 20th-century art deco artists.

With a distinctive bottle oven looming in the background, ceramicist Kevin Millward carries sugar bowls to be fired at the Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke-on-Trent. At the height of pottery production in Stoke-on-Trent, there were more than 2,000 of these bottle-shaped kilns in the area. Only 47 remain—all are listed buildings—and four can be found at Gladstone, although they are no longer fired. (Gladstone Pottery Museum, Stoke-on-Trent)

What Limoges is to France and Missen to Germany, Stoke is to the British Isles. According to one Web site, more than 1,500 pottery firms have operated in the area called Stoke-on-Trent since the early 1700s. Names in the business that have dropped by the wayside are like ghosts out of history: Hales and Adams, J. Maddock & Sons, Samuel Massey, Enoch Wood & Sons, John Adams, Sherwin & Cotton and many more. What once was a booming business in this cluster of towns has sadly diminished. The advent of technology, plus the outsourcing of production to Southeast Asian countries where labor is cheaper, have shrunken the historic industry.

Fifty years ago, the trades section of Stoke-on-Trent telephone directories covered some five pages of listings for pottery manufacturing, says Stoke writer and historian Fred Hughes. Even 10 years ago, this list would cover two or three pages. But the current trades directory for 2006 lists less than half a page of potteries producing china.

Hughes says the first traces of ceramics in the area date to 250-300 A.D., when Norman and Roman pottery were found. “What made it an industry were natural resources here,” he adds. There was rich clay in the soil, and starting around 1650, the pottery idea took off.

“There’s evidence that farmers would take their butter to market in hand-made ceramic pots,” Hughes says. “At the same time, tea had been introduced to England by the Dutch, seagoing, mercantile people exporting it from China. William (a Dutch monarch) and Mary, his English wife, were on the throne then, so there was a connection between royalty and tea.”

Ceramica Museum, Stoke-on-Trent (Holly Johnson)

The lovely Chinese ceramic pots the tea was imported in inspired the English. “The court wanted to emulate what the Chinese were doing with these beautiful pieces of chinaware,” Hughes says. “And what the royalty were doing, everybody else wanted to do. That’s how tea and its vessels became popularized.”

You know the train is approaching Stoke when you notice oddly shaped chimneys decorating the horizon, bottle-shaped kilns from yesteryear, remindful of the Victorian era’s industrial boom—only there’s no smoke issuing from these unusual, curved objects, called ovens or “hovels.” The air is fresh. The quiet green hills, spotless city parks and rather quiet demeanor of the Stoke area is a welcome relief from bustling London, an hour and a half away by train.

Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Fenton, Longton and the centrally located Stoke-on-Trent constitute the six historic pottery towns laid out in an elongated pattern, and although the centuries-old trade is down considerably, the English in this area—as in most parts of the island country—take strong pride in their history. The bone china industry is kept alive today through working museums such as the Gladstone, where children can delve into wet clay up to their elbows and make their own pots, watch demonstrations of the vintage custom of firing in a bottle oven and take advantage of other educational courses on offer. The history of the making of bone china (made primarily with cattle bone and introduced by Josiah Spode II in 1776) is described in an early factory setting at the Etruria Industrial Museum, where the guides know each 19th-century production detail intimately.

Its proximity to a canal is appropriate for this once-busy factory, where bone and clay could actually be sent up from such places as Cornwall by waterways, with barges full of supplies harnessed to horses. Seven times a year, the museum puts the world’s oldest operational steam-powered machinery into action, and children and adults alike eagerly attend. Named “Princess,” the device is a rotative beam engine dating back to the early 1820s. It was brought to the site in 1857, and its beam, crank and sweep arm were replaced in 1917.

A Wade Ceramics factory outlet shop in Stoke-on-Trent (Holly Johnson)

But it is Rosemary Dorling whom I have come to see on a grey morning in July in Burslem, a subdued section of Stoke-on-Trent dotted with Victorian buildings. In 1999, she and her husband, William, made a giant career move, giving up their upscale gift shop in Winchester—where they sold Stoke ceramics—and purchasing the former Burgess and Leigh factory (also known as Burleigh), which used the traditional Victorian production techniques. The factory in Burslem was ready to be demolished, and although it was the oldest of its kind, with business dating from 1851, no one in town had the clout or financial resources to save it, although some people wanted to buy its vintage ceramic molds. Plans were to tear the buildings down and put in a parking lot.

