The Genius of Josiah Wedgwood

In the 18th century, Europe was undergoing a revolution without banners, barricades or bloodshed.

It was called the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason.

The revolutionaries weren't violent. They were a handful of thinkers and doers,

artisans, merchants, scientists and, in one case, all of those things in a single individual.

When I was a boy, growing up here in the Potteries,

Josiah Wedgwood was regarded with awe as the first great artist/industrialist.

Wedgwood was a founding father of the Industrial Revolution with a relentless urge to change -

science, technology, transport, the welfare of mankind

and the retail experience of society ladies. He did it all from a muddy village in the middle of nowhere.

Achievements that might be better known if it wasn't for his magnificent ceramics.

Josiah Wedgwood wasn't just a famous potter. He transformed Britain itself.

I've a special relationship with Josiah. I'd a privileged upbringing,

here in the Wedgwood factory.

This was my childhood playground.

In the '50s, my father Norman Wilson was Production Director.

On Saturdays, he'd bring me to these works when he came to talk glazes and kiln technology.

He was a potter. All my family were, for some ten generations,

but I had a different destiny.

As a boy, I knew Josiah Wedgwood to be a hero, like Stanley Matthews or Yuri Gagarin.

As a writer, I find him fascinating.

Why do I want to write about Wedgwood? He combined so many different qualities

in one human being. And he believed in beauty. He wanted to make beautiful objects

and to leave the world a more beautiful place, which he did. An extraordinary inventor.

But he really had a completely new take on English society.

That fascinates me.

There's another reason. I was a witness to history when the company went through a post-war renaissance,

but too young to appreciate it all. What linked my father and his colleagues

to the great potter? Did Wilson and Wedgwood have something in common?

I'm going to navigate my way through Josiah Wedgwood's story,

via my own selection of five pivotal pots. I believe each will illustrate a turning point or theme,

keys to understanding a remarkable life lived in one of the most exciting periods of our history.

The Georgian era is still all about us in art, literature and grand architecture.

It's as relevant today as it was then, made by people we feel familiar with.

We think of the 18th century as all this - elegant squares, proportion, periwigs,

brocaded coats, the Age of Reason, Hayden playing in the background.

And it was.

But in the early 18th century, in a small provincial village like Burslem where Josiah was born,

in 1730, things would have been as undeveloped as they had been in 1530.

In the 18th century, the village of Burslem was not the metropolis it is today.

Unlike today, this town and the five others that make up Stoke-on-Trent were a centre of industry,

the pottery industry. The Wedgwoods had operated pot works here for four generations.

Josiah was born in the family pottery beside St John's church,

known as the Churchyard Works. His father, Thomas, would be buried there just nine years later.

Jos was the youngest of eight surviving children. Their world was built on clay.

The pots that came from Burslem were, understandably, a variety of rich, dark colours

or else a muddy green, made using lighter clay shipped in from Cornwall.

For centuries, the British ate and drank from these very serviceable wares,

but by the middle of the 18th century, a new kind of consumer was emerging,

one who wanted something tasteful.

Historian Jeremy Black:

From the mid-18th century, you have the development of what they would have called at the time

the middling orders. They didn't say middle class.

Britain is becoming a much more prosperous country. People wish to display their taste.

At the same time, sugar is coming into the country, coffee is coming in, chocolate is coming in.

So the actual sociability is increasingly structured

around drinking stimulating sort of beverages.

So the man who is making nice tea sets and coffee sets is in business.

The man who is making nice coffee sets, Josiah Wedgwood, is really in business.

It is a active, urban,

urbane life which requires a set of goods, a set of products,

to actually help you feel elegant.

Josiah knew few members of the middle classes, but he'd worked for potters

who sold to dealers in London, Liverpool and Birmingham, then known as Brummagem.

With a gammy leg and a restless, inquiring mind, Josiah Wedgwood felt ready in 1759

to set up on his own.

To all lovers of art, this should be a place of pilgrimage

for it was here, when he was not yet 30, that Wedgwood moved into his beautiful ivy-clad cottage

and started the so-called Ivy Works.

Surrounding him on every bit of this hillside there would have been smoking kilns of other potteries,

producing, on the whole, rather crude stuff, red and cream ware, coloured novelty ware.

What was he to make? Well, Wedgwood was a businessman. He made what would sell.

And what did sell, like hot cakes,

was pottery that reminded the new urban money of the rustic idyll they'd left behind.

The first pot in my voyage around Josiah Wedgwood represents the young businessman at 30,

with a gift for making and marketing that set him apart.

This pot is for serving tea, a fashionable drink,

and it wasn't for the hovels of Stoke.

It was destined for the tables of urban sophisticates who would be seduced

by its lustrous, green glaze.

