The History of Ceramics Podcast Josiah Wedgwood Part 1: A Giant in the History of Ceramics.

Hello and welcome to the History of Ceramics. I'm Paul Greenharsh and today we're going to explore the life and impact of the most famous potter in British history and perhaps one of the most famous in world ceramics. The name Wedgwood is recognised in every British household and Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the empire, is one of the giants of 18th century culture. Far more than a potter he was a leader in the industrial revolution, he was an entrepreneur, a scientist, a political thinker and an anti-slavery abolitionist. But who was he? What was his outlook on life and how did he create one of the most famous companies in British history? Stephanie's off today somewhere in the States but I'm not alone. I'm incredibly lucky to have in the studio the person best able to answer those questions and many more, Sir Tristam Hunt. Sir Tristam is director of the V&A museum and a leading Wedgwood scholar amongst other areas of scholarship in British history. His book The Radical Potter, Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain was published in 2021 and we just happen to have a copy on the table there. Tristam with the American cover. It's a study of the master that in many ways completely changes our view of him. That was my impression of the book that suddenly Josiah was different and for that it's an enormous achievement. Tristam also leads the museum that has no less and I counted them 23,718 works and objects associated with Wedgwood which is truly remarkable. Sir Tristam, welcome to the podcast. It's wonderful to be here talking about ceramics and talking about Josiah himself. So I thought that a good way to start is that you've got a history with Josiah going back way back and it's an extraordinary story and actually I would say your story intertwined with Josiah is why we have Wedgwood today as we do in public hands. So I think it would be lovely for you to describe that to us to get us going but also at the same time you've lived with that man for a long time and your personal view of him just at the start, you know, what made him tick and how he saw life will get us established I think. Well Josiah is this remarkable figure in British history and world history but above all in the history of North Staffordshire, the potteries, Stoke-on-Trent and whenever you arrive in Stoke-on-Trent and that wonderful mid-Victorian railway station which British Rail failed to knock down in the 1960s, you come out and there is the statue of Josiah himself holding an edition of his Portland vase inspecting it and you know that this city owes such a huge amount to this one individual. I arrived in Stoke-on-Trent in 2010 to fight the parliamentary seat of Stoke-on-Trent Central in which Josiah Wedgwood's original factory Etruria was based and you go around there's Wedgwood Street, there's Wedgwood Square, there's Etruria which we'll come on to talk about which was the name of his his factory is still a council district within the city so this is a man who permeates the entirety of the city but when I arrived in Stoke-on-Trent in 2010 and I was fortunate enough to be elected as Member of Parliament, the business itself was in terrible trouble and in the next few years it would fall into liquidation and then we had this terrifying moment that the collection itself would be sold, would be dispersed. Christie's had printed a catalogue and suddenly the greatest industrial archive of ceramics in the world, one of the greatest collections of ceramics in the world, was at risk of being kind of splint to the winds and lost to posterity. Quite extraordinary. Oh I mean it was it was this terrible quirk in pension law which meant that the collection was an asset against the value of the company and so I joined with many others not least the Art Fund, the National Heritage Fund, you know many local donors to save the collection in 2014 and put it into public ownership and the institution who was placed in charge of the stewardship was the Victoria and Albert Museum and some years later in the story I became director of the V&A so looking after this collection is part of my job now. So through that time your view of Josiah? He's this protean figure, he's this kind of enormous personality and you know Carlyle would have him almost as a kind of world historic figure. There's no surprise that William Gladstone was drawn to him. So Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister in the mid-19th century and great historian, was there and all of these dedications to Wedgwood's life in the mid-19th century because he saw him as this figure who combined in one man these incredible forces of industrialisation, commercialisation, a globalisation, transformations in taste, transformations in production and Wedgwood is on the one hand this you know this figure on the pedestal outside Stoke-on-Trent railway station but he's the most human individual and the wonderful thing is we have these letters that he sent to his great business partner Thomas Bentley so we can chart his life, his adoration of his wife, his love of his children, the way he enjoys to play the game in terms of business opportunities, you know mistakes he's made, his fury against competitors. So he's a very