The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  Wedgwood is as grand as Augustus. He is the first miner.

  ii

  Cornwall lies in front of him like one valuable lode, as he picks his way through the hills, enquiring how much the Worcester factory pays for its soap rock, how long this lease remains, whose steward he should talk to over terms and contracts. He is in a long line of Adventurers. ‘The landscape abounds greatly with mines’, he notes, ‘and in some parts the grass is totally destroyed, so that it has a very singular, & indeed a very dreary aspect.’

  They journey down over several days, ‘to the furthest point of the Lands end which terminates in large & rugged stones, upon which we clambered as far as we could with safety, to say we had been at the very farthest point, when we gazed for some time with a kind of silent awe, veneration, & astonishment, at the immense expanse before us’. This sublimity completed ‘we turned about, and it was with a transport of joy, that I cried. Now I set my face towards Etruria again.’

  And they work their way back.

  They stop at Tregonning Hill, the place where William had his revelation thirty-five years before, the synapse that connected the stone of the hills of Jingdezhen with the rising ground near Penzance:

  We had heard much of the excellence of the growan clay & stone on each side of this hill. Mr Borlase says (in his Natural History of Cornwall) that he was told by Mr Cookworthy that the stone of the hill is the most proper for porcelain – We stopt therefore on the side of the hill, & sent for some of this clay, which we saw dug up … We took samples of both the clay & the stone, & from the slight view then had of them, & perhaps likewise from being so much prejudiced in their favour, we concluded they were both good, though when I came to try them carefully, at home, I found them otherwise … We were much pleased to see such an immense quantity of the materials, sufficient to supply all the potters in the world.

  I feel a trespass here on William’s epiphany. Wedgwood, the ventriloquist for the Staffordshire potters, is now speaking for all the potters in the world.

  At St Stephen’s, near St Austell, the tempo changes again. Here, Wedgwood meets a farmer, whose lands have both clay and stone, but he finds the

  wife entirely averse to his selling the estate, indeed she told him she should not sell it, for she said if the estate was in money he would soon drink it; but he should sell us the clay at the common price. Upon asking what that was, she said 10/per ton, mine rent. We let them know in answer to this, that they were much mistaken in supposing these materials confined to St Stephen’s, for we had met with them nearly all the way to Lands end, & had the choice of many places to fix upon, that we were leaving that part of the country immediately; and that they then must fix, even that morning, whether they would have us or not. We were then asked what we would give per ton, we answered, Nothing, for we would either buy or have lease of, the land, with the materials in it, to get what we had occasion for; & if they chose to treat with us upon those terms, it was very well, otherwise we had nothing further to say to them.

  Wedgwood leans on his stick. You know that this is what he enjoys, the calculation of position and opportunity, the offer and reply. ‘The farmer then said he would lease us stone & clay in the estate for so many years, & asked 20 guineas a year rent for them. I offered 10. He accepted it.’

  So that is that. ‘Having now completed our business in Cornwall, by having got a firm & secure hold of these raw materials upon reasonable terms, and left Mr Griffiths there to conduct the business, we left St Austle after dinner, & slept that night at Liskard and the next day, we set Mr Tolcher down at his own house at Plymouth.’

  Wedgwood doesn’t call in on the other Plymouth apothecary in Notte Street on his way home to Etruria. With trophies.

  Cornwall was always a landscape for Adventurers, for speculation. Cornwall, on our own terms.

  Chapter fifty-three

  Thoughts Concerning Emigration

  i

  Champion is in trouble.

  He has his warehouse at No. 17 Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, for the sale of his porcelain, but sales are poor. On 2 March 1776, he advertises again in the Bristol Journal and plays the nationalism card, ‘Established by Act of Parliament. The Bristol China Manufactory in Castle Green. This China is greatly superior to every other English Manufactory. Its texture is fine, its strength so great that water may be boiled in it. It is a true Porcelain composed of a native clay.’

  And the Bristol China Manufactory stumbles to an end. Like Plymouth.

