All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  White salt-glazed stoneware, which was the principal beneficiary of the new slip-casting technology in the mid-eighteenth century, was on its way out when Lord Rodney followed in the footsteps of Admiral Vernon and Frederick the Great as the potters’ best-selling hero. It was a distinction that came not with his capture of Martinique in the Seven Years’ War but with the defeat of the French fleet at the Battle of the Saints at the end of the American Revolution. By that time, the cream-colored earthenware made universally popular by Josiah Wedgwood had become the medium through which the adulatory message would be imparted. The good word then was that Rodney had seized the French flagship the Ville de Paris and had taken the French admiral, the Comte de Grasse, prisoner.

  There had been precious little for the British public to wax enthusiastic about during the long land war with the Americans; even the victories had a sour taste when it was remembered that the losers had been relatives and customers. But defeating the French was something else again, and British jubilation was magnified out of proportion to the value of the victory. The battle was fought on April 12, 1782, and in May Sir George Bridges Rodney became a baron and, like Admiral Vernon before him, aspired to pub-sign immortality. He, too, became the subject for souvenir mugs, but this time the sprigged decoration was more accomplished (Fig. 68). On the front, in an oval medallion, sailed the captured French flagship under a streamer reading VILLA DE PARIS (spelling was nobody’s strong suit in the eighteenth century), and flanked by standing figures in naval uniform, holding a telescope, and behind a flag inscribed LORD RODNEY. These creamware mugs were painted in a variety of underglaze colors, commonly with bands of green at top and bottom, and with plain brown or leopard-spotted brown on yellow backgrounds to the white pipeclay reliefs. One might suppose that these mugs would be of interest only to the British—but one would be wrong. A fragment has been found in a privy pit in downtown Alexandria, Virginia, having been thrown there in the early nineteenth century and another has been unearthed at Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, its presence puzzling because the fortress site had long since been abandoned. By 1782 the township is thought to have been occupied only by impoverished fisherfolk who would hardly have been interested in Rodney souvenirs.

  68. More accomplished sprig molding greeted Admiral Rodney’s 1782 victory over the French at the Battle of the Saints. This cream-colored earthenware mug is decorated on the exterior with a brown-mottled orange slip and with green bands at top and bottom. A central medallion depicts the captured French flagship the Ville de Paris and on either side stand figures of Lord Rodney holding a blue banner bearing his name and his newly bestowed title. Height 4¾ inches.

  The next moment for British souvenir-promoting elation was tempered with sorrow, which, if anything, was better for business. The date was November 21, 1805, the victory Trafalgar, and Admiral Horatio Nelson the dead hero. Creamware was by then being replaced as the common household earthenware by a whitened glazed fabric today known as pearlware, and it was this, decorated with underglaze blue transfer prints, that provided the cheapest and most popular of commemorative mugs and jugs. Hastily engraved copper plates provided transfers that could be cut and trimmed to fit vessels of different sizes. That the cutting resulted in the almost nonsensical cobbling of elaborate inscriptions mattered little, for the women who applied the transfers could read no better than could most of the customers. Thus the small jug shown in Figure 69 has had its print trimmed to such an extent that Nelson’s flagship Victory is labeled VICORY and even the admiral himself has lost so much of his “L” that his name almost reads NESON. As for his famous signal to the fleet before the battle, that is reduced to ENGLAN PECTS EVRY MAI TO DO HIS DUTY. There were, of course, many more accomplished memorials to the great man, from ceramic busts and plaques to marble effigies and sculptured snuffboxes, but for my money the once common souvenirs for common people are the most interesting. Not only are they associated with a historic figure and a momentous event but they also recall the popular emotion of a nation, an unparalleled blend of elation, pride, sorrow, and patriotism that has left Trafalgar as the best remembered British victory of any war.

  69. Poorly transfer-printed in underglaze blue, this pitcher recalls the death of Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. His ship, the Victory, is illustrated on one side and his portrait on the other, with a list of his titles, honors, and battles in between. The rim and handle are sloppily outlined in overglaze brown. Probably made at Swansea. Height 4¾ inches.