At the Wedgwood Museum, curator Gaye Blake-Roberts has just a few of his glaze experiments on file.

Wedgwood constantly ran trials, constantly worked on experiments.

-These are just some of them.

-Wow. He's trying out his bright greens.

-Trying out his enamel colours.

-What chemicals go into these?

The green comes from copper oxide.

My father was a potter and said, "You have to be a chemist as well."

Wedgwood is the supreme example of that. He's a brilliant chemist.

Yes. Without any chemical training. It was totally picked up by trial and error.

When you actually look at something like those, you suddenly realise how dedicated he was.

-Hundreds of experiments.

-Hundreds and hundreds.

-That's staggering.

These went on to form the nucleus of the pots we think of as Wedgwood.

Josiah devoted himself so assiduously to glazes

because, as a potter, he had a major disadvantage.

When he was 11, smallpox left Josiah with a nasty tumour behind his right knee.

The foot-operated wheel of the day was very uncomfortable to him.

He gravitated towards other aspects of the business - glazes, kiln technology, labour relations

and marketing - things ripe for change.

Questioning the way things were done in the pottery came naturally

to a boy whose family dared to question the nature of God.

They were Unitarians, dissident Christians.

The Unitarianism is an important part of Josiah Wedgwood.

He came here regularly and brought his family here when he had children.

To be Unitarian was to question the status quo. You weren't part of the establishment.

Yes, you believed in God, but beyond that you didn't subscribe to any orthodoxies.

It meant that you passionately believed in free inquiry, in intellectual life,

and he certainly believed in the education of both boys and girls.

Underlying it also is this very strong sense of morality. He was, in many senses, a bit of a puritan.

Historian Jenny Uglow has studied 18th-century society in depth.

Today we take religious freedom for granted. How different are we from the Georgians?

England is far more tolerant than we might think.

You could, more or less, believe what you liked.

There is a range of dissenting beliefs which goes to Millenarianism and the second coming.

A lot of the discrimination in Britain

is actually not about the nature of belief, it's not theological.

It's about class.

It's an idea that the dissenting folk are people to do with business, with trade,

or they're the poor workers in the factories. If you wish to be a respectable member of society,

-you are an Anglican.

-It's a purely snob view.

-There was a lot of snobbery with religion.

Technically, there were enormous disadvantages.

You couldn't go to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, you couldn't hold an official position,

you couldn't be a magistrate or an MP.

But this meant that the dissenters,

many of whom were men and women of considerable initiative and go ahead,

created their own culture.

They were free to think their own way forward.

As the 1760s began, in the Ivy Works Wedgwood, unlike some of his fellow potters in Stoke,

was thinking differently about the muddiness of the local cream-coloured earthenware.

A small businessman with few employees, still throwing pots, a bachelor of simple tastes,

he devoted every spare moment to experimentation.

Pivotal pot number two.

This isn't any cream ware. This is Wedgwood cream ware.

The clarity of colour, the result of some 5,000 glaze tests, this pot represents

the kind of ware that will make him a household name around the world,

but at 30 all that was yet to come.

Brian Dolan is a California professor with a passion for the genius of Burslem.

The cream ware that he produced was a much richer

and much purer kind of colour and texture than anyone had seen before.

In addition to that, he made sure that the saucers and the tops of the saucers fit tightly,

that everything was proportioned correctly,

which originally made him stand out from the others.

Demand was high among the English for minimalist earthenwares

that told the neighbours you had good taste

and then a new kind of client emerged who was even more needy.

It's 1760, Wedgwood is the right man in the right place at the right time.

This is a period when Britain is becoming the great merchant nation of the world

and when exports are booming as never before.

And a key part of that market is America.

This was a time when Americans were settling down, building cities,

and they wanted to have houses which were as comfortable,

as well-equipped, as well-designed as houses in Bath, in Bristol,

in Stoke-on-Trent.

They wanted nice furniture, nice china, pottery.

And there wasn't a single pottery manufacturer in the whole of the thirteen colonies

so Wedgwood could see the market opportunity of a lifetime.

Britain is the greatest trading nation in the world by the late-18th century.

It has reconfigured its geography.

If you look in the medieval period, Britain traded with Europe,

but the opening up of the Atlantic world, which had initially benefited Spain and Portugal most,

created a set of commercial relationships in which the British,

in part because they have the most liberal, capitalist system of commercial organisation,

rather than a state-regulated one, are at the forefront of that.

America would become Wedgwood's most important overseas market.

As a Unitarian, he championed the settlers' right to self-rule

and he traded with the Cherokee to obtain fine clays.

His cream ware was in great demand, but he had to keep improving it.

His quest was a glaze the colour of driven snow,

something the competition hadn't even considered.

Josiah felt that through more experimentation he could find that new something to dazzle everybody.