human person alongside this you know this adamantine figure we know from the history. Unique in the history of ceramics? I think unique in the history of ceramics because of the individuality of him. You have other figures like Josiah Spode II who's so important in the history of the development of bone china. You've got other great figures at the time, Enoch Wood, Enoch Wedgwood, you know many other figures in terms of the history of ceramics but Wedgwood himself punches through that and partly his brilliance, why we know the name Wedgwood, is he was the great marketeer. He was a great person for brand, for influencing, for identity, all of that you know those components of modern marketing we think now and that's why in the book and more widely I compare him to obviously Steve Jobs and the founder of Apple in the sense of mixing that technology, creativity and brand design together. I found that comparison, it's quite shocking. Yes. And then you take it in and you realise we're dealing with a different creature. Yes. So I thought for the rest of our first episode we should look at how he formed his early life, North Staffordshire and so forth. So what kind of family is he born into and how do we explain this creature, his early life really? So Josiah Wedgwood is born in 1730 in Burslem which is always known as the mother town of the potteries, the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent. Six towns which became in 1910, 1911 the federation of Stoke-on-Trent. But this was a part of the North Midlands of England between Birmingham and Manchester which became known for the production of pottery really from the mid to late 1600s onwards and the reason was you had this incredible combination of the clay and the coal together. So you could dig up the red Staffordshire, the red and yellow Staffordshire clay, you could find coal nearby to provide fuel for the kilns to create the pottery and to have a ceramic industry. And it was a small scale, iterative, industrious business and the Wedgwood family had been small holders on the Staffordshire Cheshire border. They then come into the pottery business. Wedgwood himself is essentially the kind of third or fourth generation within a form of ceramic production and his uncles are in the pottery business, his brothers will be in the pottery business and his father, you know fairly successful but nowhere near his success. And Wedgwood is born the 12th child and he's born into both an Anglican and a Unitarian family so there's a non-conformist, a Protestant dissenting tradition within him which I think is very important for his approach to innovation, experimentation, science, always looking for new discoveries. And he's apprenticed into the pottery industry quite early on to his elder brother and he works for his elder brother in the family business and that will eventually be a source of tension. And we're assuming the training there is he would have learned how to throw, he would have learned how to do it. He would have but the clincher in the early story of Josiah Wedgwood is the advent of smallpox and smallpox was racing through the country and the Wedgwoods lived next to a church yard where victims of smallpox were being buried. The family suffers from smallpox, they're infected and the infection really cripples his leg. So his ability to be a thrower which meant treading the thread or being able to have the wheel turning with your foot, he's unable really to do that at strength. There's some debate about this because he does throw some pots later not least when Etruria opens but really when he recounts his own tradition of apprenticeship, he's mixing the clay, he's carrying the flint in, he's really at that, you know, an elder brother to a younger brother is not really giving him the opportunities for professional development. I can imagine he gave him a tough time. Exactly, exactly. Gladstone, William Gladstone, the primus always says well the fact that he couldn't actually throw, the fact he didn't have the strength to that meant his mind turned inwards and what he became was a great designer and a great innovator and a great thinker. Yeah, that's going to be the key to the future do you think? That's going to be the key to the future because he wants to push designs out in different ways and different formats, different colours, different styles, different materials and that relentless quest for innovation, experimentation, experimentation is part of the story of Wedgwood. He will know where the market is moving and wants to get there before the public or at least take the public there. Yeah, so we're dealing with something which I think is, it seems to me going through the centuries, quite common to surround family business, frequently family business and within the family quite often specialists who throw us decorations and so he's in there. His elder brother takes him in, shows him how to do it and he's being carried along and so in wealth terms not a rich family but a family managing wealth and committed religiously. Yes, a family managing wealth, the cousins and uncles sort of doing better than Josiah Wedgwood's immediate family and the name Wedgwood actually in those days would have referred to some of his cousins who are much more kind of prosperous, also working in Burslem but he is going to in