Some early Etruria characters, extracted from the reminiscence “The Land of Pots” in TITAN: A Monthly Magazine, 1859.

William Theed, another gifted artist and most amiable man, for a long time devoted all his talents to the improvements at Etruria. He lived rent-free in one of the cottages on the Basford bank, and was married to a charming little French woman, whose foreign manners and broken English seemed out of place in that dull smoky land.

Among the chemists [in the early days at Etruria] were Leslie, long professor in the University of Edinburgh, who is described as fat and ugly, yet, like many a hideous mortal, intensely vain of his person; and Chisholm, a worthy old bachelor, who worked out the ideas and suggestions of others.

In fact, Etruria soon became the resort of scientific men, among whom was Sir James Hall, the father of Basil Ball, and a great oddity.

For a long time there was no church or chapel at Etruria, and those who could not or would not go to Stoke or Hanley to hear the gospel, were addressed by a working potter, a Wesleyan who roamed from place to place carrying a lantern under his coat to light him home at night.

Canals were the railroads of those days, and a person who lived for many years in Etruria remember seeing the red jackets [soldiers], and hearing the shrill note of the bagpipes of the Highlanders, passing down on barges during the long war.

Walking by the sea at Penzance one day, Thomas Wedgwood [of Etruria] saw a boy picking up seaweed and rock plants. He spoke to him, and was so pleased with his answers, that he undertook to secure for him an education which should develop his latent capacities. He wrote in his behalf to Dr. Beddoes … The Doctor received [Humphry] Davy as assistant at Clifton, and Mr Wedgwood supplied the necessary funds.¹

(No Davy Lamp would have meant no deep coal mining, thus no industrial revolution that lasted, and thus no modern world… )

(1) This is corrected a little by the book A Group of Englishmen (1795 to 1815) Being Records of the Younger Wedgwoods…

However I would suggest that it was one thing to receive an introduction by letter, by a rather limited local antiquarian, of a promising local lad. It would have been quite another thing to have an introduction by Thomas Wedgwood, with a donation of £1,000 attached.

A facsimile sketch of one of the few remaining heliotype photographs made by Thomas Wedgwood in a series at Eturia, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1791-3.

From the book A group of Englishmen (1795 to 1815) being records of the younger Wedgwoods and their friends (1871).

The 260-page book Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells: a record of a personal and a literary friendship (1960, Hart-Davis / University of Illinois Press) is sadly not available in any library in the Potteries. It’s not on the Staffordshire or Keele catalogues, and Stoke Local Archives is listing it as “0, reservations unavailable” which seems to imply “stolen or lost”. According to Copac the nearest copy is down at Birmingham University.

However, I’m pleased to see it’s actually online at Archive.org for free: Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells: a record of a personal and a literary friendship. It’s been scanned and placed online by the University of Florida. Good for them. There’s even a Kindle ereader edition. The letters are annotated.

Since the book has been placed “Out of copyright”, here are the front portrait pictures, extracted by me at their highest resolution from the raw scans package. Feel free to re-use.

I found a very cool 1949 photo of a gas-holder at Etruria, Stoke-on-Trent. This one was up near the Shelton New Rd., across from Twyfords at Cliffe Vale (now Lock 38). I recall that a few years ago Fred Hughes tried to have one much like it, and nearby to this one, preserved as the last local example of the type. The photo is at Britain From Above. Such a pity they don’t take Paypal — they must be missing out on so much income by not doing so.

We also see there the Fowlea Brook, still flowing free and shining in the sunshine just above and behind the gas holder. It flows right to left, and goes under the old railway line to Market Drayton and Shropshire. How much would the city give today, for that line to still be intact and able to reach HS2!

If the picture goes missing due to a future blog move, the photo is EAW020983.

This blog post has now been superseded by my new book on H. G. Wells in the Potteries.

This blog post has now been superseded by my new book on H. G. Wells in the Potteries.

A new paper, “The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world”…

In order to trace the origins of the domestic cat, the authors examined DNA of 230 ancient and modern cats from Europe, north and east Africa, and southwest Asia, spanning around 9,000 years, from the Mesolithic period to the twentieth century CE.

The first major [domestication] event was probably in the Fertile Crescent about 7,500 years ago, from wildcats originating in Anatolia. “Cats can then be seen moving with human populations as early as 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, as farmers spread from the Near East into Europe, and also with seafaring communities,” […] “Cats appear to have traveled along maritime trade routes … The second major wave of domestication occurred in the Greek and Roman periods, when a fad for Egyptian cats led to a movement of domestic cats descended from North African Felis silvestris lybica to Europe. … “The fad for Egyptian cats very quickly spread through the ancient Greek and Roman world, and even much further afield [specifically] the presence of the Egyptian lineage IV-C1 [cats] at the Viking port of Ralswiek 7–11th century AD”.

