​

ECCLESHALL was our nearest place. Stone unavoidably meant school. Stafford, visited quite often, was for shops and later the cinema. But The Potteries, Stoke-on-Trent, the six towns? Virtually never. Two visits to the sexy double-seated cinema at Longton when I was seventeen or eighteen and – I think – once when younger by bus with my mother to Newcastle-under-Lyme. I believe she went there with a friend now and again for the one or two large department stores they didn’t have in Stafford. En famille, we never went there. So I missed one of the most spectacular and awful expressions of the great Industrial Revolution, only twelve or so miles away, while it was still in full operation in the 1950s. This would all have been before the closing down and the cleaning up, before the non-pollutive regeneration projects that began in the 1960s.

 

I lived so close and yet never saw that great blight of the thousand or more coal-fired bottle kilns or the great pall of smoke that hung over the whole area when they were fired. At times from Sturbridge we could see the massive glow spread across the northern night sky when furnace doors were opened. To show me what that might have been like in close-up, and what I missed, I can go to HG Wells’s dramatic short story ‘The Cone’ (published in 1895), that speaks so much of the power and the horror as well as the strange attraction of these unique, terrible townscapes and their gigantic processes:

​

Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and black masses, outlined thinly by the

rare golden dots of the street-lamps, and here and there a gaslit window, or the

yellow glare of some working factory or crowded public-house. Out of the masses,

clear and slender against the evening sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many

of them reeking, a few smokeless during the season of ‘play’. Here and there a

pallid patch and ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank,

or a wheel, black and sharp against the hot, lower sky, marked some colliery where

 they raise the iridescent coal of the place.

 

. . . [the blast furnaces] stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil

of flames and seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling

mills, and the steam-hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks

hither and thither. Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel was shot into one of

the giants, and red flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and black dust

came boiling upwards towards the sky.

 

A school friend later sent me a picture postcard showing the kilns, chimneys and great motionless drifts of smoke hanging over everything, a perfect subject for a black-and-white image, entitled daringly tongue-in-cheek ‘Stoke-on-Trent – Always Merry and Bright’.

 

Like many eventually huge industrial concerns, pottery began as cottage industry, centred on North Staffordshire because of its concentrated abundance of both coal and clay. The whole area that we call The Potteries, the unitary city of Stoke-on-Trent, is only about 8 miles long and 3 miles wide, clustered and cluttered around the River Trent and the Trent and Mersey Canal. Small potteries began in Burslem in the mid-17th century and then developed further in what were the hamlets and villages of Hanley, Stoke, Fenton, Longton and Tunstall. These are the Six Towns, reduced to ‘The Five Towns’ by Arnold Bennett in his Potteries novels because, we’re told, he thought ‘Five’ more aesthetically pleasing than ‘Six’.

 

By 1740 the industry was flourishing but local clays, which fired red, were being replaced by clays imported from Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, which burned white. Skilled local craftspeople made up half the population and the industry was so well established that there was never any serious question of moving it to where the preferred raw material was to be found. In any case, the West Country had no coal. It needed 7 to 10 tons of coal to fire one ton of earthenware and up to 17 tons per ton of bone china. So the potteries remained where they were and clay was first carried up by boat or on the backs of ponies or people. Later, Brindley’s canal in 1777 with most of the main potteries on its route, and later still the railway (1848), improved the transport of both raw materials inwards and finished goods outwards.

 

Many of the small potteries came and went during the 18th and 19th centuries, but a few of the great names survived and still do, mainly through a combination of sound business sense and the use of more advanced production techniques. This particular breed of master potters included the Josiah Wedgwood dynasty, Spode and Son, Minton, Copeland, Twyford and Doulton. Stoke-on-Trent remains famous still for its modern ceramics industry whose products for both domestic and industrial use are sold around the world.

 

Over later years, we’ve collected a few pieces bearing some of those famous names. It’s said that, if you’ve ever lived in North Staffordshire, you’re entitled to inspect the underside of any item of pottery you come across to see whether it was made in The Potteries. Incidentally, reading about the area today, I find that the term ‘pothole’ as a hole in the road originated here. Before the roads were more solidly surfaced from the mid-1700s onwards, the local cottage potters would simply dig the clay they needed straight out of the ground around them. It was so near the surface. This often included the surface of the then rudimentary roads.