a sense move outside the limitations of his family and crucially, definitely, I mean he loved his brothers and he'd worked with his brothers closely in the decades to come but moved beyond the apprenticeship. I have to say a lovely quotation which you use and I find we're both museum people. So Robert Plott, the first director of the Ashmolean, in 1686 he says the greatest pottery they have in this country is carried out at Burslem near Newcastle-under-Lyme where for making their several sorts of pots they have so many sorts of clay which is dug half a mile from the town and being found near the coal and are distinguished by their colours. So at the time it had already become the place, the potteries. Absolutely and this is where we get the phrase pothole from because they were just digging the clay out of the ground so the roads were all rutted, it was all in terrible condition but this was the, today we would call it a cluster. It was an industrial cluster and rather like, you know, Detroit is Motor City, Stoke-on-Trent was the potteries and is the pottery. Yeah, now having an older brother myself who spends his life telling me how to live my life, I always get the impression Josiah got a bit sick and fed up of his brother and he went to apprentice with Thomas Wealdon who was already well established and an interesting man. Do you think that's a key to his growth? Definitely, the brother Thomas had had enough of him anyway because who wants a clever clever younger brother saying have you thought about this and have you thought about that? So thank you, the apprenticeship comes to an end, he gets his, you know, service record and Wealdon takes him in, in Fenton in Stoke-on-Trent. Wealdon is working with lots of different colours in Rococo style, so what are they creating? They're creating those incredible teapots of cauliflowers, of pineapples, those yellows, those greens, those browns and all, you know, cutlery services, bowls, plates, all of that material and Wedgwood learns a huge amount from him and again that culture of experimentation and innovation. A big figure in himself Wealdon. Wealdon, a very very big figure in himself and and a good relationship with Wedgwood, seeing the kind of brilliance of the young man but also knowing, you know, he was on his way. Yeah, so this young man who can't really make the pots himself through illness, 1759 he's back in Burslem and the ivy house works, so he sets up himself. Yes. That's not an easy thing to do is it? No and again the story of Wedgwood is, you know, is as an entrepreneur and a business leader but the breakthrough for Wedgwood is the production of creamware. Yeah. And so moving away from those rich kind of, you know, Rococo forms and colours to a clean, easily produced, easily manufacturable product which to his mind is going to rival porcelain. That Wedgwood's breakthrough is to create a ceramic form which allows for transfers, copper printed transfers to be placed on it, so the design and the style of it can move but also it can be manufactured at lower cost and what Wedgwood is doing though is he's not using the local clay, he's not using the Staffordshire clay, he's bringing in the clay from Cornwall, from Devon, from Dorset, so the white clay mixing it with the flints and creating this new clean product which really is at the beginning of his brilliance. Yeah, we think, it always seems to me that there are grand debates as we both know about the industrial revolution including did it ever happen but assuming it did, very different from the textile industry what's happening in stone but do we think Josiah's really at the eye of the storm here? I mean, experiment, developing the chemistry, looking at already with creamware and this idea of a clean white body which mimics porcelain perhaps is something we can come back to with the Jasper discussion but he decides he wants a different product from what's going on locally. He does and he's seen what's happened to the very brilliant potter known historically William Cookworthy who tried to create porcelain, succeeded in creating porcelain but absolute bankruptcy, the heat required, the material cost, the inability to produce at scale and to go back to Steve Jobs' idea, Wedger's brilliance is going to be as taking style, taking creativity and design and marrying it with business acumen and is this the beginning of the industrial revolution? I mean, the historical debate is an industrious revolution partly that you have and all of those wonderful accounts by the author Daniel Defoe of his journeys through England, this quickening of the economic pace in the mid 1700s right across the country and whether that's the Protestant work ethic, whether it's changes through the agricultural revolution, whether it's money coming from the Atlantic economy of sugar and slavery beginning to transform a consumer economy but then you also have supply side changes in terms of crucially new energy sources in terms obviously that all of the coal being utilised and as we'll come on to see the canals so you've got you know a quickening commercial world, you've got new sources of energy, you've got new sources of infrastructure and what you've got in the middle of that is Wedgwood in Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent then introducing a new ceramic form into