  In ceramic terms, love of king and country were sometimes rather curiously expressed, as in the case of slipware chamber pots made near London in the third quarter of the seventeenth century after the restoration of Charles II and inscribed PRAISE GOD AND HONOUR THE KING. A century later, Staffordshire salt-glaze potters applied medallions to the fronts of chamber pots bearing the initials and even the portrait of George III. It has been suggested that these were intended to amuse customers who did not like the king, but that explanation can hardly explain a pearlware specimen found in Jamaica decorated in the same way with a coronation portrait of the popular and virginal Queen Victoria.

  In Britain, ceramic coronation souvenirs date back at least as far as the seventeenth century, when they were produced both in slipware and delftware, but it was not until the introduction of transfer printing that it became possible to mass-produce them. The long reign of Queen Victoria was marked by a string of souvenirs, though, surprisingly, those of her coronation are among the rarest of commemorative ceramics (Fig. 70). Her jubilee souvenirs, however, are still readily available at modest prices. Artistically, there is not much to be said for the Messrs. Doultons’ tribute to Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897 (Fig. 71), yet there is a piquancy in its prayer ENDUE HER PLENTEOUSLY WITH HEAVENLY GIFTS, GRANT HER IN HEALTH, WEALTH, LONG TO LIVE. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, and in its resonant styling VICTORIA THE BELOVED QUEEN OF GREAT BRITAIN, IRELAND & THE COLONIES, EMPRESS OF INDIA the words roll from the tongue like waves before the bow of a British dreadnought. To modern Englishmen such mugs are a glimpse of lost glory, but for their original owners they were a tangible reminder of a glorious summer day and the greatest free show of the age. Chauncey Depew, a distinguished American who was there, declared that the reality of the spectacle far exceeded anyone’s expectation. “To have in one hour,” he said, “the representation of the peoples of one quarter of the habitable globe, representing every race and religion, marching under one flag, and expressing in the most emphatic way their loyalty to Queen and Empress, was the most superb exhibition of world-wide Empire and loyalty to a sovereign witnessed in modern times.” Then, politician that he was, Depew quickly covered his tracks, adding, “As an American I ascribe much to the lesson of the American revolution changing the colonial policy of Great Britain, so that she now keeps her colonies instead of losing them.”3

  70. A brown stoneware gin flask decorated in mold relief on both sides with a figure of Queen Victoria at the time of her coronation. The pose is actually borrowed from Sir George Hayter’s 1833 portrait of the then Princess Victoria. Probably made at Lambeth. About 1837. Height 7 inches.

  71. A typical and rather horrible souvenir of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, this mug made by Doulton of Burslem is transfer-printed in orange brown. A piece of now-black ribbon is attached to the handle, perhaps put there to identify ownership in a large family that had the misfortune to possess a number of such mugs. Height 3½ inches.

  I hope somebody gave him a free mug.

  In my own collecting of commemorative ceramics I began in the eighteenth century, without any clearly defined goals, and gradually worked my way forward. There is much to be said, however, for starting with the silver wedding of Elizabeth II and working backward. Just as in philately, ceramic errors and anomalies provide added interest, so, for example, mugs, cups, and beakers made in the expectation of Edward VIII’s coronation have a special appeal. Large numbers of them were shipped to the West Indies when manufacturers found tha
t they had put their money on the wrong man, presumably hoping that the colonials might have difficulty distinguishing between abdicated Edward and his brother George.

  Most of these souvenirs are quite horrible examples of the pot-decorator’s art, but now and again ugliness was no accident. Thus the jug seen in Figure 72, with its scowling face and hooked nose, is a deliberate caricature of another hero of the Napoleonic Wars, the Duke of Wellington, who, alas, was later to become less popular as a politician than he had been as the victor of Waterloo. “Old Nosey,” as he was called by the notoriously irreverent British public, was lampooned on beer mugs for his temperance and on tobacco pipes for his banning of smoking in soldiers’ barracks. A London street seller of tobacco boxes and pipes found the latter particularly profitable. “The best sale of the comic heads,” he said, “was when the Duke put the soldiers’ pipes out at the barracks; wouldn’t allow them to smoke there. It was a Wellington’s head with his thumb to his nose, taking a sight, you know, sir. They went off capital. Lots of people that liked their pipe bought ’em, in the public-houses especial, ’cause, as I heard one man say, ‘it made the old boy a-ridiculing of hisself.’”4

