The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  There is an unmerciful sea. ‘On the fourteenth Aprill we arrived in the Downs and on the Sixteenth, Capt. Griffiths, Mr John Smith, and my Self Left the Ship in the pilots charge at Graves End, and came to London, by Land.’

  Thomas Griffiths pays £3 and ten shillings to bring ‘things on shore and attending the Clay when the Ship lay in the River’ and delivers Josiah Wedgwood his white earth, the unaker of the Cherokee, from the other side of the world.

  As promised.

  Chapter forty-seven

  C.F.

  i

  This is a cold winter in Plymouth too and there are problems at the works. It’s an unstable compound, fissile with animosity. It is a new works and skills chafe at each other. No one is quite sure what they should be doing.

  It is easy to hire people to work for you and easy to lose them. Speculative porcelain ventures come and go and potters have a reputation as cussed and independent. This instability leads to short contracts, to potters off and away to the next place, as itinerant as tinkers, travelling tinsmiths, preachers without a congregation, dogs.

  For the new manufactory, they’ve bought a set of moulds from a recently failed factory in Staffordshire, a set of the seasons, some cherubs with a goat, a ewe and her lamb, and a sphinx that looks a little like a Devonian donkey. These models are not the latest style. In fact they are already fifteen years old when the straw-lined crates are carried into the China House and unpacked.

  ii

  Three pieces, large cider tankards, are made for the next firing in March, each with an invocation dribbled on to the side in cobalt. Plymoth Manufacy, they say with a slight lilt. I come from Plymouth, Plymouth made me.

  And each one has its rebus on the base, two strokes of a brush, a sort of figure 2 with a tick across the bottom stroke. This is the symbol for tin, and it is William’s answer to those swaggardly Meissen swords on the base of those perfect plates, the apothecary’s way of saying that he knows where he comes from.

  Each of these tankards is placed dead centre in a rough clay saggar. The kiln is stoked initially with wood until the brick kiln is trembling from the heat and the flames, one short length pushed into the firebox, a pause, a judgement, another. Then after two hours of this rhythm it changes and there is coal to be shovelled in. Sound changes slowly. The boys are meant to be at the mortars, preparing moulds for next week, cleaning the barrels of kaolin, but everyone is pulled back to see the kiln, fetch water for the men. Each hour is recorded. The passage through the spectrum of orange to scarlet to carmine into the blinding white heat where test rings are pulled out on long metal poles as long as fowling-pieces and plunged into buckets to sizzle. They take five minutes to cool, heads bumping to see how the glaze is melting. Each one matters. Early in the firing the surface is open, cratered. There are pores from glaze to clay. Twenty minutes later and the surface is moving together, though still pitted. This test looks like lichen. He paces round the workshop. Everyone wants to stop. This is madness. Sixteen hours shovelling coke, naked to the waist, feeding this kiln, this man’s obsession. Look at the notes, this is two hours longer than the last firing. Another twenty minutes and another test is pulled, the glazed ring swings and settles in the water and it is bright and clear and white.

  This is the truth, says Swedenborg. You will see the heavens open and the Lord’s raiment will be white.

  And ‘The affections of the mind are translucent through the face.’

  It stops.

  Bricks are put across the chimney to keep in the heat. The doors are clammed with wet clay. The men wash smuts from face and hands and chest from barrels outside the door. Gulls wheel overhead. The kiln still hums. You have to leave. You have to turn away and go home, walk over Coxside and then up to Notte Street, through the side door and hang your hat, wash in the scullery, open the parlour door. You open your notebook and sit. You still thrum.

  Patience will reward the virtuous man.

  And it is near dusk the next day when you break the clay from the front of the kiln, and the bricks are piled scrimshanks rather than in the neat pile you ordered and out comes the first saggar and it is placed on the floor and the lid is broken off and you see, immediately, that it has worked.

  The bottom of Cookworthy’s porcelain tankard, 1768

  You hold it by the handle. You tap it. It rings clear. Plymoth Manufacy around the arms of the city, smudged, and some flowers, smudged. Plymouth made me. And on the base March 14 1768 and an italic C.F., Cookworthy Fecit in cobalt blue. Cookworthy made me.