He wanted equal colours, the whole appearance to be a brilliant white.

Every variation in glaze and clay was tested and fired in his kilns, recorded in a secret code.

What he finally discovers after toiling for months in the laboratory

was just the right formula that he could bake at just the right temperature for just the right time

in order to get what he calls "the good white glaze".

The white glaze put Wedgwood on the map.

As he began to become a household name, he spent more time in the capital cajoling dealers

and observing the habits of London society, what he called "the virtuosi".

He had an extraordinary affinity for what would appeal to people.

He had a particular feeling for feminine tastes and what women wanted on their dining tables.

His good white glaze, his cream ware, had become something that every family in England wanted.

Indeed, his very surname, Wedgwood, had become synonymous with the finest ceramics.

The message of his glaze was purity.

Josiah guessed that the negative would be, too. His black basalt ware was specifically intended

to make the white hands of his lady customers look softer, more delicate.

At Liverpool University, Robin Hill and Andrew Popp teach Business History.

They've examined the mechanics of what was the building of a Georgian superbrand.

His nephew mistakenly took

some other factory's pots for some Wedgwood pots

and Wedgwood was aghast at this.

It was acknowledged among potters that Wedgwood made the best pots,

yet even someone intimate to the business sometimes mistook something else for Wedgwood.

Wedgwood thought, "I need to distinguish what I make."

Most branding now is literally a brand stamped on, for example, a piece of clothing.

You can display the name. With pottery it's always hidden, underneath,

-face down on the table.

-It was about distinguishing it from the outside, the surface,

so we have this commitment to an ever-whiter glaze, this perfectibility.

And once you've got that in place, you can really run with it.

He developed what we now call brand extension.

You get a core and then find new ways of rolling it out - new products, new outlets.

In the first decades of the century,

the big house on Burslem's main thoroughfare was home to Josiah's cousins, Long John and Thomas.

They were the famous Wedgwood potters then.

In 1762, when he was 32 years old, Josiah Wedgwood stood here outside the big house

on the pavement, looking in.

He didn't know it, but he was about to become the greatest name in British pottery.

Within four years he'd be the most celebrated designer in the world, the greatest arbiter of taste.

And the catalyst for this was the two relationships he was about to form.

Wedgwood was on his way to Liverpool on shipping business when he suffered a riding accident

and was confined to bed there for a month. It was a hot spot for high rollers and deep thinkers.

One of them was businessman Thomas Bentley.

Josiah is this great manufacturer. Bentley was primarily a merchant, wasn't he?

Bentley was actually in Liverpool working as an agent.

He was actually very well-versed in the ins and outs of distribution to the New World,

which was exactly what Josiah needed to find, as a partner for his business.

Josiah was the worker, he was the skilled craftsman,

he worked with his hands. Bentley, on the other hand, was the one who worked with his head.

In Bentley, Wedgwood had found someone who wasn't just a business associate, but a soulmate.

Bentley was a much more sophisticated person than Wedgwood. He came from a richer background.

But something that Wedgwood responded to absolutely immediately in Bentley's character

was this idea that if you made a lot of money in business, you go out and try to improve the human lot.

Bentley had founded a public library, started the Society of Arts and built the Octagon Chapel,

where he hoped to establish a rational religion.

Through Bentley, Wedgwood now gained access to a new market - the gentry.

The urbane businessman became the potter's man in the capital and, eventually, Wedgwood's partner.

The second pivotal relationship would provide him with the finance fully to realise his ambitions.

Wedgwood had been in love with his cousin Sarah, known as Sally, for several years,

but her father Richard had prevented their union. Now the good white glaze made Josiah a better bet.

Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley:

"My dear sir, all matters are amicably settled betwixt my papa-elect and myself.

"I yesterday prevailed upon my dear girl to name the day, the blissful day,

"when she will reward my faithful services and take me to her arms, to her nuptial bed,

"to pleasure that I am yet ignorant of.

"We are to be married on Wednesday next."

Sally came with cash, which gave her the whip hand. How unusual was this?

Clever parents, or clever women quite often, made sure that they had some money.

There was always a system of sort of contractual dealing

and of protection, putting money in trust.

In the 19th century, you have women really surrendering everything they possess to their husbands.

Are you saying that in 18th-century Burslem, this wasn't the case?

In the 18th century, they were very hard-headed, sensible, practical,

especially the Wedgwood family.

And marriages between cousins are extremely common.

It's part of keeping the money, the business, in the family.

Over time comes friendship and interest and understanding.

Wedgwood had the connections, the money and a market-leading product to grow his brand.

All he needed was a lucky break.

In 1765, Wedgwood opened a letter from St James's Palace

inviting him to take part in a competition with all the potters in Staffordshire

to provide a tea service for Queen Charlotte.

