The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  iii

  Down through the Appalachians, twisting on the fall of the land, are waterfalls. We stop and scramble down and there are Turk’s cap lilies, and a clematis that is ludicrously beautiful, and butterflies out of a Henri Rousseau painting. Or from a Frenchman’s porcelain plate.

  At Franklin, ‘small, dull and cautiously unattractive, but mostly dull’ – Bill Bryson – we stop briefly in the museum. I ask about the history of Cherokee clay and the elderly gentleman tells me, without a pause, that he doesn’t know about that, but did I know that the Cherokees didn’t live here first but took the land off other people?

  Franklin is a street ringed with Fatz and Walmart. We share breakfast with a posse of retired bikers on a trip south on their Harley Davidsons. The fried food is delivered with terrific courtesy. But damn, the coffee. I ask about mines and the receptionist tells me about the gem mines here and that you can go panning, $20 a bucket.

  We spread out our maps and drive up Route 28 to a marker by the side of the road commemorating the finding of the Cherokee clay. It was unveiled in 1950. I’ve brought a photograph of Hensleigh Wedgwood, chairman of Wedgwood Ltd, proudly standing next to the new sign after its unveiling. We are above the river but this is nowhere near a hill. A man twitches his curtains from the house opposite. The trucks thunder past us. We are in the wrong place.

  Finally, we end up at Jerry Anselmo’s Great Smokey Fish Camp. He is walking across the yard when we pull in, a bear of a man in fatigues, a Viet vet cap. He looks like Hemingway. He narrows his eyes like a sailor.

  I’ve rehearsed this. Excuse me, I’m going to say, but did you know / are you aware / it is a long story / I’m so sorry to bother you.

  Wedgwood / Cherokee / England.

  We’ve come a long way. Can we please dig up your land?

  Hensleigh Wedgwood and the Cherokee clay memorial, 11 August 1950

  The camp is beautifully kempt, with banked kayaks and tubes for riding the river, and rods and serious stuff, bait and knives. And as I try and explain why we’ve come, he reaches down to a bucket of earthenware shards and pulls out a couple, rimed, blackened and gives them to me. He asks us to make ourselves comfortable outside and while his wife makes us coffee, he begins to tell us his story.

  After the war he saw the way the world was going and started to work in conservation, came up from New Orleans twenty-eight years ago, saw the land and loved it. And bought it and loves it more, day by day. As the city creeps out he has bought fields and woodland to prevent development, and has put the land into a trust. He knows names and stories. He talks of the mining for talc and marble and kaolin, the lumber businesses that felled whole ridges of trees. And he tells us of the Trail of Tears, the expulsion of the Cherokee from their homelands across the border into Oklahoma in 1838. Of course he knows the story of the white clay.

  We are not the first to visit him – there have been academics and writers, and local historians – but he is expansive and generous with his time. Send me what you write, or I’ll find you, he says, and hunt you down, and he laughs and throws a shovel in the back of the truck. He drives us in his pickup down to the crook in the Little Tennessee River where the Cowee town used to be, the mound where the Cherokee tribes buried their dead. This is the creek where he found bushels of shards. It is deep and shaded by old stands of trees.

  The shard in my hands came from this place, he tells me. It is part of the rim of a jar – quite a substantial one – and there is rope or basket impressed decoration that gives it texture. And the maker has run a damp cloth over the rim to make it smooth and then used a fingernail to notch the underside. It feels poised, fluent making. The inside has been burnished. I wonder at its date. It could be eighteenth century. There are records from traders who travelled through these mountains before Thomas Griffiths arrived on his mission from Wedgwood that the Cherokee ‘make earthen pots … of very different sizes, so as to contain from two to ten gallons; large pitchers to carry water; bowls, dishes, platters … basons, and a prodigious number of other vessels of such antiquated forms, as would be tedious to describe, and impossible to name’.

