BOOKS

Winner of the old crocks' race

Bevis Hillier

ENGLISH PORCELAIN, 1745-95 by Hilary Young V&A Publications, £50, pp. 229 I n the late 1960s there was a spate of `What is ... ? ' jokes. The two best-known were, 'What is wrapped in greaseproof paper and capers about in Paris belfries?' Answer: 'The lunch-pack of Notre Dame.' And, 'What is crisp and white and swings from tree to tree in the jungle?' Answer: 'A meringue-utan.' Just about everyone knew those two.

I remember being stumped by one of these riddles. 'What is red and black and goes dingle-dangle, dingle?' the answer was `Red and black dingle-dangles'. That one pushed the genre to its limits and presaged a time when kids would no longer sidle up to one with 'What is ...?' jokes. (Shortly afterwards, however, they graduated to the `Knock, knock, who's there?' variety.) At the time, I made a lame attempt to answer the dingle-dangle question. After discarding various rather rude possibles, I suggested 'a mobile' — meaning one of those quaint assemblages of boomerang- shaped oddments, some by Alexander Calder, that move in the wind or by machinery. (A prime example is seen in the 1958 film Auntie Mame, starring Rosalind Russell.) Today, of course, the word mobile has taken on a new meaning. I once read an article by Keith Waterhouse on how to be a newspaper columnist. He wrote something like: 'Whatever you do, don't bang on about how you hate mobile phones on trains. It has been done before.' It has become, apparently, as much a cliché as the local newspaper reporter's 'Rain failed to dampen spirits on Thursday at the Gnomewick Women's Institute fête.'

So I will keep my trap shut about mobiles on trains. (The sort I loathe the most is that which plays half the William Tell overture before the owner gets it out of his Slimline briefcase.) But I find myself obliged to mention mobiles, all the same, because I have been trying to think of a product that is the modern equivalent of English porcelain in the mid-18th century in that a) it is newish and b) it will be col- lected in the future. If there is one thing I am quite certain of, it is that mobile phones will be collected one day; maybe a smart cookie is hoarding them already. There is such variety of shape and colour, so many makers, and the design is in many cases pleasing and expressive of the Zeitgeist. All these things were true of 18th-century English china.

Porcelain itself was not a novelty. It had been imported from China since at least the 14th century. But the glassy type of porcelain made at Chelsea, Bow, Derby and Worcester — as different from the Chinese sort as juice squeezed straight from an orange is different from 'fresh orange juice' from a carton — was new. `Juicy' is in fact a good description of the `paste' (material) of Chelsea wares, as compared with the icy, glittering pastes of Chinese and Meissen (Dresden) products.

Back to mobile phones. Just suppose that mobiles suddenly fell into disuse. It might be that the already worrying research into their effect on brains became overwhelm- ing, or that technology replaced the mobile A coffee or chocolate pot made at Bow in 1760-65. Victoria & Albert Museum. with something superior and even more maddening. And suppose that nobody wrote anything about mobiles for a century, but that then people began collecting them and trying to find out about their makers. You would have there some kind of parallel to English porcelain studies. The Chelsea and Bow factories were both well under way in the 1740s, but it was not until the mid-19th century that serious study of their wares began.

Now, if you were studying mobile phones in 2080, you would at least find a mass of information about them, in old newspaper advertisements, preserved television footage and articles by disgruntled colum- nists. For the student or collector of 18th- century English porcelain, there is far less to go on. The sources were more meagre and many of them had dried up by the 19th century. Also, there was — why? — never a Worshipful Company of Potters, register- ing its members and exercising quality con- trol. If you study old silver, you have the Goldsmiths Company and its archives and hallmarks and date marks to guide you.

It is the very paucity of information about the early china factories that makes study of them so fascinating. If I may use the simile unblasphemously, it is like trying to reconstruct Christ from the veil of St Veronica. Every new scrap of evidence is treasured. There have been a few extra- ordinary breakthroughs, as when the late Dr Bernard Watney, knowing that a Nathaniel Firmin had been a director of the Langton Hall factory in Staffordshire, wrote to every Firmin in the London tele- phone book and found one with a trunkful of deeds relating to the factory; or when the late Nancy Valpy had the bright idea of going through old insurance records to find out which potters had taken out policies and when. And in the last two decades the wares of Vauxhall, Limehouse and Isle- worth — factories known previously only through documentary references — have been identified, partly through excavations.

Up to now, nearly all books on English porcelain have been by collectors or muse- um officials trying to establish the facts about the different factories. There have been admirable monographs — for exam- ple, Elizabeth Adams (wife of Richard Adams of Watership Down fame) on Chelsea; Mrs Adams and John Redstone on Bow; H. Gilbert Bradley on Derby and Bernard Watney on Liverpool. It is partly a matter of distinguishing between the differ- ent factories' pastes, so that Sotheby's can more confidently assign jugs or dishes to A self-portrait of Thomas Frye, one of the founders of the Bow porcelain factory, 1760. Victoria & Albert Museum.

their right sources. But there is also the enjoyment of tracking down the men who ran the factories. If you were young and enterprising and in quest of a get-rich- quick scheme in the 1840s, you might have been drawn to photography or the railways. In the 1740s and '50s it was china-making that seemed to offer tempting rewards. At Chelsea, there was Nicholas Sprimont, a Huguenot silversmith from Liege; at Bow, the brilliant mezzotint artist and portrait painter Thomas Frye; at Worcester, Dr John Wall, an eminent physician who also designed stained glass windows; at Vaux- hall, Nicholas Crisp, who had a jewellery shop in Cheapside and took part in City politics.

