Dickens, the Dodo and the Dinner Plate

On 1 April 1852, the writer Charles Dickens wrote a letter to his wife Kate informing her ‘We think of going on tonight from Birmingham to Stoke upon Trent.’ Despite worries about the trains, it seems that he and a travelling companion arrived in Stoke the next morning. Here after gazing with some fascination at the town before him, the famous author (who at the time was also writing up weekly instalments of his longest book, Bleak House) spent a few hours at the Spode factory which was at that period owned by W. T. Copeland. Here he apparently watched a thrower and his attendant swiftly and skilfully fashion a breakfast set for his amusement, watched jiggerers and pressers making bowls and basins and saw Parian statuettes being produced in moulds. He then explored the factory kilns, seeing the saggars being stacked prior to firing and mused on the constant cycle of heating and cooling that accompanied the manufacture of pottery. This was followed by visits to see transferers and decorators at work, producing willow pattern wares or fancier stuff, before moving on to the dipping shop for glazing and then to the placers carefully loading the ware into the appropriate saggers prior to them being loaded into the kilns he had seen earlier. Dickens seems to have enjoyed his tour and it was doubtless a thrill for the workers at the Copeland works to meet, albeit briefly, one of the biggest celebrities of the Victorian age and show him their own impressive skills. Armed with all he had seen and imbibing a good working knowledge of the history and process of pottery making, Charles Dickens moved on the next day to Stafford.

Compared to the grime and industry of the Potteries that evidently spoke to his imagination, Dickens was bored with Stafford and rather rude about the place, ‘it is as dull and dead a town as any one could desire not to see’ he wrote tartly. He lodged at the Swan Inn, which he disparagingly nicknamed ‘the Dodo’ and where he apparently seemed doomed to spend a very dull evening indeed. According to the tale he told, though, he chanced to look at the bottom of a plate and saw the name ‘COPELAND’, which set him to musing on the previous day’s events. Employing a literary conceit, he then let the plate ‘remind’ him of all he had seen at Copeland’s pot bank, telling the story outlined above as a journey through its creation. The plate’s ‘recollections’ got Dickens through the evening, so he claimed, though one might suppose that he was actually quite busy putting his recollections down on paper. His clever bit of writing, ‘A Plated Article’, was published in the magazine Household Words, on 24 April 1852. 

White Rabbit

According to the tale told, in the 19th century the Etruria Grove, a copse planted on the orders of Josiah Wedgwood near to his factory alongside the Trent and Mersey canal, was haunted by a curious phantom. Travellers that way reported hearing the terrified cries of a child after which a ghostly milk-white rabbit would appear in the road in front of them. According to local historian Henry Wedgwood, most locals avoided the area or hurried on through, though one man who encountered the ghost rabbit tried to catch it, but merely ended up with a dislocated shoulder for his pains. This phantom is said to have been conjured by the murder of a young boy, the terrified screams that heralded the appearance of the rabbit were said to be the sound of the young lad being killed in that secluded spot and presumably the animal-form that followed was a manifestation of the child’s soul seeking justice, or simply trying to find his way home.

The murder that supposedly raised this restless spirit was, alas, all too real. At about 10.30 a.m., on Sunday 4 August 1833, engraver Thomas Davies from Shelton, was out searching for a wasp’s nest in Crabtree Field adjoining the canal towpath near to Macaroni Bridge, Etruria, when he found the body of a young boy lying face down in a water-filled ditch with a length of packer’s cord wrapped around his neck. Fetching assistance, he and another man quickly fished the body out and transported it to the nearby Etruria Inn before sending for the local Constable and fire brigade chief Steven Johnson, who was soon joined by Hanley Constable Charles Rhodes; the two men immediately set about investigating the killing. 

The corpse was soon identified as that of John Holdcroft, a boy of nine years of age, whose parents had been desperately searching for him since the previous evening when he failed to return home to Burslem after leaving his place of work. John had worked for a potter named Hawley in Burslem and when the constables went to enquire there they learnt that young John had left the premises at 6pm on Saturday evening in the company of another of Hawley’s employees, an older boy, 15 year old Charles Shaw. Shaw was a relative newcomer to the area being from Swinton in Yorkshire and was lodging locally with his grandfather. As a result many witnesses did not know his name, but they knew John Holdcroft and several people saw the two boys together along the canal at Etruria on Saturday evening, some noting that the older boy was carrying a piece of packer’s cord like that found around Holdcroft’s neck. When questioned by Constable Charles Rhodes on Sunday afternoon, Shaw first claimed that he had left Holdcroft by the canal with a stranger whom he described as ‘a gambler’, the implication being that this stranger had done Holdcroft in. The constable, though, was dubious, the evidence against Shaw was strong and when Rhodes discovered blood on the boy’s shirt that he had tried to hide by dabbing clay over it, the constable immediately arrested him. The boy then accused a fellow Yorkshireman named John Baddeley who lived nearby, of the killing, but on investigation the man had a solid alibi. Shaw was committed to Stafford gaol to await trial, while John Holdcroft was buried at St Paul’s, Burslem on 7 August 1833.