the market with his marketing behind it which is really transformative then in terms of ceramic production. Making use of all those vehicles you Absolutely and his gift is both in terms of manufacturing, if we think of how he makes his plates, how he makes his wear, rather than having this sort of expensive system of individual specialist productions, what he wants is the division of labour and this is one of the great challenges of Wedgwood. On the one hand he's this great individual, he's a great artist, he's a great designer but Marx and Engels and others would see absolutely the beginning of the separation of labour from capital, the exploitation systems of the division of labour and he himself looks to what's happening in Birmingham, he looks to what's happening around to Richard Arkwright and we mentioned the textile industry to improve the systems of production whilst celebrating individual artistry. So there are also changes in bookkeeping and quite dry stuff about accountancy which are also really important to the successful management of his business. And I guess we're not long into that moment are we where people go to work rather than huge amount of ceramic being made where people actually lived. Absolutely and it's a very EP Thompson landscape of struggle in a sense, of new systems of work and play, the end of getting drunk on St Monday and all that kind of stuff and he recounts these struggles with the workers, whether it's over pay or whether it's over time, lockouts, some violence here and there and again a contradiction of Wedgwood, on the one hand quite a radical figure in terms of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the abolition of the trade in slaves but also absolutely wanting to get his money's worth from his workers and they've got to be in on time, he introduces systems to make sure that there's a kind of oversight of the workers, all of that at the same time as a kind of more progressive social vision. So this man from his portrait looks like a lovely, gentle, the kind of uncle you would want who always brings you sweets but there's another Josiah. There is, there's a tough Josiah with his workforce but also he's absolutely sort of on it in terms of intellectual property rights and so again another of the great innovations of is the backstamp so that and that was partly around branding but it was also around intellectual property that you knew you were buying a Wedgwood and we you know when I was a member of parliament with colleagues we were always battling this issue of cheap imports you know falsely backstamped about where they were made and that conversation goes right back to Wedgwood in the 1760s and 1770s. So to step back briefly, 1764 he marries his cousin Sarah and then they proceed to have eight is it? Yes, not all of them make it to adulthood but and the marriage to Sarah is both a sort of beautiful marriage, she's very uxorious, he adores her and he sort of pursues her. He marries quite old to the time and it takes a while to convince Sarah's father that he should indeed marry her because Sarah does bring with her a welcome degree of capital and actually it's a sort of complicated time for the business in terms of cash flow, in terms of some of the improvements they need to make and so this influx of capital is really very very welcome but he adores her and they have this lovely family and his eldest child Suki Wedgwood is really the apple of his eye and they're all these beautiful letters to Suki and of course Suki would go on to marry the son of Wedgwood's great friend Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin's son is Robert Darwin and Suki and their son is of course Charles Darwin and so Charles Darwin's grandfather is Josiah Wedgwood on one hand and Erasmus Darwin on the other and that's a pretty strong intellectual lineage. There's also this terrible story of Charles Darwin really not liking all of the Wedgwood he inherits and he goes off and he goes off and sells an edition of one of the vases so he can So to sum up you know he's moved beyond the normal family business he's set up on his own he's married he's happy he's out there and by the mid 1760s so Thomas Bentley perhaps the single most important relationship that Josiah had for his outlook on life apparently he met Josiah in 1763 and they formed a close friendship. Who was this character? So it's an interesting story of him meeting Wedgwood remember you know that damaged leg that crippled leg and he's going on a business trip to Liverpool you know where you know he's and he damages his leg in the journey and he has to kind of rest up and because he has this non-conformist inheritance this Unitarian inheritance this dissenting inheritance he's part of a kind of secret network almost of non-conformists and dissenters and remember there was still very strict kind of official discrimination against those who are not Anglicans those who are non-conformists and in the northwest particularly around Warrington in parts of Liverpool you also had a really strong dissenting tradition so he's in Liverpool he's laid up and essentially through the dissenting networks he meets you know scientists writers but also crucially this man called Thomas Bentley who is a merchant but he's a merchant with a much more metropolitan cosmopolitan sensibility than