Now if Queen Charlotte bought his tea service, all the duchesses in England would want to buy one

and if all the duchesses in England bought a Wedgwood tea service, the middle classes would want one.

It took Josiah months of experimentation to find a way to make 22-carat gold

stick to his good white glaze.

He mixed it with honey and fired it at a very high temperature.

He won the competition, of course, but sadly we can't enjoy its wonder today.

-The Queen's service has disappeared.

-It has?

-Disappeared.

-It's not somewhere in Buckingham Palace?

-No.

When we try to imagine the now lost Queen's service, it's a teapot like that?

Very much of this shape, which is very typical of that period, with this wonderful crossed handle.

-The Queen's service would be gold all over, with green flowers on it.

-Gilded, not plain like that.

-No.

-But presumably washing it all the time was disastrous.

-Washing and using it takes the gilding off.

Summoned to the Palace, Josiah asked for permission to call his cream ware Queen's ware,

the ultimate in celebrity endorsement.

The Royal Family acted as, in a sense, a stylistic example.

George III, he has a wife who is a figure of London society

and who is important and most people knew. He has a large family.

Most people who are socially and politically active will have met one or other royal prince.

And there are these new royal palaces going up. There's the new work at Queen's House.

We now call it Buckingham Palace.

These are centres of activity. You would expect, if you were a figure of society, to go there.

In fact, if you were reasonably well-dressed, you could meet the monarch with some ease at that time.

Wedgwood was a household name in middle-class households.

Queen's ware was an entree to the aristocracy.

Once he'd sold to the Royal Family, Josiah Wedgwood was made.

In the very month that it was known that the Queen of England was drinking her tea from Queen's ware,

this hill in Burslem was crammed with coaches and carriages

and I think Wedgwood's grander relations in the big house must have viewed that rather askance

because those carriages and coaches were filled with the nobility of England.

# We are Stoke, we are Stoke... #

Wedgwood wasted no time in alerting the press to his privileged status,

even if his new title was of his own devising.

He was now in middle age and in his pomp, but, as usual, he couldn't rest.

He was a celebrity designer, part of the fashion industry, defined by his favourite activity -

constant change.

My third ceramic landmark,

his copy of a pre-Roman vase.

This is Wedgwood, the creator of art objects,

a manufacturer of useful wares branching out into the ornamental.

Ever since the ruins of Pompeii were unearthed,

all Europe had been gripped with a mania for anything neo-classical.

Wedgwood saw this was about more than pots. It was about identity.

We use the term neo-classical to describe British culture in the late-18th century.

It helps to provide an explanation about why Wedgwood is operating

in the kind of stylistic language he is using.

What it captures, and Wedgwood profited from this,

is that the British have taken over the role of the Ancient Romans.

Real antiquities were in short supply, but Wedgwood's Etruscan wares were available in his shop.

He never relocated to the capital, but in the 1760s, Thomas Bentley began to manage a showroom

somewhere here on Great Newport Street. Later, they opened in Greek Street, Soho,

in Mayfair and in Bath.

Most places in London would have been a combination of some presentation of the goods,

some stock which would be stored there and then, in the back, would be a place to work on it.

Pretty crowded space for these small houses in London. Wedgwood decided that he should display his wares

so that once inside it's laid out like they would do it at home.

He made the selling space much bigger than an ordinary shop.

-They could mill around inside.

-And say, "My goodness, I want to have those plates."

-Yeah.

What Josiah did was to say, "What we really need to do here is create a space to stage the merchandise."

These shops drew crowds that caused traffic jams.

Wedgwood and Bentley pioneered the kind of retail experience we know today.

Josiah wasn't just meeting the English grandees. The European nobility came.

This gave him rather a good idea. He packaged up boxes of Wedgwood ware, inside he put an invoice

and he sent them at random to several European great houses.

"If you like this stuff, keep it and buy it. If you don't, send it back."

He was taking a colossal risk, almost certain to lose most of it,

but it showed his immense business bravado.

The package that went to Saxony and the modest home of Prince Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau,

always known as Franz, succeeded in rekindling an interest first ignited on the Grand Tour.

The Prince was an acquaintance of the antiquary Sir William Hamilton,

ambassador and purveyor of original pieces.

Wedgwood's replicas were seen by the Prince to be their equal.

Modern-designed neo-classics.

It's hard to think of anywhere in the world giving a better sense

of why people went mad for Wedgwood in the 18th century. Here you see it as it's meant to be displayed,

in a beautiful, 18th-century room, exactly as it was,

and don't forget this was a young man's house, a young man who had seen these beautiful things in Rome,

so what you have is an extraordinary vision of a German palace copying an English country house

and in the middle of it this domesticated classicism, the essence of English taste.

