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Coade's Lithodipyra, terra-cotta, or artificial stone manufactory at Pedlar's Acre, opposite Whitehall Stairs, enjoyed some considerable reputation in its time. The works were established by Mrs. Coade, of Lyme Regis, in 1760, and were finally closed in 1840. Flaxman, John Bacon, Banks, Rossi, and Panzetta were employed as modellers. John Bacon, the sculptor, had, by-the-by, been apprenticed to a Mr. Crispe, who owned a china manufactory in Lambeth.

Among the noteworthy productions of Coade's artificial stoneworks are the rood screen of St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and the bas-relief in the pediment over the western portico of Greenwich Hospital "The Death of Nelson," which was designed by Benjamin West, and modelled by Bacon and Panzetta.

The oldest existing Pottery about London next to Fulham is that of Messrs. Stiff, which was founded in a small way on part of the site of old Hereford House, Lambeth, in 1751, and is nowadays a very flourishing stoneware pottery.

There are few places in the vicinity of London where small potteries have not existed some time or other within the past three hundred years-Vauxhall, Aldgate, Millwall, Stepney, Greenwich, Deptford, Kentish Town, Isleworth, Hounslow, Mortlake (there are some interesting examples of Mortlake delft and Isleworth redware in the South Kensington Museum), and Southwark. A luckless potter of Southwark, Nathaniel Oade, has achieved unenviable immortality as the victim of a terrible domestic tragedy, the details of which are given in the Post-Boy of March 1, 1718. Because Oade refused to give up his house and trade to his four sons they swore to have them in spite of him. So, with the aid of an attorney, they procured their father's arrest in a sham action for £500, and then seized the house by force. The mother, who refused to give up the books, was shot dead in the struggle, as was also another woman, and the premises were only retaken after a regular siege by the police and military. The youngest son and an accomplice were hanged for murder, and the others convicted of manslaughter and transported.

The mention of old London potteries suggests to most people Chelsea and Bow et præterea nihil. Under what precise circumstances the making of soft porcelain was begun at the riverside "Village of Palaces" it is difficult to say. Its beginning dates from the close of the seventeenth century, and Llewellyn Jewitt is probably not far wrong in suggesting that it was inspired by the example of Dwight at the adjoining village of Fulham.

In the train of William of Orange there came over to England a

Dutchman of good family and great attainments, John Philip Elers. Elers was possessed of some important pottery secrets, and first introduced salt glazing into England. In partnership with his brother he started a pottery near Burslem where, it is said, they adopted extraordinary precautions to prevent the revelation of their trade secrets to the natives. They were even at pains, it was declared, to find deaf and dumb workmen and congenital idiots for light jobs. Eventually they were hoist by their own petard, for one Samuel Astbury, an aspiring potter, feigned idiocy for two years, and having in the course of that time mastered all the Dutchmen's mysterious processes, he threw off the mask and started an opposition. The story appears to be one that should be received with respectful reserve. However that may be, it seems that, after twenty years' contention with his neighbours, John Philip Elers had enough of North Staffordshire, and, his brother being dead, removed to Chelsea, where he did a great deal towards improving the already existing manufacture of soft porcelain.

Elers left a son, Paul Elers, who was the father of Richard Lovell Edgworth's first wife. Paul does not seem to have inherited much of the paternal ability. He was a tiresome, rather impertinent busybody who worried Josiah Wedgwood terribly with his correspondence some years later. Wedgwood executed a medallion in jasper of John Philip Elers, from a portrait which had been sent to him by Paul, who desired to claim for his father the distinction of having been the inventor of British porcelain, which Wedgwood would by no means concede. It is astonishing how often British porcelain seems to have been invented in the course of a hundred years. Then the irrepressible Elers wrote and suggested to Wedgwood the desirability of issuing a series of medallion portraits of celebrities. The idea was not worth much at this juncture, seeing that Wedgwood and Bentley had already produced some hundreds out of a series which was ultimately to number 881.

Then Paul Elers suggested that the application of the black basalt body, invented by Wedgwood, to the making of reservoirs and bombproof powder magazines, on account of its extreme hardness, would be an important public work. Finally, he was urgent upon Mr. Wedgwood to abandon such trivialities as cameos, plaques, &c., and to turn his serious attention to the manufacture of earthenware water-pipes for London and other great towns. At this point the great potter's overstrained patience seems to have given way at last, and we hear no more of the correspondence.

This, however, is anticipating. Returning to John Philip Elers

it does not seem clear at what date his connection with the Chelsea works terminated. The organisation under which Chelsea became celebrated came into existence about 1745, according to Mr. Chaffers. Mason, who was employed as an artist in the works, fixes the date as 1748 or 1749, but as his own connection with them did not begin before 1751 he may have been mistaken. The really halcyon days of Chelsea porcelain did not endure for more than fifteen years-1750 to 1765-but large profits were doubtless made in that period, a circumstance due, mainly, notwithstanding the great merit of the manufacture, to the fact that it was really a protected industry. It received not only the substantial money support and vigorous. patronage of the Royal Family, but opposition was practically stamped out by the importation of foreign porcelain for sale being prohibited by law. The Duke of Cumberland was the main support of the undertaking, and the manager was a clever foreigner of the name of Spermont, by profession a silversmith.