  They were known for their pots. And as he drives us through this landscape, each hill and twist of the river, each creek coded with names and stories of the Cherokee, it becomes clearer that the traders and officials and chancers who came through found people who had deep knowledge of the different clays. And were using them in complex ways. They were using the white kaolins here for pipes, not just because it is a fine clay that burns cleanly, but because white is a central ritual colour. It symbolises peace. A flag of white cloth painted with red stars would fly over the national council, the floor of the council house spread with white deerskins. White gourds and a single white vessel for use in rituals of purification would lie on a white bench.

  And unaker was used both to insulate their houses – ‘wattled with twigs like a basket’ in the words of an eighteenth-century traveller, and then ‘covered with clay, very smooth, and sometimes white-washed’ – and to make them beautiful. Imagine the luminescence of a white space, the faintest glimmer of mica. A porcelain room.

  The Europeans didn’t ‘discover’ this hillside of white clay. The white pipes and these white houses drew them to this seam that the Cherokees were so anxious to keep un-despoiled.

  He takes us up the hill behind his house where the land opens up and there is a high bluff, fringed with pine and hickory, an arc of ochre earth forty feet high. There are brambles hard against it. And a scar of white ten feet high. It is unaker, the Cherokee clay, impossibly silvery white.

  We come back the next day with a ladder and a shovel and we dig. It is soft and it crumbles and it glitters with mica, as beautiful as my Quakers said it was.

  I’ve brought a piece of Wedgwood jasperware from 1780 made from this clay.

  It is from my mother’s family. They lived in Cheshire in the eighteenth century and were prosperous and a bit conventional like a Cheshire farmhouse, lawyers and clergymen and merchants. And they had one of the first of Wedgwood’s Portland vases. There is a story that it was chipped and thrown away.

  This is all that is left from their great china collection and I’d planned to bury it here, or break it, or find a symbolic act of reparation, fulfil the promise of a punchbowl made 250 years ago. A return.

  But now I’m here, these actions all feel too precious, so I just give it to Jerry to say thank you, and he sends us off with baseball caps for the rest of the family with Great Smokey Fish Camp in italic stitching and my bag of Cherokee clay and a bearhug.

  The mist is banking up the valley. I’ve made it to my Fourth White Hill. I count them: Mount Kao-ling, then Meissen, Tregonning Hill and now Ayoree. It is Ben’s first white hill.

  I realise, cheerfully, that I’ve left the final white pot in very good hands.

  Admission ticket to view Wedgwood’s copy of the Portland Vase, 1790

  Chapter fifty-five

  1790

  i

  It is 1790.

  In China, Qianlong is emperor. He is Kangxi’s grandson.

  In Jingdezhen, they are making versions of Wedgwood’s jasperware.

  In Dresden, the porcelain in the Japanisches Palais has been stripped out, crated in the cellars.

  In Meissen, they are making porcelain altarpieces, six feet high.

  In Paris, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier is using a Tschirnhaus lens to experiment on the combustion of diamonds.

  In Paris, the young English collector William Beckford is buying up collections. He finds a Chinese ewer glazed in a sea-green, decorated with daisies, mounted with silver, and brings it back to his estate at Fonthill in Wiltshire.

  In America, the first trading ship, the Empress of China, has left New York for Canton. She returns with boxes of porcelain, of a ‘greyish and orange peel glaze’.

  In Camden, South Carolina, Champion has died. Some months before, he tried to present George Washington with two reliefs, one of Benjamin Fra
nklin and one of the President, made from ‘native Porcelain’. The President was too fatigued. Champion’s neighbour has set up a pottery and calls his first son Wedgwood.

  In Plymouth, William Cookworthy, much admired, has died and been buried in the Quaker graveyard.

  And in Cornwall, the lease of William’s and Champion’s quarry on the moor is now available: ‘the premises are unoccupied and the Lessees all dead or absconded’. The new bidders are all from Stoke: Wedgwood, Derby, Coalport, Spode, the New Hall China Manufactory, all keen on raising their own china clay and china stone.

  ii

  The world flows and ebbs, tidal with feelings.

  And things silt, gather and block.

  I want to go back to the figures in the landscape, go down some long track and knock at an inconsequential door and ask the farmer’s wife if her husband has stopped drinking, what the money did for them.