There are bound to be more discoveries, further refinements of our knowledge; and the English Ceramic Circle exists to record them in its learned Transactions. But we can feel pretty assured that the main sifting has been done and that no revolutionary re-ascription of wares is likely now. It was time for somebody to take an 'overview' of the English porcelain industry in the 18th century, from the angle of an economic and social historian rather than of a collector with his nose permanently stuck in the door of his china cabinet. The new study would need to cover marketing, design and Workshop practice, and what economists insist on giving the unalluring name of consumption', even though a meal of Chelsea porcelain would give one a bad tuninr y ache.

On a modest scale I attempted some- thing of the sort in a book of 1968, which Hilary Young is good enough to include in his bibliography and footnotes. The pukka historian who has given most attention to 18th-century ceramics is Dr Neil McKendrick, acting on his belief that historians' concentration on 19th-century poverty has unfairly — perhaps in a rather moralistic way — robbed 18th-century luxury of analysis. McKendrick's essays are masterly, and some of us regret that his duties as Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, have distracted him from the major book on Wedgwood for which we hoped, and still hope, from him. Another first-class historian who has helped to focus interest on 18th-century ceramics is Paul Langford, in his contribu- tion to the New Oxford History of England, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (1989). The first part of that title is derived from an expression used by the academic, MP and judge William Black- stone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, published between 1765 and 1769. Langford sees the expansion of china pro- duction in the 18th century as not only the `most spectacular example of the conver- sion of a taste for the exotic into a staple of domestic industry', but also as a status sym- bol and a carrier of the new `politeness' necessary for social advancement.

Hilary Young draws on both McKendrick and Langford, but his own research is formidable and this is a fine, comprehensive survey. It will serve as a matrix into which future studies of individ- ual factories will have to be fitted. The great asset with which he starts out is that, as an assistant curator in the ceramics and glass department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, he is absolutely au fait with the latest findings on the English china facto- ries. To write this book he was given time off (if you can call this busman's holiday time off) to be Derby Fellow in the History of Ceramics at the University of Derby. His style tends towards the ascetic rather than the florid; but it was just such a cool, clear approach that was needed after the parti- san gushiness of some earlier books. He ruthlessly weeds out, too, anything of previ- ous scholars' work that is speculative or hypothetical. For example, Elizabeth Adams in her book on Chelsea makes much of Dr Anthony Supply (pronounced `Supplee'), another Huguenot who sublet to Sprimont the Chelsea house which he himself rented from John Offley, a Staffordshire land- owner. But you will find no mention of Dr Supply in Young's book. I am slightly dis- consolate at his disappearing from the radar screen, since by gruelling research I found out who he was — a surgeon with the East India Company. But I quite see why Young has eliminated him: there is not a scrap of lard evidence (yet) that links him to china production at Chelsea.

When Young is not able to come up with answers, he candidly says so.

There is [he writes] remarkably little docu- mentation for the purchase of specific types of English porcelain by identifiable groups of English society.

What is particularly hard to fund out is how far porcelains of the Chelsea and Worcester types were bought by rich and aristocratic patrons, and how far by the `middling classes'. For the upper end of the market, one book missing from his bibliography (perhaps because by too 'pop' a historian) is Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats (1994), which not only records specific china purchases by the Lennox sisters, but indicates archives where, I suspect, further evidence is to be found — for example, tradesmen's bills, 1758-78, in the papers of Thomas and Lady Louisa Conolly at Trini- ty College, Dublin. (The published letters of Louisa's sister, Emily, Countess of Kil- dare and Duchess of Leinster, show Sir Everard Fawkener, a man associated with the Chelsea factory, procuring Chelsea plates for the Kildares.) A more surprising omission from Young's bibliography is Lars Tharp's book, Hogarth's China, full of valu- able social insights. On the growth of tea- drinking, Young might have drawn on the 1720 commonplace book of the antiquary William Stukeley — `The Porcelain Manufactory at Worcester, possibly by John Davis after John Cave, 1752. Wood engraving from the Gentleman's Magazine. National Art Library.

About 1698 my mother had her first set of thea equipage. Chocolate drank before thea.

It often happens that two writers hit on the same subject at the same time, pro- pelled by the Zeitgeist or just by the tide of research. Manchester University Press have just issued Eighteenth-century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society by Sarah Richards, a research fellow in the history of design at Manchester Metropolitan Uni- versity. I am writing a critique of that book for the British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies; the ethics of reviewing forbid me to say much about it here, therefore. But readers should be aware that her approach is similar to Young's and her research impressive. If I had to choose between them, I would choose Young, because of his superior grounding in ceramics scholar- ship. But price may be a critical factor: the Richards book is a paperback, while in putting a £50 price-tag on Young's work gloriously illustrated as it is — the V&A are surely pushing their luck a bit?