And Wedgwood everywhere.

Fantastic.

The lucky keeper of the collection is Uwe Quilitzsch.

We must open the window shutters.

Oh!

Oh, my goodness, me.

Yeah, the light come in...

-Goodness!

-..and we are in the Age of Enlightenment.

This is so extraordinary. Very English, only we're in Germany.

The Prince was very inspired by British culture.

I think the heart beat a little bit English.

Look at these vases. All Wedgwood vases that he sent over, presumably?

Yes. They come in the beginning of the 1770s.

-This is fantastic. What happened to the lid? Did one get broken?

-Yeah.

He saw these vases which had been dug up in Herculaneum and Pompeii

-and thought, "I could do that."

-Neo-classical copies for aristocrats.

They're just pure elegance.

In England, Wedgwood was himself preparing to move into grand accommodation -

a new, purpose-built live/work space.

In 1769, the new building was ready for occupation.

It was the most modern industrial space in the world.

The works employed around 300 artisans.

Processes were broken down to facilitate mass production.

Staff became specialists in one area, but ignorant of others,

so the chance of telling his secrets to competitors was reduced.

Wedgwood demanded hard work, but his religious beliefs made him an enlightened employer.

He built 76 workers' cottages near the factory.

To combat the lung disease that killed potters, he considered a primitive form of air-conditioning.

This was Unitarianism in action.

Most factories were hellish and it wasn't much better in the fields.

The kind of romanticisation that you saw in the opening of the Olympics was naive and ridiculous.

It wasn't the case that rural work was in some way a benign set of activities

which were swept away by harsh industrialists. Rural work also was pretty awful,

arduous and very long hours.

He called the new place Etruria after that part of Italy

where the Etruscans had lived. In the 1920s, when King George V and Queen Mary visited the works,

Queen Mary asked one of the workers, "Do you enjoy living in Stoke?"

And he replied, "I don't live in Stoke, ma'am. We're all Etruscans here."

On the day Wedgwood and Bentley opened the Etruria factory,

June 13th, 1769,

Wedgwood himself threw six celebratory Etruscan vases.

The one on the left was Josiah's own souvenir of the auspicious day.

Josiah was about to turn 40. He'd made it.

And he did still make it.

It's an obvious thing to say, but Josiah Wedgwood was first and foremost a potter.

Even when he was a young apprentice, he threw better bowls and vases than anyone else had done in England.

He was a fantastically brilliant craftsman.

When he was working at Etruria as a distinguished old man,

people would gather round and watch him throw a vase. It was a masterclass in how to be a potter.

When he moved into Etruria as a grand old businessman, was he a suit, afraid to get his hands dirty?

No.

Edmund de Waal is a studio potter driven to spend as much time as possible behind the wheel.

He's not a mass producer like Wedgwood, but does he feel a kinship with him?

My take on Josiah is that he couldn't have done

that incredible, catalytic invention of industrial pottery on that scale

unless he absolutely knew in his fingertips what it was like to mix clay.

What he seemed to be able to do was to deliver artistic perfection on an industrial scale.

This cream ware is absolutely stellar. A fantastic teapot.

This is about Englishness as well, it really is.

Imagine if we were picking up a bit of Meissen and there would be quite a lot of gilding.

And you would be being told very, very firmly how precious this was.

And here you've got somewhere on a Staffordshire river,

but also a bit of the Orient and a bit classical. Completely perfect

about English fantasy about what the good life should be. And it's a blooming teapot!

-It's fantastic.

-It's beautifully fine.

-But it's not too fine.

-No.

-It's robust, but it's finely made.

-Yeah.

-And all the same consistency.

When you feel it, you can feel the person throwing it.

You can feel a finger and a thumb in 1780 have held that.

And making that part of the joy of the object.

-So here, with this fantastic cup and saucer, you've got this ridiculous handle.

-Glorious. I love it.

-I love this.

-That's a particularly wonderful cup.

-You can see where the thumb pressed these two bits.

It was nearly always the women.

Although he went for perfection, he wasn't going for inhuman uniformity or anything like that.

No, it's industrial, but what does industry mean? Real people working in one of those factories,

so of course there's that sense of a breath of difference between what everyone does.

13 years after the opening of Etruria, Josiah and Sally were gentry.

They had money, influence, a great house and a large family.

In the intervening decade, Thomas Bentley had died

leaving Wedgwood bereft, but still determined to make improvements in everything he saw.

At the age of 57, he was old by Georgian standards,

but still felt he had work to do,

championing the rights of man.

Sending shipments to America required frequent trips to the port of Liverpool.

Cotton, linen, wool, coal and, of course, earthenwares from Britain went out

and all manner of exotic goods from the Far East and New West came in.

Josiah was a merchant, but one with the belief that people mattered more than profit.

