Cock measuring machine in Staffordshire

by David Haden

Dr. Plot’s Natural History of Staffordshire, written in 1686, makes mention of a machine then in use in this county for gauging the size of fighting-cocks. The writer designates this ingenious contrivance as —

“the nicest piece of art that ever I saw relating to the feathered kingdom, and, indeed, the ‘most curious was an instrument shown me by the Right Worshipful Sir Richard Astley, of Patshull, baronet, of his own invention to match game-cocks, discovering their size, both as to length and girth, to so great an accuracy that there cannot be easily the least mistake.”

[…] as a rule the lightest pair of cocks were fought first, then the next in weight, and so on till the heaviest pair were the last to be pitted.

— from Old English Sports.


Illustration: Bill Mayer.

Death and wildfowl in North Staffordshire

by David Haden

Another interesting addition about my theory on the links between North Staffordshire and certain beliefs about wildfowl, as explored in the central section of my book A History of Burslem and the Fowlea Valley…

“A dying person should not be allowed to lie on a bed or pillow stuffed with feathers from pigeons or wild fowl.”

The source is unspecified, but is either The Folklore of Staffordshire, or Staffordshire Customs, Superstitions and Folklore.

Children and rainbows in Staffordshire

by David Haden

“Many folk beliefs went beyond merely avoiding the rainbow’s spiritual power [a rainbow was believed to harm anyone who pointed to it] — they try to manipulate it. […] Children in Staffordshire, England, attempted to [break the power of rainbows to harm a pointing person] by crossing a pair of sticks or straws on the ground and placing a stone or two atop them, the goal being literally to cross out [the power of] any rainbow they saw.”

   — from: Raymond L. Lee, Jr. and Alistair B. Fraser. The Rainbow Bridge: rainbows in art, myth, and science. Penn State University Press and SPIE Optical Engineering Press, 2001.

Mirrors and souls

by David Haden

My answer to a question Blood and Bone China asked on Facebook…

Q: Where does the myth about not being able to see a vampire’s reflection in a mirror come from?

A: The vampire is deemed not to have a soul, and hence no mirror will reflect him or her. The idea probably came originally from the prehistoric association of pools with sacred deities that were deemed to inhabit them, a widespread belief testified to by abundant votive offerings found by archaeologists at the bottom of ancient pools and ponds in the UK and Europe. Reflections seen in such places were thought to be reflections of the soul, not of the actual body, and hence to pose a danger of seduction. This could be either a danger of self-love (seen in the myth of Narcissus, etc), or a danger of the person’s soul being “taken under” by the watery deity. Possibly this had a root in a belief that one had to shed one’s selfishness when approaching such places, or risk calamity. Then, when mirrors came along in the Bronze Age, these would have been seen as having the similar capability to ‘steal’ or “embody” one’s soul, in much the same way as the similarly reflective dark watery pool. Modern tribal peoples often have similar beliefs, even today, about mirrors and camera lenses and their potential to “steal” one’s soul. As David Jones says, there are also several mirror folk beliefs around funerals and souls (i.e.: cover mirrors while laying out the dead body in a home) that have persisted to the modern day in certain places. The folk association of “bad luck” with breaking household mirrors probably also dates back to such antiquated beliefs. All these can be traced to the idea that the reflection in a mirror is that of the soul, not of the body.

Staffordshire in the early 1600s

by David Haden

Staffordshire, as seen in the volume ‘England Wales Scotland and Ireland Described and Abridged with ye Historic Relation of things Worthy memory from a farr larger Voulume Done by John Speed. Anno Cum privilegio 1620’…

  [ Thanks to: SeriyKotik1970, who has a larger version ]

Apparently they were engraved in the early years of the 1600s, and also appeared in Camden’s Britannia in 1617.

Update, April 2018: huge version, non tatty…

* Old road expert, Charles G. Harper, in his The Manchester and Glasgow road Vol. 1 (1907), on the oldest post-road from Manchester to London in the district…

To go back to still earlier times [17th century, one saw only] horsemen, who were then your only travellers, jogging along from Manchester to London by way of the roundabout route of Warrington, Great Budworth, Cranage Heath, Holmes Chapel, Brereton, Church Lawton, [Red Street,] Newcastle-under-Lyme, whence they would generally proceed by Stone, Lichfield, and Coleshill. That was, with minor divagations suggested by taste and fancy, or by such circumstances as floods or highwaymen, the old original post-road.

Interestingly, Red Street to Holmes Chapel was later my suggestion for the likely route of Sir Gawain’s entry into North Staffordshire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Etruria Valley landscape in the mid 1860s

by David Haden

This was the sort of landscape you had in Stoke-on-Trent in the mid 1860s. This is a large oil painting by Henry Lark Pratt (1805-1873), “Etruria from Basford Bank”. Shelton Church can be seen in the distance over in the far right of the picture, Etruria Hall is on the left. This is the landscape through which the hero of the novel The Spyders of Burslem travels on the train from Stoke station to Longport station.