“No board, no big body in government could do anything,” Dorling says. “We wrote to Prince Charles, and he was very interested in getting involved, but then, he didn’t have the clout,” as his board of directors didn’t approve. In the spirit of Brits who love their history, the Dorlings, including Dorling’s husband, William, daughter Susannah and son Simon, couldn’t bear to see it vanish, and at the zero hour, “We mortgaged our house to the hilt, put our business behind … and came up to run the factory.

“We had no money to start this factory, no money to buy the coal, the clay, to pay wages,” she says. “But we did have quite a good order book from their previous business. I phoned people like Liberty’s of London and Harrods, and said, ‘We’re here to make this product. We can make this for you if you pay us up front.’ And they all did. The very first year, we made a 10 percent profit.”

The Burslem site was called the model factory in Stoke in part because it was so close to canals that coal, clay and bone could be brought in to stoke the furnace via horse-pulled cargo, and the finished product could be shipped out. “They used to turn right for New York and left for London,” Dorling explains. “We’re the oldest Victorian working factory around. There’s nobody else in Stoke making a pure English product.”

In her cozy office, flanked by dark wooden walls, cabinets and windows, Dorling waxes enthusiastic about the different teaware designs and patterns through history. “The Victorian teapots were ornate, just like the architecture of the time,” and some didn’t pour as well as others, she points out. Likewise, the earlier Georgians, with their simple lines and neo-classical buildings, had simpler tastes in pottery. And then, of course, the 20th century heralded its own plethora of styles, created by such designers as former factory employee Charlotte Rhead in the late 1920s, with her lush, tube-lined designs associated with the Arts & Crafts Movement, and the prolific English art deco ceramicist Clarice Cliff in the ’30s. “She was one of the best-known art deco ladies, and a great businesswoman,” says Dorling. Today, there’s a detailed Web site of Rhead’s and Cliff’s designs where you can track down their patterns from the past.

A novelty teapot with an image of Durham Cathedral in Northern England by Wade Ceramics Ltd. (Holly Johnson)

There have been a good number of women ceramic designers over the years, says Dorling, but women were also vital to the pottery industry as laborers who did everything from hand painting to factory line work. “The pottery industry was filled with women, and that’s why the industry never really went on strike,” she says. “The coalminers went on strike, so did the steel industry and the car drivers, but not the pottery industry because there were mostly women in the factories, and they felt they couldn’t go on strike because they had families at home, and they needed to put bread on the table.” She points to a black-and-white enlarged photograph on the wall of a group of Stoke factory women during World War II. Dorling holds up a simple white teacup to demonstrate the wartime style. “During the war, we went into utilitarian teapots basically,” she says. “They weren’t allowed to make any ‘fancies,’ as they called them, because they had to cope with restrictions.”

With the advent of train travel in Britain, the rise of hotels and the growing popularity of oceanliner trips, teaware was designed accordingly. “In the 1920s, they had hotel teapots, with their little crests on them,” Dorling says. “In the 1930s, the cube teapot came into being, a square teapot without a spout. It was used on liners going to and from the States. It stacked well on the ship, with the square sugar holder all on the top. If they used them on deck, they never tipped over. We don’t sell cube teapots, but we’d love to get a market for them again.”

Does the shape and ceramic detail of a teapot make a difference in brewing and pouring tea? Dorling responds with a fervent “yes.” “We are one of the few factories who put grids in our teapots,” she says. “It’s within the spout so that the tea leaves stop. It’s put in as a separate piece of clay and is quite a labor-intensive business. We believe it makes a proper teapot. Most teapots today don’t have grids because they’re made for tea bags.” Very few teapots pour well, Dorling explains. “The spout has to be designed just so: Otherwise, you’ll have a dribbler. Ours don’t dribble.” Handle shapes are important, she adds. “The handle’s got to be good to hold.” (Like many Brits, Dorling believes tea tastes better if brewed from loose tea leaves.) “Funnily enough, we have one teapot that’s almost cylindrical. It’s like a watering can, really. It was designed in 1920 and is the most brilliant pourer.”

