Ken Ray's Soldiers: Gunner Aaron Wedgwood

Ken Ray, a long-time researcher into the lives of local soldiers has assembled an impressive list of North Staffordshire men who served in the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimea and the numerous colonial conflicts Britain participated in during the 19th and early 20th centuries. He has very kindly given me access to some of his documents which chart the lives and careers of ordinary men from the region who might otherwise have been forgotten. This is one of those stories...

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Gunner Aaron Wedgwood, H Troop Royal Horse Artillery,

Napoleonic Wars

Though not closely related to any of his most famous namesakes, Aaron Wedgwood was certainly a member of the extended Wedgwood family of Burslem that included the great Josiah Wedgwood amongst its notable members. Born in Burslem in either late February or early March 1789, Aaron was the third child and eldest son of Richard Wedgwood and his wife Ann nee Lowndes. Aaron's father was the son of another Aaron Wedgwood, a potter of some repute, some of whose wares are today held in the British Museum collection. As a scion of a lesser branch of the family, the younger Aaron seems to have received little or no education, though in his teens he was apprenticed as an engraver in the pottery industry. However, on 4th February 1806, just before his 17th birthday, he cast all this aside and enlisted in the Royal Horse Artillery at Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Gunner Wedgwood was enrolled in H Troop Royal Horse Artillery. Armed with lighter cannon and with teams of horses to pull them for rapid deployment into action, the RHA were intended to work in concert with the cavalry, though they often filled in as regular static artillery on the battlefield. Not that Wedgwood saw any early action as H Troop spent the bulk of the Napoleonic Wars on garrison duty in Britain, mostly at Woolwich, Warley or Canterbury. There were two notable breaks from this routine, the first was in 1809 when H Troop took part in the ill-fated Walcheren expedition to the Low Countries, and in 1815 it was one of several troops of the RHA who served in the Waterloo campaign in Belgium. At Waterloo the Troop was placed in support of the soldiers fighting in and around the château complex of Hougoumont on the Allied right. Placed forward on the ridge like other artillery teams, it suffered heavily from enemy fire and the several cavalry and infantry attacks that day. H Troop suffered many dead and wounded, one of the dead being their commander Captain William Norman Ramsay. Command then devolved onto Captain John May.

Following the Allied victory, H Troop was stationed at Amiens, France as a part of the army of occupation, during which time Wedgwood like the other members of the Troop received the Waterloo Medal for his part in the action. In 1817, the Troop moved to Bailleul, where, following a reorganization of the RHA, H Troop became G Troop.

Eventually the Troop returned to Britain and Wedgwood was still with it, but not for much longer. His conduct as a soldier was, it seems, rather patchy and when he was discharged from the army on 30th June 1820, the stated reason was 'irregular conduct', while the section noting his general conduct was left blank. He was sent on his way with 5d a day pension. The discharge papers reveal that Wedgwood was a relatively short man only 5' 5¾” tall, with brown hair, grey eyes and a fair complexion. In total he had served 14 years 182 days in the army.

Though Aaron Wedgwood's discharge papers were signed at Woolwich, there is a pencilled notation on the back sheet that reads '80 miles from Pontefract to Newcastle'. On their discharge soldiers were usually provided with the fare to get them back to the town where they enlisted, though what he was doing travelling from Pontefract is unclear. It may be that he was based there and his discharge was merely confirmed at Woolwich.

Little is known about Aaron Wedgwood after his discharge, though there is some circumstantial evidence to suggest that he did indeed return to the Potteries. He may well have been the man of that name who married one Mary Ann Hudson in Hanley in 1823. There were two other Aaron Wedgwoods married locally a decade later, but these men seem to have survived well into the mid-19th century. That Aaron Wedgwood never applied for the Military General Service Medal perhaps indicates that he died before 1848. One Aaron Wedgwood died locally in 1837, and this may well have been our man.

Am I Not a Man and a Brother?

By the late 1700s, slavery, most notably the trade in African slaves, was being increasingly seen by many in Britain as a great moral evil. Abolitionist pamphlets and literature distributed in taverns, coffee houses, assembly rooms, reading societies and private houses up and down the country brought home to the people of Britain the atrocities committed by the Atlantic slave trade, and attacked the entrenched attitudes and vicious practices of slave owners and the greed of the other moneyed interests that thrived on this inhuman traffic.

