Wedgwood: The First Tycoon

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A Place for Thomas

A month before his ninth birthday, Josiah Wedgwood stood against brisk winds in the graveyard at his father’s funeral. One imagines how the melancholic mood was a scourge to the family, becoming as familiar as the feeling of the soggy ground beneath their feet. Funerals were all too frequent. Mary had already stood over the graves of two young daughters and two sons. Now she and her eight children, the youngest being Josiah—or “plain Jos,” as he referred to himself—once again mouthed somber hymns and thanked the preacher for his avuncular comforts. The father, Thomas, was fifty-two when he died. In 1739, this was an average life span for those fortunate enough to outlive adolescence, though Thomas considered himself above average in many respects. After all, he had come from a family that owned much of the land in the area of Burslem in Staffordshire, where generations of Wedgwoods, some more privileged than others, were born and laid to rest.

The 1730s opened in peace and promise. Benjamin Franklin began the Poor Richard’s Almanack in Philadelphia; John Kay patented his “flying shuttle,” a landmark in textile mass production, leading some to dream of building large mills; Voltaire wrote Lettres sur les Anglais, championing democratic government; and David Hume developed his empiricist philosophy in his Treatise on Human Nature. The decade ended with trouble when England declared war with Spain, one of many wars that would haunt the rest of the century.

Such events seemed a world away from the small village of Burslem, which was tucked off a well-worn road that cut through the West Midlands, carrying travelers from the capital to the bustling port of Liverpool and the mercantile center of Manchester. It was here, in the northern part of Staffordshire, rippling with hills and valleys, often windswept and scraped by heavy, steely clouds, that a group of medieval Benedictine monks once attempted to tame the uncultivated meadowland, building an isolated monastery and clearing modest stretches of granges and crofts to cultivate wheat.

In the hundred-year period spanning the 1400s and 1500s, one man acquired much of the sloping ground of Burslem, and to declare his presence he adopted the place name, calling himself Thomas of Burslem. He had enough wealth, esteem, and land to guarantee that future sons would possess the honorable status of “gentleman” and “esquire.” Eventually this privilege, benefitting directly from the expansive Burslem family properties, would pass on to Josiah Wedgwood’s own family, due in part to the luck and in part to the shrewdness of great-great-grandfather Gilbert.

All Josiah’s family knew how much Gilbert’s life had changed their fortunes. Some listened to stories about him while harboring hidden feelings of resentment, others appreciated his good fortune. He was born in 1588, the youngest son of six, just a few miles north of Burslem. His father was a church administrator, his brothers were local husbandmen who lived in a single, small farmhouse. But Gilbert had energy and talent, and meant to make the most of the kind of life he was given; that life, he thought, revolved around pottery.

As a young man, Gilbert saw that most work available in the area was agrarian—rearing and shearing sheep, cultivating wheat, cattlekeeping and tanning. But one or two locals were working with clay. They dug the clay, and when the sun was out, dried it in “sun pans,” forming it with their hands into coarse vessels for butter and beer—useful things for the farmers—and firing the pieces in a round, blackened oven, about as tall as a man, made of earth clod and fueled by coal from local pits. These men taught Gilbert that pottery required strength of both head and hand. One had to explore the dense woods and rocky ridges, prodding the “gouty, moorish, peaty black land” for raw material and then have the imagination to see finished forms in clumps of cold, wet earth. Gilbert was diligent, and he learned well. At that time, one could walk over a day in any direction and only meet a handful of potters—no more than about a hundred were working up and down the slopes of the region. But he became one of the best and was the first Wedgwood to be called a “Master Potter.” Though there were never any guilds to enforce the status, this meant that he had learned all aspects of the craft, from collecting clay to firing it.

Not that it was a terribly technical craft. Gilbert’s descendants would laugh about the crudeness of pottery and the fact that all it took back in his day was a shovel to dig the clay and coal and a simple oven. It was a romantic image—old Gilbert creating something from nothing. What made it even more romantic was that the rugged potter had married the beautiful and graceful Margaret Burslem.