Dorling’s most popular pattern is “Calico,” with a dark blue background decorated with vines and white flowers. The pattern was created in 1968, and her factory outlet store is full of cups, plates, pitchers and pots in “Calico.” Even the popular cow-shaped creamers line the shelves. Other successful sellers are a Victorian favorite dating back to 1827, Asiatic Pheasants, available in pale blue or pink, and Burgess Chintz, a delicate blue floral design. Pink Victorian Chintz in a pattern of roses and leaves is another featured design, chintz being a generic term for patterns inspired by the colorful designs of Indian fabric from the 1920s to the late ’60s.

A very different sort of ceramic factory lies about a mile away at another end of Burslem. Wade Ceramics Ltd. specializes in the novelty end of the industry and works in tandem with the tea industry itself. Managing director Paul Farmer leads a reporter up steep stairs to his office. “The tea industry is one that’s very close to our hearts: Two of our top 10 companies happen to be tea companies,” he says.

A statue of Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795), one of the early major figures in the ceramic industry, stands outside the railway station in Stoke-on-Trent.

A word about specialty or novelty teaware: It’s nothing new. The Victorians were making teapots shaped like cabbages and omnibuses, and craftsmen in earlier eras played with the idea. The fad has never died, and Wade has capitalized on the concept in the 21st century, producing everything from a giant-sized teapot for the Stoke football team (about three-feet-by-four-feet) to their vastly popular Whimsies, tiny ceramic figures of animals tucked away in boxes of tea bags dating from 1953. You can even find them in the United States where Red Rose tea bags are sold in North America, and the latest line of the collectables are called Pet Shop Friends, one-and-a-half-inch-high parakeets, kittens and rabbits among them. Red Rose Tea is one of Wade’s biggest clients, alongside Rington’s in Northeast England.

For Red Rose, “We also now supply figurines, tea sets, tea bag tidies, stands for the whimsies in all manner of shapes and sizes,” says Farmer. For Tetley Tea, one of Britain’s biggest tea companies, they’ve produced “tea folk” since 1973, cartoonish human figures and faces in the form of pots, caddies, jars, egg cups, toast racks and mugs. They even have names: Archie, Sydney, Gaffer and Tina are some. The idea of associating fictitious figures with a product in advertising isn’t new, but it has been a great success for Tetley’s, according to Farmer.

The long association of England with fanciful teapots has brought Wade brisk business over the years from other parts of Europe. “Wade used to make a range of teapots that were sold as giftware, so they were more ornamental than usable,” recalls Farmer. “We sold hundreds of thousands of them, particularly in Italy and Russia. We used to sell container loads to Russia. And they were of the very old-fashioned English style, replicas of teapots made to look like post offices, shops, all those sorts of things. But they weren’t particularly practical. They were designed to be looked at, not to be used.”

In 2002, Wade Ceramics produced the official Queen’s Golden Jubilee teapot, which was a huge seller in Britain. It’s an example of aesthetics and utility combined, says Farmer, an adage that has long been associated with the Stoke-on-Trent pottery industry. If you make something that works well, it should also be lovely to look at, whether it’s simple or complex. Otherwise, why bother? To quote William Morris, from a lecture to Stoke workers in the 19th century (the quote is framed and hangs in Dorling’s office), “You who in these parts make such hard, smooth, well-compacted and enduring pottery understand well that you must give it other qualities besides those which make it fit for ordinary use. You must profess to make it beautiful as well as useful.”

Farmer considers the Jubilee teapot, eyeing it proudly. “The special commemorative teapot looks beautiful sold purely as a decorative item, but we know it will work also,” he says proudly. “I’ve got one at home, not decorative, just a plain white one, and I use it every day.”

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