  There are all kinds of endings, all of them untidy, and this one shares the tumbleweed feeling of energy trickling away, debt, grand possibilities diminishing month by month. This was to be the new Dresden, but the plates keep warping. Your English Arcanum, the delicate balancing of growan clay and growan stone, has been printed in the Monthly Register. Anyone can have a go. Wedgwood is back in Etruria with God knows what contracts signed, deals achieved. But bankruptcy looms here in Bristol.

  Champion owes a huge amount of money and to some serious men of business. I find an inventory for the sale of another bankrupt pottery in Bristol around this time and realise the problem. The whole quantity of 324 pot boards, three benches, one pounding trough and one mixing trough, a clay chest, three complete wheels and wheel frames, working benches, moulds and drums, a kiln ladder, salting boxes, lignum vitae blocks and a hand mill, are valued at only £10. The ‘Old iron pot in the Yard’ is four shillings and sixpence.

  His assets are negligible, a word that crumbles scant as rust.

  The premises are sold off to a pipe maker. The investors cannot be paid back fully, and Champion is brought before Meeting in Bristol to explain himself to the Friends. He is unable to. The remaining stock is auctioned, the men dispersed.

  ii

  The only thing of any value is the patent. Champion goes to Etruria in the hope of selling it on.

  The Josiah Wedgwood Works take up six acres alongside the new canal for bringing the clay and coal in and transporting out the jasperware, figures, Queen’s Ware. Four hundred people are employed here. It is a place of careful disposition of time and Wedgwood is counting.

  Amongst other things, Mr Champion of Bristol has taken me up near two days. He is come amongst us to dispose of his secret, his Patent etc. Who would have believed of it – he has chosen me for his friend and confidant! I shall not deceive him, for I really feel much for his situation – a wife and eight children, to say nothing of himself to provide for, and out of what I fear will not be thought of much value here, the secret of china making. He tells me he has sunk £15,000 in this gulf and his idea now is to sell the whole art, mistery and patent for £6,000.

  And, he adds, it is ‘one of the worst processes for china making’.

  Wedgwood knows this, as he has been experimenting: ‘You can hardly conceive the trouble these white compositions give me … I am very sensitive of their variations, but find it almost impossible to avoid them.’ He gives Champion a list of other potters to try.

  On 24 August 1778, Wedgwood writes to Bentley: ‘Poor Champion, you may have heard, is quite demolished. It was never likely to be otherwise, as he had neither professional knowledge, sufficient capital. Nor scarcely any real acquaintance with the material he was working upon.’

  He adds, casually, ‘I suppose we might buy some Growan stone and Growan clay now upon easy terms, for they prepared a large quantity this last year.’

  iii

  Champion is on his knees. He publishes An Address by Richard Champion to the Pottery to garner support. There are, remarkably, enough takers for a new factory, the New Hall China Manufactory, to start under the guidance of men with professional knowledge. Champion can walk away.

  And in a moment of brief, tremulous balancing of political power, friendship and patronage, he becomes joint Deputy Paymaster General under Burke with a stipend of £500 per annum and a suite of rooms in Chelsea, substantial enough for the children. He makes a misjudgement about money with a clerk, which is noted and which em
barrasses his patron, reflects badly on his abilities, if not his probity. Months later the government changes. Champion has even less to tether him.

  In 1783, Wedgwood publishes and distributes gratis, An Address to the Workmen in the Pottery, on the subject of entering into the Service of Foreign Manufacturers. It deals with ‘the dangerous spirit of emigration’.

  In 1784, Champion emigrates with his wife Judith and seven children. They are on board the Britannia, on 20 October, as they pass the Lizard, the last of England, rich with soapstone, riddled and hollowed by mines for the porcelain trade.

  The last sight of the British shore sunk deep into my heart, and left an impression which will not be easily erased. The evening we parted from it was serene and the sun dipped his beams to the Westward in a calm and unruffled ocean. The Lizard Point was in view … the gathering distant clouds, seemed to tell us, that it was time to leave infatuated Britain.