  I want to see how one action brings on reactions, how a handshake and ten guineas per annum means that the hill needs a track, and then a shed, and then the track needs widening. That the man becomes men and then boys, digging, and that the brook is deepened for washing growan.

  You watch and you see a slight flicker, as far away as the buzzards, a boy collecting moss. It is used to fill the joints between the granite setts of each pan where the clay is dried. He is paid sevenpence a day.

  You buy the hill. And the place changes. The few trees are gone. It is not that it was beautiful before, but Carloggas is now a ‘bleak heath, thinly bespotted with huts and common mines’.

  It is transport costs that are high, not labour. And the losses from clay becoming dirty lying on wharfs, theft, careless handling. This means warehouses and a harbour, and then a better road. The new road is dusty with stone.

  And the moors change and the road widens and the spoil tips grow and the streams slow as the waste sand and mica make their way to the sea, silting.

  iii

  And the white clay from the moors is loaded on to boats from the new quays in Cornwall, Fowey and Charlestown and St Austell, and it travels all the way down past Land’s End and across the Bristol Channel then up the coast of Wales to Runcorn and then is transferred to narrow boats pulled by horses and then it comes down the Trent and Mersey Canal – sponsor J. Wedgwood – and it passes through the Harecastle Tunnel under Kidsgrove Hill and under innumerable bridges to the Potteries, to Stoke-on-Trent. The air is so dark from the smoke of the chimneys that there are days when there is a dense pall and no sun at all.

  Postcard of Stoke-on-Trent, c.1903

  This is becoming the greatest city for ceramics in the world. By the 1830s its scale rivals that of Jingdezhen. It is a difficult city – I correct myself – a difficult clutch of towns. Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton.

  Everything here is pressed into service. Arnold Bennett, who grew up here three decades later and eviscerated it in his novels records ‘ragged brickwork, walls finished anyhow with saggars and slag; narrow uneven alleys leading to higgledy-piggledy workshops and kilns; cottages transformed into factories and factories into cottages, clumsily, hastily, because nothing matters so long as “it will do”; everywhere somewhere forced to fulfil, badly, the function of something else.’

  I think of Père d’Entrecolles noting the saggars and shards turned into walls, the porcelain bodged and repaired. And the work passing through seventy hands, the division of tasks into smaller and smaller skills. This happens here. Everyone is pressed into serving this makeshift, shameless industry, turning out more; more porcelain, more bone china, more cheap white wares. More quickly.

  I find another witness, another careful man. Dr Samuel Scriven, appointed in December 1840 to visit the factories and workshops here. ‘I have visited and thoroughly examined no less than 173 of them’, he wrote, and ‘I feel great pleasure in recording the gratifying fact, that throughout the whole of my visits, whether in the factory or workshop, the cabin at the pit’s mouth, or in the humble cottage, I have been received with the utmost respect, kindness, and hospitality.’

  He goes down Trentham Road to the China Factory, Messrs Minton and Boyle, then opens the door of the Dipping or Gloss House. He records the temperature inside and out, Ther. 62, open air 48, and then the name and age of the worker George Corbishley, aged thirty-seven.

  It is 170 years ago, but you hear him:

  I have worked as a potter 25 years; as a dipper 6 years … Have never suffered in health yet; have known many others suffer; they get their limbs drawn, and lose the use of them. Have known persons die from it; the last man that was at this tub did. My hands are constantly in the mixture; don’t know what the mixture is made of; they don’t tell us; think it is not so bad as it used to be.

  The scourers, cleaning the dusty glazed work, ‘complain of being stuffed up in my chest; I cannot lie down at night; my throat is always sore; and I have a constant cough, with difficulty of breathing. Have never had medical advice; ’tis no use while I am at work here. The flint dust is very bad.’

  ‘This woman’s voice is scarcely audible. She is suffering, in common with many others, at this work,’ writes Dr Scriven, listening. ‘I shall never recover the use of my limbs,’ says a young man. ‘If I ever get well, I should never go back to the dipping-house again. I don’t know what the dipping is made of; the masters never tell us that; nobody knows but him and his head man, but I think there is something very bad for the limbs, as I have seen it strike into others before.’