The team also analysed one of the rare genetic markers of domestication in cats: the colouring of their fur. “The gene coding for spots and mottling is found only in domestic cats, while the fur of wildcats is always striped,” the authors said. “And here we stumbled on a surprise: spots only began to appear under the Ottoman Empire, between 500 and 1300 CE, becoming more common after 1300 both in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe. This is a very late development in relation to other species. … this phenomenon constitutes irrefutable evidence of selection by humans …”

I see that in 2007 the famous British science-fiction author Brian Aldiss updated his famous Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1973). The original book was one of the strongest surveys of the best short science fiction published during the 1940s-1960s. Doubtless I read that book in the 1980s, when I read everything worth reading in science-fiction except for the novels of Heinlein and Rand. Regrettably I was gullible and thus easily put off those two great writers by socialist critics and commentators, who sought to dissuade the young from reading anything that might be ‘libertarian’.

Aldiss’s new 560-page edition of the book has added his choice from the intervening 30 years, bringing the book up to 31 stories. Newly added are works such as the novella “Great Work of Time” by John Crowley (whose Nabokovian Little, Big I still have on my shelves) which concludes the volume. Sadly I see that there’s no audiobook version, which I thought there might have been for such a major book from Penguin.

I occasionally nibbled at bits of literary science fiction after leaving it in the late 1980s, but only really returned to print science-fiction in 2008 with Stephenson’s superb door-stopper novel Anathem. As such I’m still winkling out the various nuggets I missed in the 20 year gap. It’s proven to be rather a useful time-saving strategy actually, as I can now bypass all the mediocre, leftist and politically-correct, ‘middle-age angst’ and ‘young adult’ books and can just go straight to the very best. Ideally in audiobook format.

I discovered Aldiss’s new expanded Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus via a roundabout route. I was reading a short interview with the curator of the London Barbican’s excellent new major exhibition on the history of science fiction (on until September 2017), and read that…

Gyger said his favourite science fiction book was John Crowley’s novella “Great Work of Time”, explaining: “Crowley did a lot of Science Fiction, and still does, and his Great Work of Time is a very small novel about time-travel, and is very nostalgic and very powerful about people trying to kind of perpetuate the British Empire forever.”

‘That sounds fun’, I thought, for a moment confusing Crowley with Cowper. ‘Where is it?’ I found that the late-1980s steampunk-ish novella is included in Aldiss’s 2007 edition of Science Fiction Omnibus, and I’m looking forward to dipping into it on the Kindle ereader. Apparently Crowley’s “Great Work of Time” is a little more than just ‘fun’, though, as you might expect on such a topic. It’s said to be a lyrical work on time-travel, about the dangers of civilisational stagnation and the ways in which one has to make harsh choices for the wider good.

It’s interesting to learn that there are new text-to-speech Sapi5 voices, available in regional British variants:

* Welsh voices, Geraint and Gwyneth for text-to-speech as either Welsh-accented English or Welsh. Free, but an email request is required — registered blind people can request the voices directly from the RNIB.

* Scottish Voices, Heather and Stuart, plus Ceitidh for Gaelic. Educational non-commercial use only, and free — but registration is required.

* There are no other free accented voices, such as Cornish or Brummie, so far as I can tell. But as the cost of developing a Sapi5 TTS voice comes down, via automation of the process, and as the systems that drive the voices make them sound less robotic, I foresee a future in which some distinctive British regions and cities develop and offer their own ‘voice’. (Update: there’s now a Black Country voice and even a Glasgow voice).

There’s also Microsoft Hazel, a free British voice and better than the previous Microsoft British variants. This voice shipped as standard with Windows 8 and 8.1. The quickest way to tell if a Windows 8 user has it seems to be to install the best genuinely freeware TTS reader for Windows, Balabolka.

If you don’t have Microsoft Hazel you may be able to get it from Windows Control Panel: Language Pack | Add a Language | Select | the wait until you see the “Download is ready…” link appear. (You can apparently also get a free French-accented Sapi5 voice, Hortense, this way. Just download the French language pack for Windows).

Balabolka’s “Direct Speech” and XML tags markup option can help you set up a stage-play -like script, in which there are different voices speaking in the same document. So you could, theoretically, have a Scot talking to someone from the Black Country. Here is an example of a coded script containing a few lines from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and showing voice changes, pauses and pitch/speed shifts…

Keep in mind there are different markup tags, and some will work with some voices and not others.