This event perhaps chimed louder in the stories Josiah heard about great-great- grandfather Wedgwood than anything else. Her father was the wealthy Thomas Burslem, a descendant of the first Thomas of Burslem, and Burslem’s principal landowner, having two large manor houses, hundreds of acres of meadowland, woods, and fields, and an income from farmer tenants and the family’s new interests in coal mining. Margaret and Gilbert’s first child, a son, was named Burslem Wedgwood, and Gilbert must have hoped that the union between these families would mean a new way of life for his children. In time, they inherited Overhouse Estate, and over 100 acres of land that formed the heart of Burslem passed into Wedgwood hands.

In a world that had barely moved beyond feudalism, where an extreme minority owned the majority of the land, the right of primogeniture was often ruthless in its execution; occasionally however, the weight of tradition shifts good fortune onto the shoulders of the unsuspecting. Gilbert and Margaret’s eldest son, Burslem Wedgwood, had died young, and his inheritance passed to his younger brother, Thomas, Josiah’s great- grandfather. Suddenly, at fifty-two years old, Thomas was the largest landowner in Burslem, a gentleman by title, who now lived in the prestigious manor house on the north hill overlooking Burslem and the shadowy green valleys of North Staffordshire. Along with the roomy timber-framed house, he had “barns, stables, outhouses, cowhouses, yards, folds, orchards, and gardens.” He even had a “fish-pond and fish” out in front. It was assumed that the eldest son would get first prize of the property, while the second son could be trained up in the family craft and prepared to make a living for himself. The other children, parents hoped, either married or at least found laboring jobs that would keep them fed. Before his unexpected inheritance, Thomas’s place was therefore in his father’s “pot-works.” Gilbert sat his son down in his damp and dusty shed and trained him to work the clay—to feel it, to form it, and to fire it. In time, Thomas, dedicated as his father had been, became a master potter, taking on apprentices and journeymen, and expanding his craft. Gilbert taught his son not only the skills of the potter’s craft but also the necessity of expansion—of always looking to acquire another acre, or an additional plot on which to build an additional workman’s shed. The more ground one had, the more opportunity was at one’s feet. The more elbow power one had to work it, the more potential there was for earning a better living. Thomas followed his father’s instructions. By the standards of seventeenth-century Burslem, Thomas was well accomplished by his fortieth birthday. He owned two small potteries—each with one mud-clod hovel and one gray stone “pot-oven”—one of which he inherited from his father. He soon bought a third.

Before moving into Overhouse Estate, Josiah’s great-grandfather lived with his wife and father-in-law in the Churchyard House, a thatched country cottage at the bottom of a field on the south side of Burslem. A stone’s throw between the little Burslem church toward the village and a rustic alehouse called the Crown and Mitre, the cottage sat in the oldest part of Burslem, the spot where monks had settled long ago. It was here that Thomas built himself some new “workhouses and pot ovens” with a “horse mill with the buildings thereto” on some uncultivated land he’d recently bought, adjacent to the house. This was now the master potter’s main place of practice. Following tradition, Overhouse Estate would be destined for his eldest son, John; but his new, busy pottery was prepared as the inheritance for his second son, Thomas, who was here trained in the craft and, following in his father’s footsteps, became “Master Potter.” When this Thomas died, in 1717 the house and pottery near the church went to his eldest son, another Thomas. This was Josiah’s father. The pottery that had been built two generations ago and passed from one Thomas to the next was known as the Churchyard Works.

The detached potwork in the somewhat removed southern fields of Burslem was built up over the sixty or so years from the time that great-grandfather Thomas had begun building it to the time Josiah’s father died. Still the potters worked in dark hovels, old barns built alongside Church Lane, the winding dirt trail used by packing horses heading out from the village center and cows changing pastures. Josiah’s father had three or four mud and stone sheds under thatched roofs. They were the “workhouses,” whose clammy, gray, stained walls dripped with pungent condensation. Here mounds of unctuous rust- colored local clay, dug from a coal pit by a hired hand, were dumped into large square “slip-kilns,” tin trays about ten inches deep, that were gently heated to steam off any water soaked within to give it the right feel before it was “beaten” and “turned.” The other sheds he called “shops,” and spent most of his waking hours stocking his “plank boards & shelves” with simple pots. The pieces were crooked and crude, even childlike to a later perspective. No one thought he was an especially gifted craftsman, even though he was a fourth-generation master potter. But competition to be the best was not a concern for him. To his mind, being a Wedgwood, a member of an established family with ties to the original Burslem, was more important than being identified as a master potter.