Wedgwood and Wedgwood the sort of provincial boy from Stoke-on-Trent slightly fools for Bentley this more worldly figure who'd been traveling and all the rest of it and they form this very effective business partnership and Bentley is very very good at understanding the changing nature of the consumer market and understanding what people think they will want and he's particularly good at the female market and understanding you know what a female consumers might want from ceramics and so when we look at Wedgwood and Bentley as a business you know Josiah's brilliance in terms of material development production systems management and Bentley very good at retail marketing ensuring that they kind of do the needful as he used to say with the expanding markets and I think it would be very interesting to talk about creamware perhaps his single greatest is that his greatest invention one of his greatest I think I think creamware and jasperware are the great inventions by and and but creamware does really build on a series of experiments by other potters you know would you know Wedgwood booth within the potteries Wedgwood kind of codifies that production more effectively is very smart about using transfers on it so new designs particularly you know from the copper printed transfers coming out of liverpool new designs for specific markets both locally nationally and internationally and then crucially branding because Wedgwood's isn't creamware it's queensware because Josiah Wedgwood's brilliance is to send his brother to court to ensure that queen charlotte sees the quality of their ware they send them you know sends her a great okay so creamware they start to use it and then Wedgwood rebrands it queensware and styles himself potter to her majesty so suddenly this is the most fashionable ceramics you can get and the story of Wedgwood is yes the story of production in North Staffordshire Stoke-on-Trent but it's also the story of incredible retail brilliance in London and central to that is Josiah Wedgwood's business partner Thomas Bentley but there's so much in European ceramics through these centuries which was about the pursuit of white and hugely important and Josiah it seems to me creamware was about that but he says this again quoting he says this in 67 1767 quoted from your book i'm going on with my experiments upon various earths clays etc for different bodies and shall next go upon glazes many of the experiments turn out to my wishes and convince me more and more of the extensive capability of our manufacturer of further improvements is at present comparatively in a rude uncultivated state and may easily be polished and brought to much greater perfection so he's aware of what's going on around him and he but he's looking elsewhere the competition's elsewhere oh yeah no yeah and what i love about all those is is Wedgwood sees himself in time he does see himself as this kind of you know world historical figure and likes to analyze himself almost as the sort of third person in this in this this moment of of criticality um yeah i mean porcelain was um the most sophisticated the most beautiful the most admired ceramic body uh we know that you know henry the eighth probably had porcelain in his court we know francis the first and france catherine de medici you know porcelain was coming into the market as a very elite royal levels um from the early uh 1500s and then of course uh through the the east india companies the dutch the portuguese the british um it it's it's being imported in and as it were you know it is made for export um um in in china um and then you know in holland delftware is obviously impersonating it um in britain you know those who seek to and edmund devol's wonderful book uh you know exploring the white road exploring the kind search for for the pure white people go mad you know we know augustus the strong we we know that the story of the sort of alchemy trying to create the secret of porcelain and in britain you know this the puritan potter william cookworthy is the man who breaks the code of the you know the kaolin uh code for the production of of porcelain but it's ruinously expensive so great you can create your beautiful tiny you know paper thin white uh a porcelain jug but um in doing so you're ruined um and and wedgewood says okay well look there's this huge market for whiteware um for a clean uh dining services and and ceramic form um but i don't want to go bankrupt making it so what i'm going to do uh is create a ceramic body creamware which looks kind of like porcelain but i can produce um you know at a good cost for this emergent middle class and if they want uh you know pictures of pheasants on it or if they want our more oil crests or if they want pictures of uh you know stately homes on it well i can put the transfers on that for whichever relevant market demands we should let a saddler and green was the company wasn't it in liverpool yes we develop printing yes onto ceramic and wedgwood picks up on that and and and that again points to this you know wonderful global connections there he is in the narrow veil of north staffordshire but actually he's thinking about markets in the west indies he's thinking about markets in turkey he's thinking uh about uh the european continent because he's sending his ware up to liverpool um they're having the