Note that spelling needs to be fixed to get some voices to pronounce properly, for instance for to four,and I to eye. Overall it’s a bit of a laborious process, and — until we can get some AI-automation onto it — you might do better to hire some actors on Fiverr or rent a local music studio if you want to make a short audio play.

If you do want a few commercial British voices, then the following are recommended and are effectively abandonware today:

* IVONA 2 Amy and Emma (aka 1.6, but they’re actually 2) (32-bit)

* IVONA 2 Brian (aka 1.6, but they’re actually 2) (32-bit)

* Voiceware VW Bridget (shows up in the lists as American, but is British, upper-class) (32-bit)

32-bit will run on Babaloka (32-bit) on 64-bit Windows.

David Horovitz, A survey and analysis of the place-names of Staffordshire (2003), freely available for download…

“The main body of this work consists of a gazetteer of all of the main, and many of the minor, place-names of Staffordshire (meaning any places which are or were at any time known to have been in what was, or became, Staffordshire), with early spellings, and observations on the likely or possible derivation of those names, often in a rather more discursive form than standard works on place-names, particularly where uncertainty exists as to the derivation.”

A new letter, purchased by The Bodleian library this week…

“Lady Gerard’s discovery of a ‘healing spring’ at Willowbridge in Staffordshire would be recorded in 1676 by her chaplain Samuel Gilbert in a pamphlet entitled ‘Fons sanitatis’ (London, 1676). She died in 1703. … The present letter reveals Lady Gerard to have had a serious interest in writings on witchcraft”.

The springs appear to have been about 8 miles south-west of Newcastle-under-Lyme…

“Willowbridge Wells are on the north side of the parish, nearly 2 miles North of Ashley, and in the neighbourhood of extensive woods which supply immense quantities of crate-wood for the Potteries, and timber for the manufacture of oak baskets. The wells in the now enclosed park of Willowbridge were formerly in great celebrity for their medicinal virtues.” — from William White’s History, Gazetteer and Directory of Staffordshire, 1851.

Roy Booth has dug up the relevant text from “Fons sanitatis, or, The healing spring at Willowbridge in Stafford-shire found out by the Right Honourable the Lady Jane Gerard”, and gives an extract…

“This Spring was first taken notice of, and several experiments tryed with it, by the most Ingenious and true vertuosa, that Right Honourable Lady Jane Gerard, Baroness of Bromley, of Sandon in Staffordshire, whose Charitable care and charge, in damming it out from the common Water, into which it delivered it self, (a large Pool through which the River Terne runs, taking its beginning about half a mile above it,) causing it to be divided into two large Baths; the one for Men, the other for Horses.”

I’ve also searched Google Books. I see that the whole of Fons sanitatis is available there. Thomas Pennant’s account of The Journey from Chester to London (1783) notes…

“I RETURNED into the great road by Winnington forge and Willowbridge wells. The last were once in high esteem for their sanative waters, strongly impregnated with sulphur. They were formerly much frequented on account of bathing…”

The “once” suggests they had declined in repute or power, by the 1780s.

William Pitt’s A Topographical History of Staffordshire (1817) add more…

The North Staffordshire Field Club visited a century later in 1917, a short while after the woods had been denuded for war-time timber needs…

PIPEGATE, WILLOWBRIDGE AND ASHLEY.

April 28th, 1917.

The opening excursion of the season was favoured with the usual “Club weather” and on alighting at Pipegate Station the members at once made their way to the outskirts of Willowbridge Wells, where the leader gave a short address. He stated that the place owed its name to the large number of sulphurous springs, as no less than sixty of these had been noted within an area of ten square yards. In the 17th and 18th Centuries the waters were highly esteemed on account of their curative properties, and Dr. Plot, who visited the district in 1686, quaintly remarks:—

“It cures many diseases by its balsamic virtue and great subtlety and volatility, easily permeating the closest texture and most inaccessible parts of the body, when once
heated by the stomach if taken inwardly, or by the external heat of the skin, if applied outwardly by way of a bath.”

The road led through Willowbridge Woods, which have suffered heavily from the recent demand for timber, and here Mr. Ridge addressed the party on the ecology of the district, tracing the steps by which the once dominant type of forest vegetation became converted into heather moor.

There’s no mention in the 1917 report (given in the 1918 volume) of the springs still being in existence, or the relics of their stone enclosures visible. In which case one has to assume that the transition from woodland to heathland may have dried them up long before the First World War fellings. The mention of “wells” in the 1851 text (see above) suggests the natural water level had sunk quite deep by the 1850s, deep enough that wells were required to get to the sulphurous waters that once flowed on the surface.