  He writes and writes in his journal, and by the time they land in America it has become a hundred pages of a pamphlet: Thoughts Concerning Emigration.

  iv

  They are going to South Carolina, to live in Rocky Branch, a tributary of Granny’s Quarter Creek. This is ten miles north of Camden, 130 miles from Charleston, ‘where the heat is less intense’, and where the provisions are cheap and there are ‘no musctoes’. ‘I came to America in search of the Virtues of Simplicity, so becoming in a new Republic’, he writes to a friend.

  There are no more letters from Burke, who has crossed over from one party to the other; he is ‘spared the pain of correspondence’.

  The family bring some things with them. Most precious is a memorial, thirteen inches high in unglazed porcelain, a figure of a weeping woman leaning on an urn supported by a pedestal. She is clutching a wreath and her eyes are closed and every part of her is heavy.

  It is very white.

  The urn simply says Eliza Champion and has her dates. She was fourteen. Champion has spent time on this memorial, writing a long, sad Latin inscription from Virgil on the cornice of the pedestal.

  Engraving of Champion’s memorial to his Eliza, 1779

  And then because he cannot stop, the whole of the plinth is covered in his writing, small and careful and urgent, necessary:

  We loved you my dear ELIZA, whilst you were with us. We lament you now you are departed. The Almighty God is just and merciful, and we must submit to his will, with the Resignation and Reverence becoming human frailty. He has removed you Eliza from the trouble which has been our lot, and does not suffer you to behold the scenes of horror and distress in which these devoted Kingdoms must be involved. It is difficult to part with our beloved Child, though but for a season … Happy in each other, we are happy in you Eliza, and will with contented minds cherish your memory till that period arrives when we shall all meet again, and pain and Sorrow shall be thought of no more. R.C. J.C.

  And on the pedestal ‘This tribute to the memory of an amiable girl was inscribed on her coffin the 16th October 1779, by a father who loved her.’

  He has finally made something real and true out of porcelain.

  v

  Wedgwood has been painted by Stubbs, is a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the Lunar Society. Alongside teacups he makes fossil cups for mineralogical specimens, measuring cups for use by chemists, druggists and apothecaries, mortars that ‘will be of great Use to Chymists, Experimental Philosophers and Apothecaries’. He writes to James Watt, the mechanical engineer and developer of the steam engine, that ‘I never charge such experiment pieces to anybody, & it would be unreasonable in you to expect in this instance to be favor’d beyond the rest of mankind.’

  Wedgwood is using a good French white clay, finer than the American. He has tested the clay from Sydney Cove, brought back by Captain Cook, found it wanting. The Green Frog Service, 957 pieces strong with all the principal views of the whole of the United Kingdom, has been delivered and is in use by Catherine, empress of all the Russias, in her palaces in St Petersburg. Several of the views show the picturesque sights of Cornwall, its moors and rocky coastline.

  He writes to his friend Dr Erasmus Darwin, who is writing a long poem, The Botanic Garden, in which the whole of creation is explored in Swedenborgian rhythms. Darwin has got to Clay and Wedgwood wants the Chinese to have their fair share of the acclaim: ‘I am a little anxious that my distant brethren may have justice done to their exertions in the plastic art.’ He tells Darwin to read the letters of Père d’Entrecolles on ‘Ka-o-lins and Pe-tun-tses’.

  Wedgwood is a great man. ‘I hope white hands will continue in fashion’, he writes to Bentley, thinking of how his new wares look as they are picked up.

  And in Etruria, in his new and beautiful redbrick house overlooking the new canal, Wedgwood muses to his business partner Bentley on the value of white earth:

  I have often thought of mentioning to you that it may not be a bad idea to give out, that our jaspers are made of the Cherokee clay which I sent an agent into that country on purpose to procure for me, & when the present parcel is out we have no hopes of obtaining more, as it was the utmost difficulty the natives were prevail’d upon to part with what we now have … His Majesty should see some of these large fine tablets, & be told this story (which is a true one for I am not Joking) … as has repeatedly enquir’d what I have done with the Cherokee clay. They want nothing but age & scarcity to make them worth any price you could ask for them.