The sight of slaves sickened him. His Unitarian convictions compelled him to act.

The fourth of my Wedgwood landmarks isn't a pot.

It's a ceramic masterstroke of marketing genius, designed to change attitudes by stealth.

It's Wedgwood, the taste maker and moral crusader.

Wedgwood wasn't just a man with a passion for making and selling things.

He was also consumed with a passion for social justice. "Am I not a man and a brother?"

The slave trade and slavery itself remains a powerful economic interest

because obviously what you've got is very low-cost, controlled labour

and that is producing goods like sugar in which there's then a high profit margin to owners and shippers.

That is significant for British industrialisation.

While Wedgwood would have irritated some people by his stance,

others would have thought, "Absolutely. This is right."

-He actually made thousands of much smaller medallions.

-That's wonderful.

He sent them to people like Benjamin Franklin for free distribution for anybody who'd support the cause.

-They're the very earliest campaigning medal.

-Did he give them away free in England?

-Absolutely.

-It was the way he could demonstrate his support.

-Where would you have worn them?

-On watch chains,

-put into bracelets.

-Or pinned as a brooch?

-Brooch.

-It's recorded that some wore them as hat pins.

-Wonderful.

-It is said in a letter by Benjamin Franklin

that they've done far more for the cause than thousands of words

because for the very first time people openly showed their support.

The idea of using fashion to deliver a political message,

pre-dating the t-shirt by two centuries, was Wedgwood's.

But it wasn't just the message that was revolutionary. The medallions and a new wave of pots and plates

were made of a completely new kind of pottery, invented by Josiah Wedgwood.

Josiah had long ago given up the idea of imitating Chinese porcelain.

Instead, he thought that this new invention of his was even better.

And in 1775 he announced to the world the existence of this new ceramic material - jasper.

Jasperware could absorb these very strong colours

and the most popular colour of all was a certain shade of blue.

Jasper was and is a fine-grained stoneware

made from a mixture of clay and a sulphate form of the heavy metal barium.

Wedgwood was so afraid of industrial espionage, he posted the formula to Bentley in two separate letters.

For all his working life, Wedgwood was potter by day, inventor by night.

In the pottery, he looked constantly for ways that the manufacturing might be improved.

In an 18th-century pottery, the best-paid man was the kiln watcher.

His job was to watch the oven and to judge, by instinct,

whether the coal was hot enough and not too hot to fire the pots.

Get it wrong and he'd destroy a whole oven full of pots. A very expensive business.

Now Josiah Wedgwood came up with a solution. A very simple one, like so many of his brilliant ideas.

A simple brass frame with a little lump of wet clay in it.

When the clay contracted, it rolled down a channel and he knew the oven was the right temperature

to fire his pots.

He called it the pyrometer.

Josiah's science was self-taught and his constant desire for invention self-motivated.

In 1782, the simple lad who had left school at nine came here

to address the Royal Society regarding his pyrometer

and was elected to this, the world's first scientific institution.

British society as a whole at that period

was probably more engaged with science than it is today.

Many people who were not of aristocratic background were interested in the world of science,

and Wedgwood with his utilitarian concerns, but also his philosophical interest in trying to work out

how things happened, was very much a man of science.

Once a month, Wedgwood joined other free thinkers who dared to ask big questions.

How common was it to have an intellectual society or a group or a club like this?

It is a very sociable time

and there are clubs for virtually everything,

from glee singing to worm collecting. You'd probably find a club somewhere!

At Soho House, the Birmingham home of a rival industrialist,

Wedgwood and friends met at full moon. It was a sort of gents' discussion group.

It was a local affair, but the locality was the Georgian equivalent of Silicon Valley.

There's Matthew Boulton and James Watt,

of the great Soho manufacturer and steam engine fame.

Joseph Priestley, not only a great leader of radical dissent,

but the discoverer of oxygen or, as he called it, dephlogisticated air and photosynthesis.

They each had a specialism.

They could turn to the other person, they could turn to the mathematician if their calculations didn't work.

There's the extraordinary development of new ideas and the collision of interests and imagination.

It's an extraordinary gathering and Josiah is one of the most extraordinary.

It's so exciting to be in this room where so many geniuses met,

where so many ideas were played off, one against the other,

and you get the sense of them all feeding off one another, really.

You get, for example, Joseph Priestley pioneering our modern perception of H20,

the property of water itself.

Wedgwood supplied his ceramic equipment to do those experiments.

Then you get Matthew Boulton and Watt, pioneering the steam engine

on the strength of their knowledge of what H20 was.

Who's the first person to buy a steam engine? Josiah Wedgwood. The Industrial Revolution steams ahead

on the ideas formed at this table.

Dr Erasmus Darwin was a key player who became a close friend of the potter.