transfers applied and then he's exporting it around the world and the canals obviously are such an important part of that uh the empire you've written very widely on empire and its impact upon britain joseph picked up on that pretty early on uh surely he was sending his work abroad he was and and and what's you you know there are many interesting components to it but originally you know his big market is the east coast of america it's the american seaboard it's philadelphia it's boston it's it's new york who are all looking at british fashion you know they're all reading the spectator they're all you know taking the right you know clothes from london and so wedgewood is is is fashionable um and so it's a big export market there but also you can see when you go around the old plantation houses in in the caribbean he's exporting to the west indies he's exporting to those those slave economies but not least because that atlantic model of of of sugar and slavery is very important for the consumer economy in the uk because whether it's hot chocolate whether it's tea whether it's jam whether all these components of the new rituals of sociability wedgewood is going to provide the ceramics for them to to to to have those new you know new tastes and new forms and tea parties so actually what we're saying is it would appear to be the 1760s um it i think there's debate about when pure creamware comes but 1762 so it's there uh 1769 the atruri factory opens and so through the 60s he develops his body he starts looking to selling internationally and he builds a new factory so can you tell us something about atruria so he moves from ivy house works and um the the the kind of pot bank um as as we call them um in in berslin to a to a new facility he buys this this estate and builds both a factory um and his own house uh and his house overlooks the factory um crucially he also ensures that the new trent and mersey canal which is the treasurer goes right past the factory uh so it means it's the economics of this is absolutely fundamental it means the cost of transporting the clay up from you know devon and dorset um falls markedly and then the cost of transporting his wares safely up to uh liverpool um or or over over to the east falls his way so there's a huge increase in profit um uh in that uh period and atruria um which he used to spell with an h atruria because he had no idea what this thing was um obviously based upon etruscan so funny i know yeah etruscan civilization which he kind of liked the sound of because of all of the uh new archaeological discoveries in in pompeii and the grand tour um brings together all the different components of making pots and he does it in on one side and the model here uh is the is the great factory soho house um and soho um by his friend matthew bolton uh in birmingham and bolton there made toys he made metalware in a very kind birmingham uh way uh but it was an enormous factory um and wedgewood sees the cost efficiency embedded there so when we think of the industrial revolution we do think uh of bolton's factories we think of richard arcwright uh and cromford but we should also think of wedgewood and atruria i mean is it too crude to say assembly line not too crude at all very much an assembly line and there's this sort of terrifying quote that wedward says that he wants to make machines of the men such as cannot err so that he doesn't want any imprecision and he falls out with some of his workers here because you know they had a certain flair they had they were certain potters you know their style would be in the pot and wedward wants to strip out all of that individuality he wants to strip out in a sense that humanity in each of the pots and just wants a really uniform quality product coming out the other side which is an extraordinary piecing together the ethics of it because in many ways we see wedgewood as we don't really have left or right yet but if we did if anyways on the liberal left uh outlooking but actually also the assembly line is seen by many in the coming decades and centuries as being this nightmare of destruction of humanity but he brings the two together it brings it and that and you know the bloomsbury group were always very sniffy about wedgerwood partly because you know they they they they saw him as kind of destroying the uh the the individual the capacity of the individual worker i mean he's completely sort of un-ruskinian um but this again is the interesting contradiction to to go to where we started recently um he's a man of the enlightenment uh he is a man of growth and individuality and experimentation and fulfillment at the same time as sort of crushing the workers to ensure an absolutely precise piece of you know creamware or jasperware or basalt or cane ware or you know whatever they're producing production systems driven by science and yes he invents the chromator yes so the great the great you know problem of of of ceramics is you know what is the heat in the kiln um yeah and because you can lose so much wear uh you know an entire kind of you know shelf uh can crack due to getting the heat wrong and so you had these very very you know sort of wise uh workers who the kiln men who who who were kind of knew about different heat levels and could judge and all the rest of it but it was still very imprecise and