 

The industrial scene – with its mills, canals, railways, viaducts, factories, kilns, coalmines and rows of workers’ terraced houses – has had a double and contradictory fascination. On the one hand, there’s admiration for the ingenuity of inventors or engineers and the tenacity of the entrepreneurs who forged the incredible economic and technological advancement of the Industrial Revolution. Britain boomed and became known as ‘the workshop of the world’. At the same time, it was all another vision of Hell – formerly gentle landscapes ravaged, atmosphere poisoned, rivers grossly polluted and employees living in filthy substandard conditions, often working in vile and dangerous surroundings for punishingly long hours and for appallingly low wages.

 

Arthur Young speaks in his A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England (1770) of the Barton aqueduct as forming ‘altogether a scenery somewhat like enchantment’. George Borrow in Wild Wales, decades later, saw the iron forges at Merthyr where the remarkable industrial scene had ‘a gloomy horrid Satanic character’. Writers frequently experienced both aspects together – as Borrow put it – both ‘wonderful’ and ‘terrible’.

 

Yet another writer helps me capture the scene I never saw. In A Mummer’s Wife, George Moore found Hanley:

 

. . . one of those terrible cauldrons in which man melts and moulds this huge age

of iron. Of what did this valley consist? Of black plains that the sun could not

change in colour; of patches of grass, hard and metallic in hue, of tanks of water

glittering like blades of steel; of gigantic smoke clouds rolling over the

stems of a thousand factory chimneys.

 

Despite a series of Acts of Parliament from the 1840s onwards, industry did tremendous damage to the English landscape and to the living conditions of the urban working class. The misery of masses of human beings caused by industrialisation became a powerful central thread in the writing of novelists such as Mrs Gaskell, Dickens, Lawrence and, later, George Orwell. Dickens strikes what he calls ‘The Key-Note’ in Hard Times, where ‘you saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful’, likening the town’s appearance to ‘the painted face of a savage’. His description of the excavation works for building the railway at Camden Town in Dombey and Son is a classic account of appalling destruction. In A Writer’s Britain (1979), Margaret Drabble calls Dickens ‘the great poet of pollution’, suggesting again that combination of dreadfulness and artistic inspiration.

 

But when you want the thoroughgoing, developed and detailed feel of The Potteries in our literature, you read Arnold Bennett. Later than most of the ‘industrial novelists’, he wrote his major novels during the first two decades of the 20th century. He grew up there and invented names for his five contiguous towns (omitting a fictional parallel for Fenton), as the setting for Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and the Clayhanger trilogy. In another of life’s incidental flashes of synchronicity, not engineered by any supernatural power, as I write this piece in early February 2004, BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a dramatised serialisation of The Old Wives’ Tale in fifteen-minute segments every weekday evening.

 

What those dramatisations necessarily lack are the detailed views of the industrial landscapes with which the novel opens, and the pervasive effects of the pottery industry itself on the people and the natural world that it touches. Speaking of the fictional Bursley in Anna of the Five Towns, located ‘in an extensive valley, which must have been one of the fairest spots in Alfred’s England but which is now defaced by the activities of a quarter of a million people’, Bennett writes:

 

Here, indeed, is nature repaid for some of her notorious cruelties. She imperiously

bids man sustain and reproduce himself, and this is one of the places where in the

very act of obedience he wounds and maltreats her. Out beyond the municipal

confines, where the subsidiary industries of coal and iron prosper amid a wreck

of verdure, the struggle is grim, appalling, heroic – so ruthless is his havoc of her,

so indomitable her ceaseless recuperation.

 

. . . The grass grows; though it is not green, it grows. In the very heart of the valley,

hedged about with furnaces, a farm still stands, and at harvest-time the sooty sheaves

are gathered in . . .

