A History of Twyfords 1680 - 1982
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A HISTORY OF TWYFORDS 1680 - 1982 James Denley Introduction Today’s events are tomorrow’s history and it is nearly 90 years since Joseph Hatton published his own story of Twyfords which he called ‘Twyfords A Chapter in the History of Pottery’. Now we have added one or two more historical chapters. I deeply appreciate James Denley’s work and would also like to add my thanks to those who have helped him. Both inside and outside the Company, people have been kind enough to give their time to enable us to gather together the wealth of information contained in this book. Inevitably there are omissions, but nevertheless, I am sure our history will be treasured by all those who may follow in our footsteps. I am particularly grateful to the elder generation, some of who are now in their 80’s, for so willingly and accurately recalling the events of past years. They have been our vital link - thank you all very much. Tradition and reputation are two things which money cannot buy and when you read the following chapters you will see that Twyfords have long and strong roots. But let me encourage you not to regard past achievements like a soft armchair in which to relax, but rather consider the past as a firm and solid springboard for the future development of Twyfords. Harry Barclay Chairman 1982 2 Contents 1 A Thousand Years Unwashed 4 2 The Family Connection 9 3 Into the Closet 15 4 Going National 20 5 The Beginning of Open Plumbing 25 6 Cliffe Vale and the Fireclay Madness 28 7 The Deluge and After 35 8 Twentieth Century Apogee 39 9 An Era Ends 46 10 Interregnum 51 11 Riding the Storm 56 12 The Reconstruction 63 13 Cheshire Changes 70 14 The New Generation 76 15 Home Thoughts and Abroad 81 16 Joining Forces 87 17 The Future Emerging 93 Acknowledgements 98 More Books to Read in the Bath 99 3 CHAPTER ONE A Thousand Years Unwashed To late 20th century homo sapiens, living in a part of the world where good sanitation and reasonable hygiene are taken very much for granted, it is by no means easy to picture, in all its manurial vividness, what life was like before these conditions became the norm. On holiday, in some unspoiled resort or foreign backwater, you may think you have witnessed sanitation at its most gruesome - but to coin a phrase, you have not even scratched the surface. If you take the ordinary family, living in the crowded towns and cities of early 19th century England, however, you may get a much better idea of what it was really like to plumb the depths. The population was growing at an enormous and unprecedented rate. (It much more than doubled in the first 30 years of the century). Yet the number of worthwhile water-closets in the entire country could probably still be counted in thousands. Only the fortunate few enjoyed the salubrious benefits of the bathroom, or even fairly primitive sanitary apparatus, while most, in their teeming garrets, had to cope with sordid privies, pans and ash-pits - if they were lucky. In rural areas, the inhabitants could at least step into the garden, as Dean Swift put it, ‘to pluck a rose’, but otherwise, things were little better - and even royalty and political grandees had serious sanitary problems. As late as 1844, Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, was horrified to discover 53 overflowing cess-pools cringing beneath the towers and ramparts of Windsor Castle, and on hot days, when the breeze was in the wrong direction, the River Thames so stunk of sewage that Parliament had to suspend its sitting - as it did in ‘The Great Stink’ of 1858. ‘Hell’ wrote the poet Shelley, ‘is a city much like London’ - and it is only when you consider that it had been like this for hundreds of years, that you begin to understand the impact the sanitary reformers had on late Victorian England. Pioneering men like the Twyfords - the story of whose company this is - changed our lives quite as profoundly as say, Marconi, Ford, Edison or Baird - and it is perhaps only because of our more tender susceptibilities, that they are not given the credit they so richly deserve. 