what wedgerwood seeks to create is this new thermometer this new system of accounting for heat i mean it's you know as it were modern scientific um sort of critique suggests it didn't really work um and it was fairly flawed uh but again it points to wedgerwood's belief in experimentation better than what was around better than what was around and it makes him a fellow of the royal society so i'm sure he wasn't complaining i know it was peer reviewed effectively at the time the history of ceramics outside most of the major centers there were large artificial hills full of wasters yes exactly because of kiln failure yeah yeah so he reduces that yeah yeah you refer to as an enlightenment figure the enlightenment which we should say it's later 17th 18th century a different vision of humanity a different vision of life which clearly desire picks up on absolutely but also for wedgerwood in terms of the enlightenment it's also the english enlightenment because he he he sits within a community of radicals uh thinkers innovators based in you know in stoke in leicester and derby and nottingham and birmingham who um are also thinking about um natural philosophy scientific experimentation there's this amazing club called the lunar society where they all meet and discuss these ideas and it's an idea of enlightenment it's a it's an idea of the capacity for human fulfillment vis-a-vis kind of you know the the natural world so you've got the european enlightenment partly partly based around ideas of modernity and then you also have this english enlightenment much more focused on natural philosophy and and histories of radical descent as well the religious dimension to this it means presumably the lunar society and the people who adhere to it are pushing back as you were the mythology of of religion in favor of science or is that too crude a thing to say it's it's it's a different idea of religion it's an understanding of the revelation of god's grace through the workings of the natural world and in a sense the more you understand through experimentation and discovering innovation uh the natural world then uh in in a sense the the closer you are to the godhead and the great figure of this is obviously joseph priestly the the chemist who uh who discovers as it were oxygen even though it was there before he discovered it um who combined you know a tradition of protestant descent with experimentation um what what that did lead to was a kind of radical politics which was hostile to the state and to church and to king and those other components um but it's it's a it's a line of radical protestantism um which um connects to scientific inquiry yeah yeah so it seems to me that the vase that pulls a lot of this together and the first day vase where we're told and whether it's true or not you may you may know whether you think it's true or not where Wedgwood and Bentley make the pot themselves and apparently Bentley was uh kicking the wheel because Josiah couldn't uh and they threw a pot and then had it decorated and the first day vase was to celebrate the opening of Petruria the factory so it all comes together yeah and there are i think there are four first day vases left and there's there's one in the Wedgwood museum there's one in the pottery museum uh in in Hanley in Stoke there's one in i think a couple of private collections and we know we love these because we we know the provenance of them he's written on them saying this is to celebrate the opening of the factory they have a huge kind of hog roast and a big big party uh and it's this lovely moment and he does he creates this uh this almost this sort of greek vase um this Etruscan vase to celebrate the opening of uh Etruria um and it's this celebration of his of his his loving friendship with Bentley he's always trying to convince Bentley to move to Stoke Bentley says no i'm gonna live in London or Liverpool or uh elsewhere um and then this this this new world they're forging at which Etruria the factory is is at the heart of it classical style the Etruri factory and a very clever man marketing Bentley so we're all set yep for the empire to to hugely grow and then moving and i find it the description in your book it's so harrowing that uh in 1768 Josiah loses his right leg and what i find staggering looking at the letters and so forth at the time is how it's done we're in an age before anaesthetic of any significance he says this not long just immediately before i shall not go to London so as soon as i expected it's a very disagreeable business which keeps me so long at home so that's it uh i mean the the the leg is removed from below the knee without anaesthetic um on the 31st of May uh and he always writes in his diary for the 31st and he recovers extraordinarily well um and he's he then he then sort of works on the prosthesis and how he's going to have his his kind of wooden leg and you know how it's going to work and you know and he never complains he never moans about it he's he kind of he's almost drawn to the the hideous experimentation of it in a way and wants to recount how well it's doing and you know you what he's learned from it it's really quite staggering there's a letter and i think it it can only be eight or nine days after the operation he says had two earrings in a chaise have left off my laudanum and do better