  72. Press-molded into a caricature of the Duke of Wellington, this brown stoneware jug was probably made after he became Prime Minister in 1828. At that time the Iron Duke’s popularity was waning and unkind cartoons proliferating. However, there is said to be a companion jug portraying Napoleon, in which case a manufacture date around 1815 would be reasonable. Probably made at Lambeth. Height 6⅞ inches.

  Just as ceramic souvenirs could be used to praise or discredit, so, on occasion, they could be employed to express public sympathy. A good example is provided by the pearlware jug shown in Figure 73a and bearing on its side a printed portrait of Caroline of Brunswick, niece of George III and the wife of George IV. It is not a particularly becoming pose, but the engraver has made up for that by adding a loudly loyal GOD SAVE QUEEN CAROLINE! It is an innocent enough picture—if one does not remember what happened in 1820. It was in that year that the king tried to be rid of his wife, saying that he would never allow her to become queen. On his accession he had offered Caroline an annuity of £50,000 if she would renounce her rights and stay out of England. She refused to do so and persisted all the way to the coronation when the doors of Westminster Abbey were closed against her. Meanwhile, the government (at the king’s urging) had instituted divorce proceedings in the House of Lords, alleging her adultery with an Italian, Count Bartolomeo Bergami; but the unsavory business was handled with such ineptitude that no matter how guilty Caroline may have been, it offended the British workingman’s sense of fair play. Unfortunately it did her little good, for less than three weeks after she had been denied the crown, she died.

  In 1818, while still Prince Regent, her husband (whose own morals left everything to be desired) had sent a commission to Milan to collect evidence against Caroline, and it was the report of that commission, backed by an imported troop of seedy Italian witnesses, that led to the introduction of the infamous Bill of Pains and Penalties and the Lords’ attempt to sit in judgment. The other side of the Caroline jug relates to this hearing, which began on August 17 and went juicily on until November 10 when the House narrowly ruled against her. Printed in purple on the pitcher is a parody on lines from the national anthem framed by a wreath containing the names of Caroline’s principal supporters, among them Henry Brougham and Thomas Denman, her attorneys, and Alderman Wood, who had accompanied her to England in January and in whose London house she had first stayed. The verse begins with the lines “As for the Green-Bag crew,/ Justice will have its due,” a reference to the green baize bag in which the Milan Commission’s evidence was carried in and out of the House of Lords. Thus this now innocuous jug (and many more mugs, plates, and vases like it) was once the propaganda instrument of a nation’s rage against an unpopular monarch and a discredited government—as well as being the memorial to one of the nastiest and most tragic scandals in British royal history.

  73a & b. Memorial to one of Britain’s most embarrassing moments. A pearlware jug decorated in copper luster and with purple transfer prints showing on one side Caroline, the estranged wife of George IV, with the not entirely accurate inscription GOD SAVE QUEEN CAROLINE!, and on the other (Fig. 73b) a parody on lines from the British national anthem. 1820. Height ¾ inches.

  The story behind the Caroline jug is infinitely more interesting than is the object itself, yet, as in the case of most commemorative artifacts, the two are inseparably wedded. The jug preserves the history and the history dates the jug. Sometimes the incidents and people are relatively obscure and might not be remembered at all were it not for the survival of a ceramic cenotaph which, ironically, was never intended as such. This is certainly true of George Pocock and Jeffreys Allen, whose names, and the date 1802, adorn the neck of a blue-printed, pearlware pitcher (Fig. 74). Ironically, too, the jug was intended to draw attention to an event yet to come, and not to one that had passed. The two men had been elected Members of Parliament for Bridgewater in Somersetshire in 1798, and four years later were running for re-election. This jug, and others like it, filled with free beer and given away to potential supporters, may have been instrumental in sending Pocock and Allen back to Westminster for four more years. They do not appear to have been particularly notable parliamentarians, but their jug serves as a reminder that the balloon and bumper-sticker ballyhoo of the American electoral process has been around for a long time—as has a little honest graft.