The anti-slavery movement had originated with non-conformist groups in Europe and America in the late 1600s. Quakers and other dissenters objected to slavery on both moral and religious grounds, but because of their unorthodox beliefs they were regarded as social outsiders and barred from public office and as a result their views were largely ignored save by their fellow dissenters. The movement had grown slowly in Britain during the 18th century, but it finally found a voice and a leader in 1786, when Thomas Clarkson published  An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. This proved to be a rallying cry for the movement, bringing Clarkson into contact with other like-minded men and the next year he and eleven others formed the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. This Committee would become a Society as it grew and would coordinate the Parliamentary campaign led by MP William Wilberforce that resulted in the end of the international trade in African slaves. That eventual success was still a couple of decades away, but the Committee made a good start, not only by being led by men of intelligence and zeal, but also by utilising what could be considered an early example of product branding, namely an easy-to-recognise logo, mass-produced by leading Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood.

Josiah Wedgwood.

Josiah Wedgwood like many abolitionists was a non-conformist, being brought up as a Unitarian. He was not an immediate recruit to the cause, his early life being devoted to setting himself up as a potter and businessman. However, he was always very keenly interested in the social movements of his time and their consequences for society at large. This found its way into his paternal attitude towards his workers, whom he housed in the new model estate of Etruria that he built around his factory, and can be seen in the interest he took in the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution. His involvement in the anti-slavery movement, though, seems to have come about through the influence of his business partner Thomas Bentley. Bentley had worked as a merchant in Liverpool, a circumstance that might normally have made him a supporter of slavery, but he was firmly opposed to the trade and unlike the other merchants refused to go and meet the slave ships when they came into port. Doubtless Bentley's feelings on the matter influenced Wedgwood in this just as his knowledge of arts and science had done earlier in their friendship. Certainly, following Bentley's death in 1780, Wedgwood subscribed to all the tracts and pamphlets concerning the abolition of the slave trade and used his influence to do all that he could to help the cause.

Wedgwood became friends with Thomas Clarkson and in 1787 he joined the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade shortly after it was set up. As an experienced businessman  Wedgwood would prove to be a valuable asset in the Committee's arsenal. He understood the value of publicity - he afterall, was the man who had pioneered the idea of the money back guarantee and the benefits of the 'By Appointment' status of Royal patronage - and he now came to the Committee with a brilliant idea to help promote their cause. Better still, he had the means to bring his plan to fruition and was willing to pay for it out of his own pocket.

Wedgwood proposed producing a classically inspired oval cameo based on the seal of the Committee. This showed a kneeling African slave in chains, imploring mercy or pity, with the motto 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' The idea appealed to the Committee and Wedgwood immediately got one of his best craftsmen, William Hackwood, to first model and then prepare for production what became known as the slave medallion. Hackwood used Wedgwood's black jasper to represent the supplicant slave, set against a white or cream background in the same ceramic body, with the motto moulded in relief above and partly around the figure. Then, once the working moulds had been made, the medallion went into production. Thousands were made and Wedgwood immediately began sending them out - again out of his own pocket - to interested parties. Thomas Clarkson, writing years later, remembered receiving his first batch and recalled the instant and telling popularity the slave medallion enjoyed.

'Mr Wedgwood made a liberal donation of these, when finished, among his friends. I received from him no less than five hundred of them myself. They, to whom they were sent, did not lay them up in their cabinets, but gave them away likewise. They were soon, like The Negro’s Complaint, in different parts of the kingdom. Some had them inlaid in gold on the lid of their snuff-boxes. Of the ladies, several wore them in bracelets, and others had them fitted up in an ornamental manner as pins for their hair. At length, the taste for wearing them became general; and thus fashion, which usually confines itself to worthless things, was seen for once in the honourable office of promoting the cause of justice, humanity, and freedom.'

Most of the medallions were distributed via the Committee, but Wedgwood sent out many more himself, most notably in 1788 when he sent a package of the cameos across the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin, an old acquaintance from the Lunar Society and at that time the president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery. Wedgwood wrote 'It gives me great pleasure to be embarked on this occasion in the same great and good cause with you and I ardently hope for the final completion of our wishes.' Franklin replied, 'I am persuaded [the medallion] may have an Effect equal to that of the best written Pamphlet in procuring favour to those oppressed people.' Sadly for both, neither Franklin nor Wedgwood would live long enough to see those wishes fulfilled.

Wedgwood continued to actively support the anti-slavery movement right up to his death in early 1795. He bought shares in a company set up to form a colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone; befriended and advised William Wilberforce who would lead the parliamentary fight against slavery; and he paid for the printing and distribution of an anti-slavery pamphlet that the Committee produced. Offering to pay the cost for the production of a woodcut block, he advised them to head their pamphlet not with the advertisement they had originally planned, but with the woodcut, a reproduction of the same image of the kneeling slave that had inspired his own ceramic contribution to the cause.

Reference: Thomas Clarkson, History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade, vol. II (1807)

Website: Wedgwood Museum