i
The white earth of the Cherokees, unaker, shown briefly to William Cookworthy twenty years before by a mysterious man from America who proclaimed he had made porcelain, has reappeared. This earth is a white promise. It has been talked of for years. A patent to use this earth, ‘extreamly white, tenacious, and glittering with mica’, was granted to the proprietor of the Bow Porcelain works but it came to nothing. It glitters and it thwarts.
This time the earth has turned up in Bristol. A young Quaker merchant, Richard Champion, has received it from his brother-in-law in America. It is August 1765 and Champion has passed on to another china manufactory a ‘box of Porcelain Earth’, from the ‘internal part of the Cherokee Nations, 400 miles from hence, on mountains scarcely accessible’. But he has kept a little back.
Champion is twenty-one and recently married, part of a Bristol clan with family interests both in ships and in the shipyards. He is a man in a hurry to prove himself, keenly involved in the politics of the colonies, as the family trades with the West Indies and America. Richard is both politic – he has six ships – and moral, a member simultaneously of the Society of Merchants dedicated to self-interest, and the Bristol Society for the Relief and Discharge of Persons Confined for Small Debts dedicated to their victims. His self-confidence borders on the alarming. He writes Public Letters using the name of Valerius Publicola, protesting against injustices on behalf of ‘gentlemen of fortune and reputation … uninfluenced and independent’.
White earth piques the interest of Richard Champion, so much so that when he sees William trialling porcelain, he decides to become involved.
Champion sees a Public Friend with an idea, an amiable family man, a preacher, a man of good works, a little removed from modern business, well regarded, but a touch provincial. William, he senses, is a man with a limited sense of how to get things going, a man who starts up Works and gives up Works. He senses opportunity.
William, in turn, is glad of the energy emanating from Champion, this young and positive Friend. Their new business is to be based in Plymouth, closer to the raw materials. Premises will be taken. ‘Experience must determine the best form and way of using this kiln,’ writes William cheerfully, ‘’tis the only desideratum wanting to the bringing of the Manufacture of Porcelain, equal to any in the world, to perfection in England.’
That, and access to the materials themselves, of course. These lie on the land belonging to Thomas Pitt.
Access is delicate. This isn’t a straightforward request for copper or tin prospecting – sign here, bang on the table Cornwall stuff. William is anxious that this shimmering possibility of Chinese porcelains made from minerals under Cornish hills might seem ‘mere fancy and Chimera’. What will happen if Thomas Pitt, this rich young man, takes no noticed of it, shrugs and turns away?
ii
Pitt is thirty, politically savvy and well travelled, having spent years on the Grand Tour. He has come back a connoisseur with views on architecture which he is keen to try out in his Cornish estates and at Camelford House in London. William asks his friend Dr Mudge to intercede as he is more businesslike, less like an old Quaker. We all know, William writes, of those who have engaged in ‘an Imprudent Undertaking’.
I realise that the last thirty years of my life can lay claim to this exact description of making porcelain.
Terms for the raising of the clay are agreed and William starts to write to Thomas Pitt in the winter of 1766. Three dozen long letters survive in the municipal archive of the Cornish Record Office, a single-storey prefab building on the edge of Truro, grounded in car parks. This is the front line of research. The folder is waiting. I’m given white gloves and left alone.
Shards from Cookworthy’s porcelain experiments, c.1766
Each one is folded three times, addressed to Thos Pitt, Piccadilly, London, a red seal-mark heavy on the outer fold, carefully scripted.
And I’m immediately floored.
I’d expected words but three little fragments of porcelain fall out of the first letter, wrapped and then folded into scraps of paper, annotated with the exacting notation of a chemist, broken by the snapper of saucers. ‘The inclosed Samples are not sent as proofs that I am a good Potter, but that the Materials which enter the Composition are at least the Equal in quality to those of China.’
They are as sharp as when they were snapped.
He sends a fragment of Common China Ware, and Part of a Jar of Nankin Ware, and then two shards made from the ‘Materials that rise in thy Lands’. It’s a start. The ‘Inside of the piece where the glaze was applied Vastly too thick’, writes William. This is no surprise as ‘no person is at present concerned with me but my Brother’. They have built an Essaying kiln, which does not contain above fourteen small pieces, and are going to trial it. They are going to use Newcastle coal as it is ‘Vastly cheaper than Wood’, and undersell everyone else with their glorious, perfect, economic china.
Five weeks later he writes in good spirits that in three weeks he will be able to send a Cup or a Jar. His brother Philip and he have built a larger kiln – a Trifle of a kiln one foot square – and from this firing they have two vessels, marred by falling Spar which has stuck to the glaze but it gives ‘an Idea of perfect Porcellain’.
For William, porcelain becomes an Idea as it comes into being, marred, sharp where broken, but an Idea.