  74. How to get the message to the voters. This large pearlware jug was almost certainly used to dispense free beer to the voters of Bridgewater in Somerset when Pocock and Allen were standing for re-election to Parliament in 1802. Probably made at Swansea. Height 8⅛ inches.

  I found the Pocock and Allen jug on the top shelf of a stall in London’s Portobello Road market, and as the dealer specialized in Chinese export porcelain he had little knowledge of English wares and put a price on the pitcher that was almost contemptuous. Much more significant than its value as an “election” jug is the fact that it may be the earliest dated example of “willow-style” chinoiserie on transfer-printed pearlware. Although the “moth” pattern around the neck occurs on Staffordshire pieces, it is also found on examples made at Swansea in South Wales, and that fact coupled with the style of the handle had already prompted me to lean toward Swansea before I discovered that Pocock and Allen came from Somerset, a county in easy reach of the Swansea Pottery across the Bristol Channel. In short, there is more to be learned from a pot than first meets the eye, but much else is forever lost—and if that sounds like a cue for another flight of fancy, it is. It is not one of my own, however; it was written nearly 250 years ago, and published in the Pennsylvania Gazette under the heading “A Meditation on a Quart Mug,” and this, in part, is what it said:

  How often have I seen him [the mug] compell’d to hold up his Handle at the Bar, for no other Crime than that of being empty; then snatch’d away by a surly Officer, and plung’d suddenly into a Tub of cold Water…. How often is he hurry’d down into a dismal Vault, sent up fully laden in a cold Sweat, and by a rude Hand thrust into the Fire! How often have I seen it obliged to undergo the Indignities of a dirty Wench; to have melting Candles dropt on its naked Sides, and sometimes in its Mouth; to risque being broken into a thousand Pieces, for Actions which itself was not guilty of! How often is he forced into the Company of boisterous Sots, who lay all their Nonsense, Noise, profane Swearing, Cursing, and Quarreling, on the harmless Mug, which speaks not a Word! They overset him, maim him, and sometimes turn him to Arms offensive or defensive, as they please; when of himself he would not be of either Party, but would as willingly stand, still…. And yet, O Mug! If these Dangers thou escapist, with little injury, thou must at last untimely fall, be broken to Pieces, and cast away, never more to be recollected and form’d into a Quart Mug. Whether by the Fire, or in a Battle, or choak’d with a Dishclout, or by a Stroke against a Stone, thy
Dissolution happens; ’tis all alike to thy avaricious Owner; he grieves not for thee, but for the Shilling with which he purchased thee!5

  This remarkable portrait of the life and death of a colonial artifact was composed by the owner of the Pennsylvania Gazette, the twenty-seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin, and having read it, I can no longer look at an eighteenth-century tavern mug without thinking of the indignities it has endured (Fig. 75). Franklin went on to describe the fate of the mug’s sherds after it was broken and they were tossed away, following them into the field where they snagged a mower’s scythe and were “with bitter Curses” tossed over the hedge, later to be used by boys to throw at birds and dogs “until by Length of Time and numerous Casualties, they shall be press’d into their Mother Earth, and be converted to their original Principles.”

  75. Rhenish stoneware mugs like this were common in British and American taverns through much of the eighteenth century. About 1740. Height 7 inches, and two-quart capacity.

  The average collector will not, as a rule, be acquiring his specimens from the earth, and his tavern mugs will have escaped the final humiliations so graphically imagined by Franklin. Nevertheless, the accident of survival is equally intriguing, for one wonders how it is that a common mug with no intrinsic value managed to avoid the hazards of usage and to surmount the usually towering obstacle of obsolescence. Where has it been from then until now, can be a question quite as interesting as what happened to the object during the span of its normal life expectancy. The latter question was brought home to me through another of those coincidences to which I seem prone, and which cheating playwrights employ to tie up the loose ends of mysteries that otherwise defy solution.