much better without it uh the skin on the upper part of the wound is healed and got down to the bone which i tell you to compute all those who deny the present age to be an age of miracles so you know he's only eight or nine days yeah have you gone through this without anesthetic yeah lord love to keep him but he doesn't like it because it makes him feel woozy yeah and we're talking about an extraordinarily tough man extraordinarily tough and then and then he'll also sort of talk about it with erasmus darwin from a scientific perspective because erasmus darwin was a great you know medical figure and doctor so um and and then this becomes you know josiah is then known as old wooden leg in in the because you know he stomps around with his uh wooden leg you know and before they knocked it knocked it down before they knocked it down it was always said that in in the wooden stairs going up to his office you could see the indentation of his kind of you know wooden peg leg into the into the wood itself no self-pity no absolutely none yeah yeah and we're coming i thought nice way to finish our first episode uh is it the single greatest commission of any british ceramic company so far at the frog service and uh 1773 empress of russia catherine the great commissions from wedgwood when she has the whole of europe to look at at the frog service which is a 50 person service 1222 scenes of the british landscape are going to russia which i'm sure has its own political direction to it and uh i'm not sure what it meant at the time but uh we have a number 2290 pounds which i think would have been a fortune absolutely at the time i mean do we see this as one of the great things oh totally um and and it speaks to so much about wedger because part of the reason catherine the great is going to commission the service is because of all which was brilliant marketing with the diplomat the british diplomatic community in st petersburg using merchant routes remember there was a huge um uh you know commerce between london and st petersburg at that time russia was a really important market uh for uh england and wedgwood is always sending out kind the wives of diplomats the wives of ambassadors he particularly um uh focuses on um so so he's kind of you know pushing his wares there part of the reason is as you say political that what catherine the great wanted and she is this enlightenment figures as she tries to kind of move russia uh towards a more kind of european sensibility she wants her court to see what an enlightened nation with you know trading systems civil society the rule of law uh commerce looks like um and so she wants an idea of britain she wants an idea uh of the uk um on these on on on this dinner service for her so it's a it's an ideological account of the meaning of britain to be sent to russia and at the heart of it are all these incredible depictions of landscapes of stately homes of cityscapes even industrialization they have colbrookdale uh so so so they depict the industrial revolution happening on a dinner service alongside this amazing depiction of the thames with all of the boats and wealth and all the rest of it so there's none of the sort of poverty there's none of that ep thompson world of wigs and hunters there's none of the immiseration there's none of the black acts there's none of the you know it's a night it's a sort of wondrous idea of england presented to the court of catherine the great and important to remind ourselves uh we're the most powerful nation on earth at that stage uh i don't think there will be huge well the french perhaps would dispute but nevertheless britain and industrialization modernization enlightenment which catherine recognized because i was always puzzled why she was happy with all those scenes of britain on a service that was going to be in st petersburg yeah i i i think it was i think it was to him like to to direct her court to think this was the pathway we wanted to go to in the future enough of the kind of autarky enough of the sort of you know feudalism this was the the kind of prosperous commercial civil world that russia should head towards yeah so i think that's a nice point to pull the first episode uh to a close uh josiah has gone through a tremendous personal life which has seen him survive health-wise be married have eight children and create his factory which is beginning to dominate european ceramics at that stage would we say yes and he's exporting into france he's exporting into the german states he's exporting right across the world so the british royal family are buying it but actually the russian empress is buying it so a nice point i think because in many respects the way we think of wedgwood the way the general public think of wedgwood still hasn't actually taken shape so in the next episode we'll look at the wares that really the world knows him for and and what still make wedgwood uh the brand that we can all recognize but also desires political and social outlook which is really quite spectacular and and bears examination i think has this enlightenment figure so his greatest wares and his political outlook next time to find out more and to see all of the works we've been talking about in this episode and all our episodes go to henny.com forward slash the history of ceramics or go to the henny talks youtube channel