  Girls working in a slip house, Stoke-on-Trent, c.1900–1910

  And then you hear children. Josiah Bevington, aged eight, mould-maker. William Mason, aged twelve, working in the plate room at Wm. Adams and Sons, who turns a jigger for John Joplap.

  Dr Scriven records if their parents are alive and if they are working; there was a strike three years before and many are still unemployed. You get detail on how much each part of the family earns, how much they contribute to the household.

  You hear about the work. The boy at the dipping tub and the boy who helps pack the kilns and the boy who runs moulds and wedges clay for Wm. Bentley who ‘licks me sometimes with his fist; he has knocked me the other side the pot-stove for being so long at breakfast; half an hour is allowed, but he makes me work before the half-hour is up’.

  And the girl who makes cockspurs, the three-cornered clay supports that keep each plate apart in the kiln. You press damp clay into a mould and tease it out when it’s dry.

  She is No. 279 in the two large volumes of Scriven’s Children’s Employment Commission, Appendix to the Second Report of the Commissioners – Trades and Manufactures, Part I. Reports and Evidence from Sub-Commissioners presented to both the Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 1842.

  Hannah Lowton, aged six:

  I make cockspurs for Mr Holland; I don’t know how long I have been to work; mother is here too, father is dead; I can read, cannot write: I went to day-school, I don’t go to Sunday-school. I get 1s. a week; I come sometimes at six o’clock, and sometimes after; I go home when mother does at nine o’clock. I’ve got a brother and a sister, one makes cockspurs, t’other runs moulds. I like to come to work. Father died of cough. They called it decline.

  Hannah Lowton works for Messrs R Hall and Co.’s Earthenware Factory, Tunstall, who make the Select Views Series and the Picturesque Scenery Series. These are views of aristocratic houses of England and the Palace of Saint-Cloud, France, full of porcelain, buried deep in a blue border of fruit and flowers, each plate held in the kiln by a cockspur.

  iv

  I go to Stoke. I go to Tunstall to see if I can find the factory where Hannah Lowton worked. It is a carpet warehouse.

  I go to Etruria to nod to Wedgwood – his hall now a Best Western Plus Hotel offering comfort and convenience – and to the Gladstone Pottery Museum to see the bottle kilns, and past my favourite building, the Wedgwood Institute in Burslem, built in mid-Victorian-Venetian splendour with JW enthroned above the tympanum where
Christ should be.

  And later that evening I walk up to the Church of the Resurrection in Longton, not from some grave-fixated tic, but to see the church itself, built in 1853 by George Gilbert Scott. It is very good Gothic, rather severe and plain and unemotional, as you might hope from these towns, and it too has changed, a new name and now owned by the Antiochian Orthodox Church.

  The church was built for a new community. The Longton Freehold Land Society acquired Spratslade Farm for £5,000 and announced the purchase by placing a notice in the Staffordshire Advertiser on 20 July 1850. They held their first annual meeting which was very well attended. Tea was served. There were to be 190 plots, 500 to 600 square yards each. By 1864, there were 500 houses here for workers in the ceramics factories.

  This new estate was called Dresden.

  There is where the Dresden Porcelain Company was founded. They, usefully, put DPCO on the base to distinguish themselves from the other Dresden with its crossed blue swords. This company made Kakiemon-style porcelain for the hotel market until they too changed their name, changed their mark, amalgamated, went under. Disappeared.

  Part five

  London – Jingdezhen – Dachau

  Chapter fifty-six

  Signs & Wonders

  i

  Several years ago I had an invitation to make an installation for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  The old Ceramics Galleries that stretched along the top floor on the Cromwell Road side of the museum were being renewed. The invitation was very open. Would I respond to the collections? I could be anywhere in these galleries, it could be any scale. I had a year.

  When I was a boy I would walk up the stairs and then more stairs. You had to be resourceful to navigate your way through Medieval Metalwork, and not get lost in Enamels. You reached the top. There were very few places that you could see out of or even sense the museum below you, the spaces seemed completely self-contained, one enfilade gallery after another after another. In each direction there were armies of vitrines holding pots. Who would dream of building such high rooms with such spectacular volumes for a cup or a dish or a bowl?