Burleigh: Back from the Brink

When the bottom-knocker brings his saggar-bottom to the saggar-maker... I could go on, but only an aficionado of earthenware manufacture would get my drift. Like all ancient trades, pottery-making has an evocative private language. The pug, the jolly, the monkey’s tail, the whirley, the cow’s lip, the tommy stick, the dobby, the fettler, the sherd-ruck, the diddler, the bung and potter’s rot all play their part in the process of turning clay into tableware – by hand.

The romance of pottery-making has aroused passion, prose and poetry for millennia; listen to Omar Khayyám in the 12th century: ‘For I remember stopping by the way/ To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay:/ And with its all-obliterated Tongue/ It murmur’d – “Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”’ Arnold Bennett devoted a novel to the subject, JB Priestley extolled its virtues, and even God urged Jeremiah that to receive the Word he should hurry on down to the potter.

The Middleport Pottery, where Burleighware is made

A huge archive cupboard in the owners’ office is filled with books containing recipes for all the coloured glazes used by Burleigh

Plates engraved with the patterns that decorate Burleighware are housed in wooden pigeonholes

Teetering heaps of plaster moulds, stacked up like cheeses, stand until they are needed to produce another batch of plates, cups pr jugs.

But for sheer blind enthusiasm and love of the stuff you should meet the Dorlings. They are William and Rosemary, who in 1999 spent one sleepless night before putting everything they owned up as collateral to buy the Burleigh Pottery in Burslem, one of Stoke-on-Trent’s five towns. They had known Burleigh’s two-acre factory for some time, having almost by accident started a business selling Stoke-made earthenware from their Hampshire sitting room. Every couple of months or so they would do a round trip, leaving before dawn for Staffordshire. They would spend the day piling up their vehicle with cups, plates and jugs from the pottery factory shops and drive back home the same night.

Burleighware is made at the Middleport Pottery factory on the banks of the Trent and Mersey Canal, and soon the Dorlings became as enamoured of the factory as of its tableware. Built in 1888 as the last word in modernity, it had been owned by the Leigh family ever since, and in the interim almost nothing had been changed. I swear there is a 1900s photograph showing a couple of broken panes of glass that still have not been mended. The Leighs knew all there was to be known about making the simple honest pieces for which Burleigh is known: their teapots, jugs, cups, saucers and plates have graced dressers and tables the world over for generations, but they had lost their way in marketing, and by the late Nineties the factory teetered on the brink, and finally fell into the hands of the receivers.

The Dorlings got wind of mass redundancies and the dire financial straits Burleigh was in. They moved heaven and earth to interest English Heritage, the National Trust and other potential philanthropists. They wrote impassioned insomniac letters to everybody in high places, but to no avail. Meanwhile the receivers were not doing any better and a point was reached when it looked likely that the dour redbrick factory façade (Grade II listed) would be the only thing left. Gone would be all the ‘shops’ for mixing clay, making slip (liquid clay), mould making, drying, transfer printing, gold leafing, hand painting, glazing and firing, plus all the skills and knowledge of the craftspeople who worked in them. But perhaps worst of all, gone would be the miles and miles of shelves storing the master moulds of every single piece of earthenware made by the company since the late 18th century. There are 15,000 of them – I counted 100 jelly moulds alone and there are 240 cup shapes to choose from. All of these were destined for the skip.

Rosemary and William Dorling were in despair, but until the aforementioned fateful and wakeful night, I don’t think it crossed their minds to step in and buy the factory themselves. They had almost nothing in the bank and were happy with their lives in the South. But buy it they did, and with what they describe as an unshakeable sense of fulfilling their destiny. Judging by the current turnaround in Burleigh’s fortunes, some intangible force was at their side.

Special tissue paper is printed with the design ‘Calico’, prior to the ink being transferred onto earthenware

To prevent the metal from being damaged, the copper cylinders engraved with patterns are stored without touching

The design incised onto the nell-shaped rubber mould will be inked and stamped on a plate

Skipping the following years of toil, when the Dorlings scarcely saw their beds, a visitor today would never know there had been such problems. You pass beside the glass-fronted lodge where a black cat nudges the nightwatchman should he nod off; you enter the general office, lined with what look like huge linen cupboards from a stately home, painted a delectable shade of mushy pea; from here you step through a mahogany door to the old inner sanctum, which Rosemary and William use as base camp. They have not changed it at all. Two enormous desks with sloping tops face each other and a cupboard still houses dozens of notebooks containing recipes for all the coloured glazes ever used by Burleigh. The desk drawers have cheque stubs from the 1900s and sheaves of hand-painted designs for plates that have not yet been explored. There are dozens of unexplored shelves and cupboards all over the factory, but everybody is too busy to investigate them. Beyond the offices and a blond-wood veneered Thirties showroom displaying sample collections is a very well-secured store for the historically important stock of Burleigh's transfer-printing plates. Going back to the founding of the factory and beyond are a priceless array of copper rollers and flat plates engraved with patterns that eventually get transferred with inks onto earthenware. Another archive much in need of further investigation.

Printed tissue paper, the ink still wet, hangs like washing over ladies who are expert in wrapping the paper onto earthenware to transfer the patterns onto jugs, plates or cups

With the pattern transferred from the tissue, the paper is washed away to leave the design on the earthenware

Outside are the ‘yards’, cobbled alleys about the width of a narrow mews running between long ranges of buildings. Pipes belch forth gusts of steam at ground level, and there is the regular thud of machinery, greatly enhancing a satanic-mill aspect of smoke-blackened brickwork.

Inside could not be more different; all is calm, clean, tidy and white. I was most reminded of being in a bakery. Men and women dressed in white – many of them third-generation pottery workers – pad about shouldering scrubbed planks, carrying batches of cups or jugs that might well be loaves or scones put aside to rise or ready for the oven. A thin dust of white clay powder settles like flour everywhere. Between each of the 25 stages in the turning of clay into, say, a cup, the items are always returned neatly to these planks and trundled on to the next person in the chain. A clay-basher never makes a mould, a mould-maker never sponges off the imperfections, a handle-maker never fixes it to the jug; each is a clearly defined skill and each person is responsible for weeding out substandard pieces. The broken shards used to end up as mountainous heaps on wasteland, and it is said much of Stoke’s terraced housing is built upon these old tips.

Burleigh, The Middleport Pottery, Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent ST6 3PE. Visit burleigh1851.com

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