  The white earth has become this white vessel. It is the first piece of true porcelain ever made in England and this cider tankard with its vernacular handle and its curly italic inscription, its smudged symbol for tin on the base, is already slightly out of date.

  This is William’s white pot, my third.

  Chapter forty-eight

  on Englishness

  i

  So that is that. I’ve got my third white pot. Jingdezhen, Dresden and now Plymouth.

  There is a tenderness about this pot of William Cookworthy. It comes into being through walking and noticing and picking things up and feeling texture, through listening intently, openly, to men working by the side of the road. It is a Quaker pot. It carries its earnestness and is unembarrassed. It is a chemist’s pot; the tin cipher on its base is beautiful and proud of where it comes from. I’m from here, it says, and there is a burr in the fall of the words.

  And its whiteness is a special whiteness, too. This porcelain tankard, so smudged in execution, is a pot for angels.

  My shelf is pleasingly full of pots and shards. I can move them back and forth and I should now be able to get back to making my own with real attention. There is the exhibition in Cambridge to organise. This promises a great deal of pleasure, with days looking at Chinese porcelain in the stores of the collection. And I have to pick up my pace with making for New York, too. I come into the studio very early to get a couple of hours of throwing when I can.

  English Porcelain 1750–1800 isn’t part of the plan. But the truth is I simply don’t know what happened next beyond the very bare bones of the story – that the ROYAL WARRANT FOR COOKWORTHY’S PATENT was published, and that things got sticky and that Plymouth didn’t become the Dresden of the West Country. I need to find out how William reacts when it goes wrong.

  And because I’ve lost my precious four pages, £95 of real money, I have to go and read The Patent humbly in a library. It is beautiful. It is the first patent I’ve ever held and it has a perfect cadenced formality. This is as it should be.

  William Cookworthy of Plymouth in our County of Devon, Chemist, has by his petition humbly represented unto Us, that he hath, by a Series of Experiments, discovered that Materials of the same Nature with those of which the Asiatick porcelain is made, are to be found in immense Quantities in Our Island of Great Britain.

  At this point all he has to do is wave his hands and be orotund which he does happily, scattering capital letters across the page.

  The Ware which he hath prepared from these Materials, hath all the Characters of the true porcelain in regard to Grain, Transparency, Colour and Infusibility, in a degree equal to the best Chinese or Dresden Ware, Whereas all the Manufactures of porcelain, hitherto carried on in Great Britain, have only been Imitations of the genuine kind, wanting the Beauty of Colour, the Smoothness and Lustre of Grain, and the Great Characteristic of genuine porcelain, the sustaining the most extreme degree of Fire without melting; That this Discovery hath been of his Knowledge and Belief in regard to this Kingdom is new, and his own; the Materials being even at this time and applied to none of the Uses of Pottery but by him, and those under his Direction, and that he verily believes this Invention will be of great advantage to the publick. He therefore most humbly pray’d Us that we would be pleased to grant him Our Royal Letters Patent for the sole making and vending this new invented porcelain, composed of Moorstone or Growan and Growan Clay.

  Then William sets his h
and and seals the document on the eleventh day of July, in the eighth year of the reign of George III. And then, finally in 1770, the Plymouth Manufactory becomes the Plymouth New Invented Patent Porcelain Manufactory.

  ii

  I’ve put time aside for these first porcelains. And for William. I’d thought this English journey would take a summer and it is now a good year. I try and work this out, feel my way into my habitation of his aspiration. I ask him how can you be English and make porcelain? Where in this damp country can white porcelain come alive? Does it stay exotic, an import, a quixotic enterprise, or can it naturalise?

  I ask myself the same. Where does porcelain belong?

  You put a pot down and the space around it changes. You put groups of pots down and you are playing with much more complex rhythms. Five years after coming back from Japan I started putting my groups into buildings and museums and galleries.