When Shaw’s case went to trial at Stafford in late March 1834, the prosecution argued that a trifling amount of money was at the root of the killing, as both boys had been paid by Hawley the day before, but while Holdcroft had received 1s, 6d, Shaw because of stoppages and money he owed, only received 4d to take home. The theory was that the boys had been gambling and Shaw envious of Holdcroft’s money had fleeced the younger boy of all his wages. When Holdcroft tried to get some money back, a fight had started that resulted in his death, possibly by a beating followed by strangulation. When the younger boy's body was found the next day the money was missing and Shaw meantime seems to have gone on a spending spree that he could not have afforded. This sudden wealth, plus the rope, a footprint at the scene that matched his boots and the evidence of the witnesses weighed heavily against Charles Shaw and he was quickly found guilty of the murder and sentenced to hang.

Judge Patteson, presiding, was clearly uncomfortable sentencing one so young to death and perhaps to his relief several days later some doubt was thrown on the murder conviction. Shaw’s mother gave sworn testimony that her son had told her that Holdcroft had died from hitting his head against a railing after Shaw knocked him down, and the rope had merely been used to drag the body to the ditch. Probably as a result of this new evidence and the questions it raised, Charles Shaw’s death sentence was commuted to one of transportation for life and he was held in prison until the next year, when he was one of 280 convicts loaded aboard the ship Norfolk which sailed from Sheerness on 14 May 1835. Arriving in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in on 28 August that year, Shaw was first incarcerated in the Point Puer Juvenile Penal Station and later the Port Arthur Penal Station in Tasmania. His records seem to indicate that he was an habitual troublemaker from beginning to end, being subjected to numerous whippings and solitary confinements for his bad or disruptive behaviour, though many were for minor infractions. From the late 1840s, Shaw put in numerous requests for a conditional pardon, but was refused many times, only finally being granted one in March 1851. His fate after that remains unknown. 

Reference: E. J. D. Warrillow, History of Etruria, p.135; The Staffordshire Advertiser, 10 August 1833, p.3; 22 March 1834, p.2; The Monmouthshire Merlin, 5 April 1834, p.1; Tasmanian Names Index/Libraries Tasmania, online resource.

Richenson’s Patent Aerial Battleship

In late August 1908, the Sentinel and numerous other papers up and down the country carried the story that an engineer, Mr A. T. Richenson. and who was living at 5 Ward Street, Burslem, claimed to have it within his power—providing he could get proper funding—to build a dirigible air-battleship which would carry guns and that the War Office was showing an interest in his proposal. Intrigued, a representative of the Sentinel called upon Mr. Richenson and found him quite willing to talk of his invention. The reporter described Mr Richenson as a coloured man who had been born at Barbados, British West Indies, who had first come to Britain twenty years earlier to serve an apprenticeship as a marine engineer at the Elder Dempster Co.'s work at Liverpool. He then served in the Royal Engineers' Constabulary at British Honduras for several years before returning to England in 1891. After working as an engineer at sea for a period of three years, he started work as an engineer for Messrs Vickers Son, and Maxim at Sheffield and continued in their employment for a considerable time.

Mr Richenson said, “This air-battleship has been my life study and I am confident, providing I can get some gentlemen to back me up with financial assistance, that its success will be great.” He produced a number of letters for the reporter showing that the War Office was taking more than a passing interest in his invention, though he added that negociations were currently paused as the War Office wanted him to disclose certain details regarding the construction of his air-battleship which he did not want to release. Though he remained cagey regarding the construction details of his aerial battleship, Richenson stated that the length of the "deck " was to be 100 ft and it would carry six small calibre guns. The car supporting the deck and guns, was to have three sets of petrol engines to provide motive power and there would be three propellers, one at the front of the ‘ship’ and the other two aft. Wings were to play an important part in the vessel, and attached to the car there will be a balloon 100 feet in length and 90 feet in diameter, making it part plane and part airship. Mr. Richenson claimed that his air-battleship could be steered in any direction in even the worst conditions. By a secret process, which he would not divulge, he said he could reduce the amount of gas required to keep the vessel in the air. He had a working model at Manchester, noting, "It is twelve feet long, by six wide and the moving of a lever releases it from its anchorage, and it soars into the air like a pigeon leaving its nest." The only major problem was a lack of funding to take the project further and he added that any gentlemen who was interested in the matter would be shown drawings of the "ship," and if the money was made available he would have the airship built by a reliable engineering firm.