An inventor, a poet, a physician, he suggested in 1768

that Wedgwood would be better off without the gammy leg.

Josiah had already allowed the experimental inoculation of his children, possibly killing one.

Medicine was science.

18th-century medicine is the one thing one would really avoid at all costs.

-Josiah Wedgwood was not fortunate enough to avoid it.

-No. The amputation of Josiah's leg

is a grim moment.

He was fantastically brave.

We can't say with hindsight whether it was...what could have been done to help him,

but it's very shocking and yet it's part of his image, stomping around with his wooden leg

and using it to smash, you know, inferior pottery.

-And it was his nickname, Old Wooden Leg.

-Old Wooden Leg.

In terms of the medical advances of the time,

Erasmus Darwin, awful, liberal doser-out of laudanum,

opium, you know. If it doesn't work and you feel a bit woozy, take more!

There are terrible notes in his book about, "Poor Mrs So-and-so...!

"Vomiting! Coma! Death!" You know.

So it is... a rather frightening time.

Mobility was an obsession with Wedgwood. The Lunar Men will certainly have heard

of his desire to drag the transport system into the 19th century.

Wedgwood was a modern man, a key figure in the creation of modern industry,

but he knew there was one vital ingredient missing - transport.

He lived in Burslem, one of the most inaccessible parts of England.

It was on this sloping hill, full of rutted tracks made worse by amateur clay diggers

gouging out potholes from the few existent lanes.

He wanted to devise a smooth, efficient method

of transporting pottery from the pot banks to the dining table.

He didn't just want to reform the lanes of Burslem, but the entire transport system.

He wanted canals and one in particular.

Manchester, Birmingham and London had canals, but they were cut off from Stoke. That had to change.

The most exciting project, really, of the age was the building

of the Trent and Mersey Canal.

If the alternative was putting things on the back of mules and going over muddy roads,

or, if you were lucky, putting things in wagons that got stuck in ruts,

the canals cut through this and enabled you to move bulk goods at low cost.

And that's wonderful for ceramics, it's wonderful for coal,

it's wonderful for many of the goods that are important to British industrialisation.

Wedgwood formed committees, raised funds and cajoled backers.

When work began, it was he who cut the first sod.

He'd spent 11 years trying to persuade his fellow potters that the canal was great for business,

though he was the only one who would eventually have the Trent and Mersey Canal passing

right outside his new loading bay.

As he approached his 60s, Josiah could look down from his pot works to his canal and feel

a sense of accomplishment. Little did he know,

he still had his best work ahead of him.

The last in our potted history

is his copy of the finest example of an ancient vase ever found.

The original was made in 25BC

and purchased by the Duchess of Portland in 1784.

The Dukes of Portland were prodigiously rich, making the rest of the aristocracy like paupers.

And the old Duchess of Portland placed it in her cabinet of curiosities. Then, presumably,

it was the excitement which killed her. She died almost at once.

And all her wonderful collection of loot was put up for sale in London.

Her son, the Duke, was terrified - he, one of the richest men in Europe -

that a manufacturer from North Staffordshire would be rich enough to outbid him at the auction.

The Duke got the vase, but it was lent to Josiah so that he might copy it.

All my landmark pots stand for a different facet of Wedgwood's personality.

This one is tenacity, technical genius and stubborn refusal to give in.

It is the most technically difficult thing he ever tried to do.

Many went wrong in the kiln. They bubbled, they blistered, the ornamentation fell off.

-What was going wrong?

-The problem, I think, was that he was trying to copy something

effectively made of glass, cameo glass, in a ceramic body.

He was trying to make the same sort of translucency. With great triumph in October, 1789, he said,

-"I've got a perfect one."

-And did he put it on display?

-It was on show in London by ticket only.

-Wonderful.

There we are.

Josiah...in 1790...

had more or less perfected his copy of the Portland vase.

And by then he was a sick man.

He was taking a lot of laudanum for pains in his face and in his leg.

He managed to get 20 or 30 or so, we don't know exactly, which were truly exquisite and...

Oh! I nearly dropped it! Don't worry. This is a Victorian copy.

But he did make about 20 or 30 really perfect copies of the vase

and this was one I bought in a junk shop. It probably cost 10 shillings.

After he'd made the Portland vase, it became his hallmark

and it was reproduced and reproduced.

The power to transform mud into china was a given for all potters,

but Wedgwood went further, taking pottery from utility to luxury.

Wedgwood could see that what he'd done was produce a product that was much more than just utilitarian.

This was art that you could eat off, drink from, serve your boiled potatoes from,

but in owning a piece of Wedgwood ware, you become part of a larger movement, a movement of classicism.

You'd really become part of the cognoscenti.

Comparisons have been made with a modern design genius.