  My first attempt was at High Cross House, a modernist house built in 1932, with huge windows and a flat roof and an aspirational sun deck to catch the Devonian weather, gaze on the oak woods. It had tubular furniture and plywood cupboards and should have been in St Tropez. It had become an archive and the archivist was in search of projects.

  I made a huge lidded jar for the great slab of a fireplace, a line of dishes to catch the rain on the sunroof. And I hid groups in the unused cupboards. You could slide back a door and find porcelain jars waiting. A critic complained that she couldn’t find the exhibition.

  This was my start. I made porcelain to put amongst the shelves of poetry and along the kitchen table at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, a beautiful huddle of cottages holding paintings and sculpture, books and pots. I made huge Dragoon vases to put along a grand and stony corridor at the palatial Chatsworth. Each installation was a query for me.

  I seemed to hide everything I made, put it in the shadows, around corners, in the cupboards.

  iii

  The Plymouth Manufactory is up and running. All the hands are briskly at work. Most of the ware is coming out clean. The saucers are mostly straight though the safeguards are still cracking, which is dispiriting, so they have come up with the rather desperate idea of making them out of pot shards stuck together, as if that would work. And they have made an experiment to see whether contracting the holes which lets the flame up to the roof of the kiln might not help us. ‘It did not help but hurt us, however the Product of this kiln together with that of our former Experiments hath been sold for upwards of Twenty-two pounds.’

  I sigh over ‘Selling your Experiments’.

  This is the ‘selling your seconds’ moment. You have a sale coming up – possibly before Christmas when everyone needs a milk jug or a small vase – and potters make their income. The kiln has not behaved and you are faced with boards of pots that are almost right. They aren’t chipped. There is an odd wobble in one of the jars, and a bit of warping on the larger bowls that is quite attractive but the glazes are a little over-fired. What do you do?

  You should break them up.

  According to the great Wedgwood, who is having his own thoughts about the pots that go wrong – the Invalids and reprobates as he calls them – if you sand the bases down of some warped vases you can screw them to new plinths, and no one will know.

  You write a card with SECONDS on it and prop it up and watch them disappear into the world.

  iv

  I know this moment, as I look at the glazing of the porcelains. Glaze is clothing for the clay body. I have a cracked Meissen plate from 1768 – two chaffinches on a branch, moths on the scalloped rim, a gilded edge – and it is seamless, the glaze has fused with the porcelain. Think of a glaze covering a body. The fit is couture, neither a sense of constriction, nor one of too much latitude, just easy movement.

  ‘WHENAS in silks my Julia goes’, I think as I turn it in my hands, ‘Then, then methinks how sweetly flows / That liquefaction of her clothes.’

  I look at these pots. West Country porcelains look foxed like the pages of an old book, a little grey on the edges. They are an unspooling of lopsidedness and distortion, tiny fissures in the base where the clay has opened up during the cooling of the kiln, gaping ones where there was a making fault. There seem to be minute fragments of adherent clay. I recognise each and every imperfection in the glazing. I call them out, know them as my own. There is some running in the cobalt decoration of a tendril where one of the lads has pressed too hard with the brush and got the thickness wrong or a tongue of flame has lingered. There is pinholing, open dots like the spores under the frond of a fern where someone in the workshop has left dust on a pot before glazing it, or the heat wasn’t great enough to completely melt the glaze. And here are rivulets of arrested glaze. Too thickly dipped into the barrel? Another firing that didn’t quite reach temperature? And here the glaze has scaled off because it is too thin.

  Each thing that has gone wrong is attributable to several factors, but I blame the weather.

  Now you examine it, the gilding isn’t great, either.

  I turn to William, quizzically. What were you thinking of?

  v

  The going wrong speeds up. Or perhaps, if we slow the film, many things that have been going wrong are now visible.

  The Plymouth Manufactory are going to have to go back to the subscribers, as the money has run out – they have spent twice as much as they expected. As a quick moneymaker, William is going to make porcelain mortars for apothecaries.