4 ‘The story of sanitation’ says Roy Palmer in his excellent history ‘The Water Closet’, ‘seems to be one of spasmodic efforts soon forgotten’ - and this appears to have been precisely the case all down the long and insanitary years. One of the oldest surviving privies, for example, at Mohenjo Daro in India, is over 5,000 years old. Half-a-dozen, no less, have been found in the second millennium Sumerian Palace of Sargon, King of Kings, and in the City of Akhenaten, at Tel-ek-Armana; we know that at least one ancient Egyptian enjoyed a shower bath, and a key- hole shaped closet, with a buttock-shaped limestone seat. So clearly, pre-historic plumbers have done it all before, as we shall see, with considerable panache. The Cretan Palace of Knossos has been described as “a plumbers’paradise” and well it might be. From around 1650 B.C. it had an extensive system of drains, fresh water pipes and settling tanks. You can still see the closets which almost certainly flushed, and a bath virtually identical in shape with its late nineteenth century successor. The island, as tourists will know to their cost, is considerably less well-equipped today, although in Heraklion Museum, where the treasurers of Knossos are kept, the gentlemen’s cloakroom can boast a row of superbly plumbed Twyfords Cascatas - 3,600 years after Knossos, circa. 1950 A.D.. More familiar than the Minoans perhaps, the Romans were also skilful plumbers - the very word sanitation stemming from ‘sanitas’ meaning health. By the first century A.D., Rome’s water supply was provided by eight main aqueducts, about 22Omiles long, and the sheer scale of their operation defies belief. The baths of Diocletian are said to have accommodated an incredible 3,000 people, whilst those of Antoninus Caracalla, dating from around 215 A.D., covered an area of 28 acres or six times the site of St. Paul’s! ‘In the fourth century A.D.’ wrote Lawrence Wright in his sanitary classic ‘Clean and Decent’, ‘Rome had 11 public baths, 1352 public fountains and cisterns, and 856 private baths.’ In addition, as well as private water-flushed latrines, there were plenty of public ones’ - 144 is the figure he gives - and the city supplied water at the staggering rate of ‘300 gallons per head, per day’. The Romans, of course, brought the concepts of piped running water and bathing to Britain, and built baths over natural springs - as at Aquae Sulis at Bath. They included among their pantheon, ‘Crepitus’ and ‘Cloacina’ - god of conveniences and goddess of sewers - and even at the nethermost outpost of Empire, they did their best to keep up standards. Featured in Lucinda Lambton’s splendid photographic essay ‘Temples of Convenience’ is the magnificent latrine at Housesteads, on Hadrian’s Wall - on the very edge of Roman civilisation. There, like British colonials dressing for dinner in the jungle, 20 legionnaires could sit cheek-by-jowl, and having performed successfully, make use of communal sponge sticks in lieu of paper. 5 The problem in sanitation was never one of invention, but one of continuity. After each blossoming of civilisation - even after the Romans - skills were lost or neglected, and the standards of the barnyard came back into play. Though there were innovations in almost every century, there was little sustained improvement until a mere generation or two before the days of Twyfords, in the mid-19th century. There were, it is said, a thousand years from 300 to 1300 A.D., when Europe went unwashed, and this could comfortably be extended by nearly another half millennium without more than marginally bending the truth. The Dark Ages were also the dank and dirty ages; the later medieval period was a mire. The lot of the average peasant was not conducive to enlightened attitudes, nor even to regular washing, and as far as the early church-men were concerned, this was all to the good. Like St. Francis of Assisi, they believed that dirtiness was next to godliness, and bathing a penance. As in so many things, the monasteries were to prove an exception, and just as they helped preserve learning in the midst of barbarism, so they helped maintain a level of sanitary devotion. At Canterbury’, at the end of the 12th century, both cathedral and monastery enjoyed sophisticated plumbing, with lead piping, settling tanks to purify the water, and a constant supply for layers or washing troughs, baths and latrines. Similarly, in 1220, at the Priory of the Canons Regular at Trim, in Ireland, some of the very earliest glazed clay closets were built into a four-holer latrine, flushed by water from a conduit. But like other holy houses which sought to cleanse the body as well as the soul, Canterbury and Trim were but islands of hygiene in a sea of squalor. Sanitary innovation took one step forward and three steps backwards. London received its own piped water supply, via Tyburn, in 1237, but for reasons it is perhaps better not to go into, this was not altogether an undiluted pleasure. The River Fleet where it flowed through the city was little more than a seething open sewer, and in 1355, though it should have been ‘deep enough to float a boat laden with a tun of wine’ the Fleet Prison ditch was choked solid with filth.