“I glimpsed [from the steam train] old women and girls out collecting sloeberries along the thick hedges of the rail line. I was obviously in one of those industrial districts where the countryside ways and the new manufacturing ways lived strangely side-by-side. It seemed a bucolic and rustic glimpse, but I had no doubt that each of those rosy-cheeked girls had a tongue in her head that would clip a hedge.” — from The Spyders of Burslem

It’s slightly cropped at the top and bottom, as can be seen from this thumbnail…

The new Basford Bank road was built 1828, alongside the older and much steeper Fowlea Bank road (seen here as the roofs paralleling the new road) which is the logical place at which the old Roman road at Wolstanton could have dropped down the side of the valley to reach what is now the Stoke station area (where it’s known to have run). Further down the valley was too likely to be flooded out in winter where the Fowlea met the Trent.

Staffordshire University lecture on the 1860s

by David Haden

Staffordshire University is to host a public lecture on the ‘Potteries, Public Health and Karl Marx’. Specifically Das Kapital, in which Karl Marx selected a paragraph of evidence from an appendix of the voluminous Royal Commission on Employment of Children (1862, published 1863), to illustrate the conditions of the Potteries workers in the early 1860s…

From the report of the Commissioners [published] in 1863, the following: Dr. J.T. Arlidge, senior physician of the North Staffordshire Infirmary, says: “The potters as a class, both men and women, represent a degenerated population, both physically and morally. They are, as a rule, stunted in growth, ill-shaped, and frequently ill-formed in the chest; they become prematurely old, and are certainly short-lived …”

Actually, Marx slightly mis-quoted Arlidge, and also mis-spelled his name as “Arledge”. But what is interesting, and what Marx neglects to mention, is that Arlidge had literally only just arrived in the district when Assistant Commissioner Longe of the 1862 Commission was taking evidence in the Potteries in April 1862, and that Arlidge had then undertaken no systematic research in Stoke. His main academic training in London had been in Botany. He had moved up from Kent to Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1862, and although he had once been apprenticed to a GP, in Kent he had been wholly a psychiatrist (then called an ‘alienist’) — only interested in the treatment of the mentally ill. In the Potteries he kept rooms at Trentham and a house at Newcastle-under-Lyme, so he was not exactly cheek-by-jowl with the workers. His comments were regarded as extreme, at the time, by people in the Potteries and by medical colleagues, and he had to defend them in the letters pages of the Staffordshire Sentinel. Basically his reply seems to have been that the notion was ‘common knowledge’. Yet one of his colleagues, William Spanton of the North Staffordshire Infirmary, later wrote in his 1920 memoirs that Arlidge had… “greatly offended manufacturers and his medical associates” with his comments.

As it was, Arlidge was broadly correct on the statistical fact of pottery workers as a class being “short-lived”, although this appears to have been concentrated among particular types of pottery workers. After the firing process, some of the dry and finely-powdered flint adheres to the ceramic ware. This has to be removed by hand scouring. Fragments of the fine dry flint dust (flint was ground up with bone to make the wet ‘slip’ for the clay) can be inhaled by a type of worker called ‘scourers’, and presumably also by those unpacking and sweeping the kilns, and this gave rise to lung diseases. This, together with exposure to lead in some decorating paints, had by the early 1860s led to an overall higher death rate in potteries workers than in other large industries. Arlidge noted scourers were “always women belonging usually to the rougher, more ignorant and reckless of their sex”. Many manufacturers rapidly shifted to leadless or reduced-lead glazes, but the flint dust was generally only dealt with by forced ventilation during the scouring process.

On the overall death-rate, Arlidge was in 1864 able to produce new research, distributed by him in a pamphlet rather than a medical journal, proving his earlier anecdotal claim that potters were “short-lived”. Yet it seems that his wider comments — those used by Marx and forever thereafter repeated as gospel by socialists — were highly contested by other local medical men and by the local people at the time, and were not then based on any research work done by Arlidge himself or even on his general training of treating physical ailments in an industrial environment. Arlidge did later write a book on the subject of industrial diseases, but his findings have been found wanting. For instance, a 1973 scholarly article in the Journal of Industrial Medicine by E. Posner concluded that: “it must be recorded that many passages in Arlidge’s book [on industrial health] have not withstood the test of time”.

Conditions were indeed bad in certain types of small workshops of the mid 1800s, especially for the young children who would often be sent to work by alcoholic adults ‘in the place’ of the adult. But the quotes selected by Marx have the effect of giving the impression that the problems swept across the whole of the industry, and indeed the whole population of the district, rather than being largely confined to certain specific tasks within ceramics production. Marx’s slight mis-quoting of Arlidge serves to emphasize this effect on the reader.

Marx also neglects to mention that a Dr. Boothroyd — whom he selectively quotes as saying that: “Each successive generation of potters is more dwarfed and less robust than the preceding one” — was also the mayor of Hanley, and thus presumably a highly political figure. One suspects it was from Boothroyd and his circle that Arlidge adopted his initial prejudiced position on Potteries health. In 1878 Arlidge was himself elected Mayor of Newcastle-under-Lyme, a little more than ten years after arriving in the district. Thus one has to wonder what part headline-grabbing claims about health problems played in the local politics of the day.