  His translation of Swedenborg isn’t yet published. He is supposed to be running an apothecary business, but I find out what he’s really up to in his notebook in the Plymouth archives, green, waxed and split. After lists of ingredients for pills there is a fair copy of a letter to the governor of North Carolina, on the nature and usage of cobalt, the black mineral that blooms blue on porcelain, makes willows, swallows, lovers on a bridge, carp rising in a pool, a butterfly on a chrysanthemum.

  William has been refining cobalt blue from the ore:

  black-blue glass … plainly proving that as the other Enamel Colours are from Metals, as the Green from Copper, the Black & Red from Iron, the purple from Gold, so the blue is from this semi-metal, this little Discovery makes the whole affair of Cobalt easy, Scattering that Cloud of Mystery which the wrongheadedness of the German writers hath spread over it.

  William enjoys dispelling Mystery, whether it comes from China, Cornwall or from Germany, and cobalt is a tangle of suppositions and stories. Its etymology reveals this: cobalt comes from Kobold, the name given to underground spirits in Germany. They live, some stories say, not just below the surface but within the rock itself. They blow out your lamp, knock the wooden spar that holds the roof of the mine up, crumble the earth below you, steal your food, your flask of water, your pick. If you are a miner you pray for protection but they are recalcitrant, unappeasable. They entice you to extract the wrong minerals, fooling you with this seam of silvery ore, the glimmer of gold, only for you to find after you have sieved it and ground it and washed it that it is worthless. There is something in this assonance of malignancy, hiddenness and depth that rings with truth.

  I’m reading this upstairs in my studio with my dog asleep at my feet. In the last couple of years I’ve started to use black glazes. I haven’t fallen out of love with my whites, but needed to see what the shadows around black pots might look like. I use cobalt in one of my favourite new glazes, a lustrous black like a midsummer’s night sky with sparks of gold, as dark as a starling’s wing. It needs only one per cent. And a little more, two to three per cent, in the denser glazes, the matt pewter-coloured glaze that we call basalt, and the new one that isn’t quite right yet, a blistering black with pits and craters like a slither of obsidian.

  Cobalt stains. I have an idiotic need to feel cobalt oxide and run down to the glaze room, open the plastic box and pour a scattering of the blue-black powder into the palm of my hand, rub it between forefinger and thumb, and when I scrub my hands I still have a skeletal tracing of toxic ore that sta
ys with me for days, as I trace William and his passion for cobalt.

  The world is very big for this Plymouth chemist, I realise. He holds Cathay and Carolina as he crumbles the ore between his fingers. And as the start-up is running aground, this is what William is doing, crumbling ore, led and enticed further into white and blue. He treats the works as a laboratory, a testing place for ideas not as a business.

  I realise I’ve spent the last bloody week thinking about cobalt.

  William is happily astray.

  Chapter forty-nine

  endings, beginnings

  i

  What are we going to do? William asks Pitt. It is a good question.

  This September morning in 1770, there is a jeremiad of problems. Two of the three boys who work in the manufactory are sick. Objects that should have been the same height, but weren’t, have been taken from the kiln, there are cups that were not ground down straight and which stand crookedly.

  The coal that was used last week for firing the little kiln has weakened the structure. They will have to use wood. But there is no wood to be bought. Four kilns have been ruined through the badness of the wood, all an ill colour. Pitt’s steward is going to send a barge of wood down the coast from his estates, but William is apprehensive about it. It won’t be dry enough after a week on the sea, uncovered to the elements, and too small, unbark’d.

  So William has been talking to the commissioner of the docks who advised him to apply to the Admiralty, ‘that we may have some timber from a ship that is to be sold. He is decent to help me as there are some who would put the prices up to thwart me.’

  So he buys a boat, and all the spars, masts, the decks are axed into timber and then sawn into lengths three feet long and stacked by the workroom. And this takes the throwers, who are now the labourers, several days. William has been at work on Swedenborg’s De coelo et inferno, his Treatise concerning Heaven and Hell, polishing the Latinate rolling phrases, coming down late one afternoon to Coxside, to his Idea of Porcellain, and there is a puddle of salty water spreading over the floor of the workshop from his pile of sodden, expensive timber.