 

. . . mean and forbidding of aspect – sombre, hard-featured, uncouth: and the vaporous poison of their ovens and chimneys ha soiled and shrivelled the surrounding countryside till there is no village lane within a league but what offers a gaunt and ludicrous travesty of rural charms . . . They have not understood that this disfigurement is merely an episode in the unending warfare of man and nature

                                                                                       

And of Staffordshire, the physical centre of England, in the opening paragraphs of The Old Wives’ Tale we find again the interplay of beauty and ugliness but also pride in the county of his birth:

 

The county is happy in not exciting remark. It is content that Shropshire should

contain that swollen bump, the Wrekin, and that the exaggerated wildness of the

Peak should lie over its border. It does not desire to be a pancake like Cheshire.

It has everything that England has, including three miles of Watling Street; and

England can show nothing more beautiful and nothing uglier than the works of

nature and the works of man to be seen within the limits of the county. It is

England in little, unsung by searchers after the extreme, but how proud in the

instinctive cognisance of its representative features and traits!

 

For a final word on Arnold Bennett and Staffordshire, here is his biographer Frank Swinnerton’s comment:

 

Bennett’s novels will live indeed, because future generations will see and feel

in them the actual life of one part of England in a day that is already past. His

scene is Staffordshire; but Staffordshire men think themselves the quintessence

of the English spirit. If they are right, as I fancy they may be, Bennett expresses

that spirit.                                    

                                                                          Arnold Bennett: a last word (1933)

 

Bennett moved away from The Potteries at 21, two years older than I was when I left Staffordshire, and went, as I did, to work in London. He only ever returned on brief visits, which is more than I ever managed or wanted, and revealed later that even passing through the area and seeing it from the train made him shudder. But, like James Joyce after leaving Dublin, he still lived in a Potteries of the creative mind. His imagination continued to work on it and it supplied the material for his best writing – though some of his later work was lucky to see the light of day. One evening in London towards the end of the First World War, he came very close to being wiped out along with the cream of English writers of the time. In JM Barrie’s flat he was meeting Barrie, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad and John Galsworthy when a Zeppelin dropped a bomb nearby, which exploded only a few yards south of the apartment building in which these rather special individuals were sitting round a candle, talking.

 

                                                                             *

 

On Reflection

​

A village, a school, a farm, a couple of distant towns and a great deal of relatively unexciting countryside between them made up the surroundings of my teenage world. Those are the mixed elements that made up the ‘home’ I left in February 1958. I knew some of them closely, others fairly well, but The Potteries really only through the eyes and minds of writers no longer living.

 

I’ve met people ever since who have difficulty imagining someone moving around from one part of the country to another every now and again during their life. How can I refer, they say, to any part of it as ‘home’, particularly in this case, when seven years later I was gone again? Such interlocutors have never moved away from the place of their birth. They’ve grown up, married, remained where they always were, and where their parents always were before them, and may live there to see their own children have their children there. For some, their most dramatic move might be to another part of the same town or to another town nearby. To them, I’ve been rootless, nomadic, having nowhere to go back to. In their terms, I have had no home.

 

Increasingly now, younger generations do move away for many reasons, but it’s a process that’s been a long time gathering steam during the 20th century. It’s taken a very long time in industrial areas, like mill towns, dockyards or mining valleys, where work skills and whole cultures have been handed down through generations within families, and one specific type of work may be all there is. The place would be the job, the livelihood and the entire life: the home, in the fullest sense. And it’s been hardly different in the deeply rural parts of the country, where families have lived on and from the land for so many generations.

 

My parents would naturally have seen London as their ‘home’, being born and bred there - and their parents before them. But it has been different for me, and there’s been a kind of gap in my psychological hinterland, the lack of that single place where I knew I might return, again and again, and years later, meet people I’d played with as a child and grown up with. Such a place doesn’t exist for me in that particular way. Shrewsbury is the nearest I shall ever get to it as the place where I acquired my first awareness of the world beyond the house and the family circle, and slowly developed some awareness of myself. As for my future, there was never any question about it, right from the beginning. One way or another, I would end up in London.

​

​