What Steve Jobs did was to take an existing concept or product and just make it much better.

That could also be said of Josiah.

Even when it comes to imitating thousands of years old pieces

he would actually take good ideas,

but work his magic and his aesthetic qualities

and make that the recipe for success.

Today, the six towns that comprise the Potteries

are home to call centres, fast food joints and shopping precincts.

As it has in much of the Midlands, the kind of industry that made Britain famous has largely relocated

to somewhere far away where labour is cheap and the climate warmer.

The manufactory on what is now Festival Way,

once the most advanced in the world, is gone.

Only the house Josiah built remains.

Etruria Hall, now a conference centre.

One difference between us and the great Josiah is that everything he touched he left more beautiful.

Everything we touch... Well, we don't have the knack. This place is now absolutely hideous

and he would have been appalled at what we've done.

But if he sat here with the business execs, he'd be realistic enough

to realise trade has to go on.

In the 1950s, the trade was going on.

I grew up with the legacy of the first Josiah. My father and his colleagues wanted to recapture

the spirit of the 18th century.

They shared a belief in the power of design to make things better,

that sitting on a sideboard, their pots could banish post-war gloom.

They made their factory a well-oiled machine and, like Wedgwood, built ideal homes for the workforce.

Those homes are still there,

a five-minute walk from the factory. We lived just down the road.

It's 50 years since I was last in the house I grew up in,

smelling the cigarettes and hearing the laughter.

Now this is absolutely as I remember it. It's extraordinary.

And this was my bedroom.

I can remember kneeling on the bed and looking out of the window and imagining witches in the trees.

It doesn't evoke deep feelings, funnily enough.

What I'm amazed by is the way that individual corners have created memories I didn't know I had,

incidents I can remember. Thinking of my old father here,

I can place him in various bits of the house,

always surrounded with smoke, 60-a-day man, Senior Service, untipped, of course.

This is where my father would sit drinking gin and French with old Josiah.

My father talked about the Wedgwoods all the time.

Him and Uncle Jos, as we called him, Josiah Wedgwood V,

they built up the factory together. They'd been through some hair-raising times doing so

and constantly talked about that.

I think Josiah I was a genius and I think Norman Wilson was a man of prodigious talents

and energy, but not a genius. They had things in common, no question.

Norman was inspired by the first Josiah to build a new Wedgwood factory in a rural setting.

He was like Josiah in that he was both a businessman and a designer

and he had a passionately strong aesthetic sense and a horror of ugliness.

And really believed that popular table ware, cups and saucers,

teapots, should be as beautiful as possible.

He hated jasper and all that blue and white stuff. That was C-R-A-P for Americans.

The side of America he liked

was that optimistic belief in a golden future and I think Josiah I had that.

They were both sunny optimists, which I certainly am not myself.

Much of the time my father would be sitting in a chair sketching out new designs.

He used to get scrapbooks from Woolworth's and he did his drawing in fountain pen

on these grey pages. Rather beautiful, actually.

As you can see, the pots he designed were pared-down pieces

for the decade when England swung like a pendulum.

As did the company's fortunes.

Josiah Wedgwood died worth the modern equivalent of half a billion pounds,

but subsequent directors found the going tough.

I was too young to appreciate the glory days.

A few years later, I knew all about the demise of the potteries.

The whole pottery industry had changed completely

and wasn't agreeable to my father. He warned me and my brother off.

He just said don't have anything to do with it. He was quite right, too.

I actually got into an art school and he was very angry

and made me withdraw. I was feeble. You should never obey your parents over things like that.

Obey them when you're little, but when you're older, follow your star.

And I was a coward about that.

If I count back through my family, my father was probably a tenth-generation potter.

I probably thought when I was a boy there was an inevitability about my doing the same,

but destiny had a different idea.

I'm fairly amateurish at it as you can probably see.

I fancied the life of the potter, but the first Josiah's sons didn't.

Josiah had educated his sons and he'd given them money - a lot.

They'd become more or less landed gentry. This was a trouble in a way.

They went into the business, but weren't really inclined for it

and thought themselves a little too grand to be in trade.

Nevertheless, there was genius in that DNA.

When Suki, Wedgwood's favourite daughter, married Robert Darwin, the son of Dr Erasmus Darwin,

what a gene pool that was.

In 1809, they had a son.

He inherited a great deal of the inquiring mind and spirit of Josiah Wedgwood.

He also inherited a lot of money, which gave him leisure to research.

And the name of that genius was Charles Darwin.

The Age of Enlightenment brought huge changes to the world

and Josiah was personally behind quite a lot of them,

but I think the change that meant most to him was that the humble craft of the potter

was now perceived to be a fine art.

When they carved his epitaph,

they said he converted a rude and inconsiderable manufactory into an elegant art.

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