One has to wonder if this was a genuine project or an elaborate scam-cum-money pit, as after that there was no further mention of Mr Richenson and his innovative new air battleship in any newspapers. If for real, then either the cash injection he hoped for to fund his project was not forthcoming, or the War Office were unimpressed with his invention and his caveats and never returned to the negotiations.

Reference: Staffordshire Sentinel, 29 August 1908, p.6; The Manchester Evening News, 28 August 1908, p.6; Banffshire Herald, 5 September 1908, p.6.

Wind-Stars for Mr Wells

Norman Saunder's illustration showing the
Time Traveller rescuing Weena from the
Morlocks in The Time Machine.
(Wikimedia Commons)

In early 1888, 22 year old Herbert George Wells was recovering from an illness, some disorder of the lungs, and went to stay with an old college friend and his wife at their terraced house in Basford for a few months where he was apparently a troublesome and petulant house guest; perhaps as a result he also spent some time lodging at the Leopard Inn in Burslem. The future ‘father of science fiction’ had lived most of his life in rural or semi-rural districts and the Potteries was the first industrial landscape he had encountered. As he later wrote to local author Arnold Bennett, ‘the district made an immense impression on me’ and his memories of the area later found their way into his works. 

In the 1890s, Wells wrote a short essay entitled ‘How I Died’, in which he seemed to recount his recovery at this period. He described how after four months lying ill and convinced that he was dying, he staggered out one early spring morning to get some fresh air and take a last look at the sky before expiring, when he encountered a young girl who had got her dress caught by a bramble whilst climbing a hedge. After helping her free, the invalid stood chatting with the girl about this and that and he noted that she carried a small bunch of wood anemones that she called ‘wind-stars’. Wells was charmed by the pretty name that the innocent youngster gave her flowers and by his account the meeting - if genuine - bucked him up and he grew bored with the idea that he was dying and decided at that point to put all gloomy thoughts aside and get on with his life. It has been suggested that this pleasant meeting was the model for the time traveller’s first encounter with the childlike Eloi Weena in Wells’ first novel, The Time Machine, who presents a bunch of flowers to him for saving her life, then sits with him as he tries to communicate with her. Also in The Time Machine, a friend of the time traveller refers to a conjuror he had once seen in Burslem, while the spectacle of the Potteries at night with its numerous kilns and furnaces casting a fiery glow into the sky, is famously referenced early on in his next novel, The War of the Worlds, to describe the destruction wrought by the Martian war machines.

In addition to these famous examples there were lesser tales of his that owed something to the Potteries. In 1895, the same year that The Time Machine was published and he began work on The War of the Worlds, Wells had a short macabre horror story The Cone published, which was set in a fictional forge in Etruria, and was probably based on Earl Granville’s iron works. That story was all that remained of what Wells had originally planned to be a larger dramatic novel set in the area, but he went on to produce another work, the slightly scandalous science fiction novel (because it advocated free love) In the Days of the Comet, published in 1906, which was also set in a fictional version of the Potteries.

Slaughter of the Innocents

At about 10.10pm on the night of 28 May 1837 in Lane Delph, Fenton, on hearing a cry of ‘Murder’, a man in a nearby house and two customers from the Canning Inn went out into the street to see what was happening. To their horror they found two young boys, 11 year old George Colley and nine year old Josiah Colley, running down Market Street (now part of King Street) dressed in their night gowns and drenched with blood. George had one of his ears nearly cut from his head, while Josiah had suffered a severe cut to the throat. The distressed boys cried out that their mother had attacked them and was killing their brothers and sister. The three men quickly passed the boys into the care of others and rushing to the house, lit a candle and ventured in. Going up the stairs to the family bedroom they encountered a scene that none of them would ever forget. In the middle of the bare room they found the mother, Ann Colley, on her knees with her head down and blood streaming from her throat. Beside her was a black handled kitchen knife which she had used to kill or wound her children before using it on herself. Her six year old daughter Ann lay uncovered on the floor, her head nearly severed from her body which was covered in blood. On the right of the room was Charles Colley, aged about three years, lying on his back on a pile of bloody clothes. He too had suffered a deadly cut across the throat. Her infant son James aged about three months lay at right angles to the dead girl, his feet resting against her, the slit across his throat was not easily seen and the dead baby had a peaceful look on its face.

At first, the stunned men thought that Ann Colley was also dead, but when they went to lift her up there was a flicker of life and on repeatedly being asked “What have you been doing?”, the woman replied “I am in want. I am in want.” She then asked if any of her children were alive. Surgeons were sent for and were soon on the scene, one tending the struggling, injured mother, while another treated her two surviving children. More neighbours came in to help as did the police and George Colley the father also arrived, but was quickly led away by a neighbour. By midnight the surgeons were finished sewing up the injuries and Mrs Colley and her son Josiah were both transported to the North Staffordshire Infirmary two miles away. On Monday afternoon an inquest was held at the Canning Inn, where the numerous witnesses of the night’s events described what had occurred and a picture began to form of a once respectable family that fallen on hard times with horrifying results. The tragedy of the Colley family was explained in detail at the subsequent trial of Ann Colley at the Stafford Assizes in July that year.