  It is the story of scarcity that matters. ‘A portion of Cherokee clay is really used in all the jaspers so make what use you please of the fact’, he writes, cannily.

  All the famous jasperware, the hard blue neoclassical cameos and vases and garnitures in their Horatian self-confidence, one enunciated, grammatically correct vessel after another hold a part of unaker, of a promise made, hands shaken.

  The world and its geology are in obeisance.

  Chapter fifty-four

  a road trip

  i

  I think I have finished with unaker, but the whiteness of this clay and its ownership, its contested provocative storyline, bothers me. It is partly because I cannot feel the distances involved, and partly because I haven’t had it in my hands, that Cherokee clay doesn’t quite seem real.

  Ben, my oldest son, has finished his exams and it is the dog days of July and he is kicking his heels, and though he doesn’t explicitly need to come on an expedition to find a seam of kaolin, this changes a research trip into a family one and is legitimised. He can be my map reader and we can stay in motels and do the road trip father/son bit. We work out that we could get to Carolina for five days and find Champion.

  A week before we set out, I’d mentioned this trip to a New York friend – an expert on Impressionism – over coffee in the studio. He knows the Quaker graveyard, he shrugs, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Watch out for the turning off the main road, it is easy to miss. If you get to the Holiday Inn you’ve gone too far. If we went two miles east, he added, we would find white clay.

  He volunteers his art-historian son to meet us by the grave, down a lane, a mile outside Camden. His grandparents are buried here; their family have lived next door on Mulberry plantation for 200 years.

  This is our first time in the American South. We head down from Charlotte on back roads. We pass signs for the Holy Church of the Living God, Landmark Pentecostal Church, the Restoration Ministries, Ebenezer Church, Mt Calvary Zion, Fellowship Tabernacle, Damascus Congregation, the Holy Church of the Living God. And Baptists by the mile, any style. Repent says one sign in red, outside a tumbledown shack. And then REPENT. It is hot and humid. Good weather for repentance.

  We meet my friend’s son near a memorial to Civil War soldiers, a Confederate flag staked in a grave, under a tall magnolia tree, a month past flowering. There are three dusty arched headstones in a row. The smallest is the oldest.

  Sacred / To the Memory of / Richard Champion / And Julia, his Wife / Natives of Bristol, England.

  Ben clea
ns them up, while I wander over to break a flower off a rufus shrub. I’ve brought a small porcelain cup glazed in white with me that I made last month. I fill it with water, place the flower, and I stand briefly and think of aspirations and emigration and disappointment. We leave.

  And as we walk back to the car, I think that no one should bring their son on a graveyard tour.

  ii

  At Mulberry, a beautiful brick four-square house, self-confident in paddocks, we meet the manager of the estate. She picks up a geological survey and takes us in a pickup to a bluff above the Wateree River, a bend where there was one of the greatest burial mounds for chiefs of the Mississippian people, twenty feet high, one stratum of coloured earth added each time a chief died, but now ploughed and pillaged to a mild rise amongst the tall grasses. They were great potters.

  The estate manager drives over the rutted ground at speed, a finger on the wheel, her other hand scrolling for pictures of the rattlesnakes five feet long, that they shot outside the house last month. Which takes her on to the plenitude of water moccasins and then on to the ’gators that are increasing here, and then on to how to deal with poachers. At intervals we stop and grab the shovel, and dig hopefully at the red earth.

  And then on a slipway from a lake, surrounded by pines, and poison ivy, there is lighter clay, more ochre than white. The son of my friend goes to look and is back seconds later having surprised a large black snake with concentric white bands. This is a snake our guide approves of, as it eats rattlers, which shows some sangfroid I think, as I crouch and dig some earth and crumble it between my fingers and it feels good, plastic, possible.

  It is kaolin, china clay. Champion is buried on a seam of kaolin running all through this country, beautiful and unprotected.

  That evening we drink to Champion. And go our separate ways; back to Mulberry, off to the art world in New York and Ben and I head west to the Appalachians.