Thomas Wedgwood might have walked proudly around the village, his head high and his hand deep in his pocket, but in Josiah’s own later assessment, his father—and his grandfather, for that matter—showed a profound lack of financial acuity, both wasting too much of their menial profits on unnecessarily high weekly expenses. They were uninspired and artistically lethargic. His father was satisfied with producing common black and mottled ware—simple in substance (no specially prepared clay) and design: baking dishes, jugs, porringers, and the like. The pieces were cheap and common; “he was apparently content to carry on the old fashioned peasant pottery,” in the judgment of a later Wedgwood.

In the few years that Josiah’s father and grandfather’s trade overlapped—in the 1710s, before his grandfather’s death in 1717, at fifty-seven—each mustered an annual trade worth a mere £36, from which everyday living expenses needed to be drawn. Later in life, long after brother Thomas pored over the account books, Josiah did some calculations of his own, casting a critical eye on those early days. He headed a piece of paper: “Men necessary to make an Oven of Black and Motled, per week, and other expenses.” He added up what they paid for the clay, coals, couriers, packing straw, and labor: £4 5s per oven load. A crate of final goods was sometimes only worth £4, and often they could not get much more than one crate’s worth into their one oven. Josiah calculated that the best any potworks in Burslem could do was to turn a profit of a mere sixteen shillings per week, and Josiah’s father made even less. Regardless of the organization of the potworks and thus lack of innovation, Josiah still thought that with few minor adjustments his father or grandfather could have yielded a bit more profit, if even another five or six shillings a week—enough for one man’s weekly wages. “The Wear and Tear,” for instance, “and some other things, are rated too high,” Josiah thought. The expenses could have been tightened up, “4l per Oven-full is thought to be sufficient, or more than sufficient, for the Black and Motled works of the largest kind.” This was hardly the model of a successful business, or the figures that would allow one to be thought of as a gentleman. In fact, his father’s income approximated the annual interest accrued from a landed gentleman’s average income of £2,000 ($200,000) per annum; it was even well short of a country squire’s salary at around £300 ($30,000) a year.

But day after day Thomas returned to the dusty workshops, where all Josiah’s brothers and sisters spent long, laborious hours. The boys would pull leather straps to turn lathes for forming the contours of the clay and the girls dipped the pieces in glaze and fit handles onto mugs. The centerpiece to one shed was Thomas’s “throwing” wheel and rough, water-stained oak modeling tables. Everything, including the handles of the carving tools, was coated with a fine film of dark dried clay, like bloodstains.

The work that required the most muscle was performed just outside the sheds and across the mud yard, by horses turning a wooden “pug mill.” Every other day, Josiah’s brothers carried loads of clay from the slip kiln in the workshop to the mouth of the pug, an insatiable maw that swallowed up each shovelful, while fierce metal blades attached to a revolving shaft turned by the horses gnawed away at the clay, removing any air bubbles, and forcing it through a tube where the clay emerged as a condensed log, ready to be taken to the thrower’s wheel. In the other corner of the yard, adjacent to the buildings and the coal fold, largely blocking any southern view of neighboring pastures, were the large brick ovens, the icons of the cottage industry that kept Josiah’s family fed and clothed.

A footpath leading through a wooden gate embedded in the furze hedges on the north side of the potworks led the family to Burslem church, St. John’s, where, in 1739, Josiah and his family stood outside, huddled around Thomas’s freshly dug grave. Nearby were the gravestones of grandfather Thomas and great-grandfather Thomas. They had all been master potters, and they had all labored at and owned the adjacent potworks. But Josiah, the youngest son, was still too young even to begin working there. And none of those buildings behind him—now the largest pottery in Burslem—was ever bound to be his. The Churchyard Work had been passed along to Thomas, Josiah’s eldest brother.