The Colleys were originally from London and had arrived in the area at the beginning of the year, when the father George, who had served as a police constable in London and then in Walsall, secured a position as superintendent of police in Fenton. However, in March, he had been dismissed from his post by the inspector and was forced to make a humiliating apology for some unspecified wrong-doing. The family’s formerly comfortable existence rapidly fell apart after that and they had to sell most of their belongings to live. Though well-educated, Ann Colley either suffered with mental issues, or was in the grip of a severe postnatal depression that had worsened with each pregnancy. She had reportedly threatened to kill her children a few years before, but had been dissuaded by her husband. However, when George lost his job and the family sank into poverty, her depression deepened and finally tipped her over the edge.

As a result of the evidence presented at the trial, Ann Colley was found not guilty due to temporary insanity and ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure at Stafford. But hers was not destined to be a long incarceration as she could not escape the horror of what she had done. On Wednesday, 4 October 1837, George Colley paid Ann a visit in prison and foolishly gave his wife a locket containing hair from the three murdered children. This left Ann greatly agitated for the rest of the day and night. The next morning at about 10 o’clock, she went to the privy and hung herself from the rafters with a long silk handkerchief. Discovered shortly afterwards she was cut down still alive, but the effect of the strangulation had put her beyond medical help and at 5 p.m. that day, she died. Ann Colley aged 36 was buried two days later in the grounds of St Mary’s Church, Stafford.

Reference: Staffordshire Advertiser 3 June 1837; 17 June 1837; 7 October 1837; numerous other papers nationwide, June to October 1837.

A Swedish Spy in the Valley of Crockery

A portrait of R. R. Angerstein in 1755.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

A visitor to the mid-18th century Potteries was Reinhold Rücker Angerstein, an industrial spy in the employ of the Swedish government, who was tasked with gathering information on new or emerging technology. Between 1753 and 1755, he journeyed through England and Wales and produced a wide-ranging and comprehensive survey of the various industries and their practices. He appears to have visited the Staffordshire Potteries, which he labels rather colourfully as a ‘Valley of Crockery’, in about 1755. Here, after examining the manufacture of salt-glazed wares, describing the kilns in Hanley (including illustrations), the raw materials used, the prices of ware and various mechanisms employed in producing pottery (with still more pictures), he went on to add a few descriptions of the area that make for interesting reading.

He notes that in Hanley there were 430 makers of white ware and other types of pottery, adding ‘The kilns are everywhere in this district.’ and to prove his point he includes an illustration of the skyline of the town. There were also large numbers of potteries in Stoke and other places, ‘where mostly the same kind of ware as that enumerated is made and also some simpler crockery.’ He then adds a picturesque and slightly comical tale. ‘When as it sometimes happens, many kilns are glazing with salt at the same time, there is such a thick smoke of salt in these towns, that people in the streets cannot see 6 feet ahead, which, however does not cause any difficulties. On the contrary, the smoke is considered so healthy that people who are ill come here from far away to breathe it.’

Of the pottery itself, he writes, ‘The crockery produced is mainly sent to London or other sea ports, from which much of it is exported to America and many other foreign countries.’

R. R. Angerstein’s Illustrated Travel Diary 1753-1755, pp. 340-342.

See a Fine Lady upon a White Horse

Between 1697 and 1702, partly from a wish to improve her health and from an equally strong desire to see more of her native land, Lady Celia Fiennes (whom some claim was the fine lady at Banbury Cross from the children's nursery rhyme) undertook a series of journeys around England. In the summer of 1698, her peregrinations brought her into North Staffordshire. Here, after admiring the as yet unsullied landscape, she was keen to visit the Elers Brothers' factory at Bradwell, but as she notes in her diary she was unsuccessful; the potters had temporarily run out of clay and were not working.

'..and then to Trentum, and passed by a great house of Mr Leveson Gore, and went on the side of a high hill below which the River Trent ran and turn’d its silver stream forward and backward into s’s which Looked very pleasant Circling about ye fine meadows in their flourishing tyme bedecked with hay almost Ripe and flowers. 6 mile more to NewCastle under Line.'

After ruminating briefly on the 'coals to Newcastle' adage, she continued. 

'… I went to this NewCastle in Staffordshire to see the makeing of ye fine tea potts. Cups and saucers of ye fine red Earth in imitation and as Curious as yt wch Comes from China, but was defeated in my design, they. Comeing to an End of their Clay they made use of for yt sort of ware, and therefore was remov’d to some other place where they were not settled at their work so Could not see it;'

Reference: Celia Fiennes, Through England On a Side Saddle in the Time of William and Mary, pp.146-147.