Mason, whom I have already quoted, says that the Duke of Cumberland and Sir Everard Fawkener were the first proprietors, and that Spermont "was made manager at a salary of a guinea a day, with allowances for apprentices and other emoluments. Sir Everard died in 1755, much reduced in circumstances, when Mr. Spermont became sole proprietor and amassed a fortune. He retired in 1765 and travelled about England, and the manufactory was shut up for two years, for he neither would let it nor carry it on himself."

Probably Mr. Spermont, as a shrewd business man, knew perfectly well what he was about, and realised exactly wherein lay the strength of the position of the Chelsea Porcelain Works. When the Duke of Cumberland died an able friend and patron had been lost, and the interests of rival manufacturers were now so strongly backed that the protection and support of the Government was no longer to be relied upon.

Spermont understood his privileges, and was tenacious about them, as appears from an interesting memorial from "the undertaker of the Chelsea manufacture of porcelain," which is preserved among the Lansdowne MSS. in the British Museum. This memorial is directed against the systematic evasion of the Act prohibiting the importation of Dresden china for sale. Certain exemptions were made in favour of private persons receiving the china for their own use, and of foreign ministers in England; the effect of which was that the house of one of the ambassadors was turned into a warehouse, where trade in Dresden china was unblushingly carried on.

Jonas Hanway, about the same time, called attention to the way in which this protective legislation was being set at nought.

Spermont, in the course of this memorial, sets forth that, being a silversmith by profession and having casual acquaintance with a chemist who had some special knowledge of porcelain-making, he was tempted to a trial, and, upon the progress he made, he was encouraged to pursue it with great labour and expense. Furthermore, he states that the manufacture employs one hundred persons, and "a nursery of thirty lads from the parishes and charity schools were bred to designing and painting." Notwithstanding the opposition of smuggled Dresden, business seems to have been good at the time the memorial was sent in, for the previous winter's sales were stated at more than £3,500.

Doubtless the fact that, under Spermont's judicious rule, Chelsea had become a training-ground for designers and painters, induced Josiah Wedgwood to move his enamelling works here in 1769, about the time that the old Chelsea Porcelain Works showed signs of breaking up.

The building in which the Chelsea manufacture was carried on was an aggregation of old timber houses which stood at the corner of Justice Walk, an avenue of stately lime trees leading from Church Street to Laurence Street. Wedgwood & Bentley's new works were started not far off in Little Cheyne Row, where Mr. Bentley took up his residence, his partner looking after the interests of his more important establishment at Burslem.

The Chelsea Porcelain Works were sold in 1769 to Mr. Duesbury, who had established a successful manufacture of porcelain at Derby in 1751. For some years he carried on the manufacture at both places simultaneously, until in 1784 he decided to dismantle the Chelsea Works altogether, and transfer the seat of his business to Derby. Mr. Duesbury, who had bought the Bow Porcelain Works in 1775 or 1776, had already carried out the same arrangement with respect to that once celebrated Pottery; so that, from this date, these two great London manufactories became merged in the stillexisting Crown Derby Porcelain Works.

The last that we hear of Mr. Spermont, or Sprimont, is the advertisement of a sale by Christie, in March 1771, of "the pictures of the late proprietor of the Chelsea Porcelain Works, who is retired into the country, brought from his houses at Richmond and Chelsea."

The works at Bow, called New Canton, are said to have had their origin about 1730, when some samples of china clay were

brought from Virginia and made the subject of a patent by Mr. Edward Heylin. In 1749 Thomas Frye took out his patent for making porcelain. It is probably superfluous to add that Thomas Frye was described in his epitaph as "the inventor and first manufacturer of porcelain in England." Frye, if we may trust his monumental inscription, must have been a remarkable man. He was a painter originally, and executed a portrait of Frederick Prince of Wales, and when he weakened his health by too much hanging about his kilns he took to art again to such effect that his tombstone assures us that "he had the correctness of Van Dyck and the colouring of Rubens," while "in miniature painting he equalled, if not excelled, the famous Cooper."

One of Frye's daughters, Mrs. Catherine Willcox, who married unfortunately, became a clever china painter, and worked for Wedgwood & Bentley, at Chelsea. The Bow Works passed into the possession of Weatherby & Crowther, by whom a considerable business was done for several years, the old books of the firm showing a return of £10,000 to £11,000 a year up to 1765. Weatherby being dead, John Crowther, the other partner, who also carried on the business of a china-man in Cornhill, became bankrupt in 1763. After a long struggle to carry on the works they were eventually sold to Mr. Duesbury, of Derby, as already stated, and the separate existence of the Bow Porcelain Works came to an end.

Accompanying an old Bow punch-bowl in the British Museum is a curious and somewhat pathetic document, which deserves to be quoted in extenso: "This bowl was made at the Bow China Manufactory at Stratford-le-Bow, Essex, about the year 1760, and painted there by me, Thomas Craft-my cipher is in the bottom: it is painted in what we used to call the old Japan taste, a taste at that time much esteemed by the late Duke of Argyle. There is nearly two pennyweight of gold, about 15s. I had it in hand at different times about three months; about two weeks time was bestowed upon it. It could not have been manufactured, &c., for less than £4. There is not its similitude. I took it in a box to Kentish Town, and had it burned there in Mr. Gyles's kiln; cost me 35.; it was cracked the first time of using it. Miss Nancy Sha. (sic), a daughter of the late Mr. Patrick Blake, was christened with it. I never used it but in particular respect to my company, and I desire my legatee (as mentioned in my will) to do the same. Perhaps it may be thought I have said too much about this trifling toy. A reflection steals in upon my mind that this said bowl may meet with the same fate that the manufactory where it was made has done, and like the famous

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