Princess Di, Henry Cooper and Linda Lusardi – they all came to Doulton’s!
HISTORIAN MERVYN EDWARDS SPEAKS TO FORMER ROYAL DOULTON WORKER PAUL BAILEY ABOUT HIS CAREER AT THE BURSLEM
IT ISN’T what you know, it’s who you know. A desperately-hackneyed old adage, I agree, but it was perfectly true of many Stokeon-trent workplaces well within living memory.
I was reminded of this much when I chatted to Paul Bailey, below, recently, a 60-year-old former pottery worker. Paul’s working life was mapped out for him after leaving school, as he quickly found a job at an adhesive tile factory that was always expected to be temporary. He was actually waiting to join that colossus of Burslem pottery manufactories, Royal Doulton in Nile Street. He explains: “Back then, they employed family members, and it was said that you could only get a job on Doulton’s if your family members already worked there – that’s the way they operated at the time. My sister worked there as an on-glaze figure painter and she got me a job as an under-glaze figure painter in 1979. My interview saw me being taken to the manager’s office in the factory and being introduced to him – his name was John Kay, I think – and he said, ‘Hello, Paul, welcome to Doulton’s. When can you start?’
“It sounds bizarre, but back in the late 1970s, I can’t remember anybody not having a job – you could literally go from one job to another job, depending on what you wanted. There was plenty of work!”
At the tile adhesive factory, Nicobond in Burslem, Paul earned £24 a week, but in his first week as a figure painter, he was earning £75 weekly. Working hard gave him the opportunity to play hard, he apprises: “After a year’s work at Doulton’s, I could afford to fly on a Laker Skytrain and take a holiday in Florida. My well-paid job and the shifts I’d put in allowed me to afford it.
“I later worked in the glazing department, on machines that glazed cups, etc., before becoming a hollowware dipper, dipping some really large pieces by hand – sometimes quite a physical job.”
It never ceases to amaze me how pottery employees – my own mother included – endured the pervasive pong of factory workshops.
“Oh, yes,” nods Paul. “The turps, white spirit, aniseed smells were horrendous in the first week, but we all got used to it. Other people told me that my workwear stank – but I was oblivious to it.”
Industrial relations have changed irrevocably since the 1980s, and I am curious as to how Paul remembers the relationship between masters and men at Nile Street.
He outlines: “I certainly enjoyed working in the pottery industry when I first started, as the management was quite relaxed then. Painting was done on a piece-work basis, and as long as you earned your money, they were not so bothered about time-keeping. Later, management became a little stricter.”
Tales of potbank pranks and daft tricks are legion among old-time workers, but Paul’s generation also has stories to offer.
“I always respected women because I was brought up that way, but the workforce in the figurepainting department was 70 per cent women, and they were wicked, especially in terms of their humour.
“These women would put new recruits through an initiation process. So you’d have a board with 12 pegs on, and the figures you’d painted sat on that board. Then you would take the board to the inspector’s bench to be checked for quality – the inspectors being predominantly women.
“These figures were your own work and you didn’t want to let go of the board because the ware on it represented money that would be earned by you. The women knew this, so sometimes they would try and put you off by pulling your trousers down and applying boot polish to your intimate regions.
“It happened to me and other blokes, and we’d been warned it would. But as soon as it had happened, and everyone had had a good laugh, it was out of the way.”
Paul reveals that workers’ humour manifested itself in other ways, too. He laughs: “I worked in the underglaze department on character items like the Balloon Lady, etc. My sister worked upstairs on the on-glaze figures, on such as the Crimson Lady design. In my sister’s department, they only painted the bodies of the ceramic figures, whilst the heads were painted by a select few workers.
“However, in the underglaze department where I worked, you painted the complete figure. One of the in-jokes we played was to paint a figure with cross-eyes and to try and get it past the quality inspectors – because if it got past them, it would go out into production and end up in a shop. We rarely managed to pull it off.”
Despite such monkeyshine, Paul assures me that the workers and their bosses got on comfortably well – and that there was a reason for this: “The lower managers or supervisors had come through the ranks and so understood what you were going through yourself and spoke
your language. Appointing supervisors who had worked their way up actually prevented animosity. Occasionally, there were managers who attempted to wield the big stick, but they didn’t last very long.”
Doulton’s in its 1980s heyday seems like a well-oiled machine with a surprising amount of giveand-take between workers and their superiors, as Paul illustrates: “Theoretically, you worked an eight-hour contracted shift, but you may have ended up working for nine hours because you cared about your job. After your shift had ended, you stayed put until the person due to come on-shift turned up.
“The machines were working on a 24-hour basis and the shift changeovers were therefore important. If someone called in sick, my shift might be extended to 12 or 16 hours. I would do it without resentment, because it was extra money, and there would be more leeway from management when I needed a half-day off.”
There was occasionally light relief from the slog of potbank work because a major name in ceramics such as the Nile Street factory inevitably attracted the press and media – especially if celebrities were appearing at local theatres.
“One day,” says Paul, “Henry Cooper visited, and I couldn’t believe how tall he was. The day after, Ronnie Corbett came, and he was unbelievably small. Princess Diana and Alvin Stardust came, as well as the model Linda Lusardi, who was tiny. It was a relatively small factory, perhaps employing 5,000 people at most, but lots of important television people visited the figure-painting department.”
We all know how beautiful Royal Doulton ceramics were – but was ware ever nicked, and what was site security like, I ask?
“Well, if we had a range of figurines that were a limited edition of a thousand, it was sometimes the case that they would manufacture three thousand in order to ensure a thousand really good ones - and all these would be painted and glazed with their numbers on. All other manufactured pieces could not be sold due to the limited edition offer. One of my jobs was to take the surplus pieces to a skip and knock the heads off them.
“However, the security team discovered a local chap who had climbed over a wall, recovering all the heads and bodies, after which he would glue them back together and sell them. After this episode, we started smashing up the whole bodies.”
And what of the tragic demise of Doulton, remembered by so many today as a dagger through the heart of Burslem that would have farreaching consequences for the town’s economy?
“The redundancies began in about 1998 and I was made redundant in 2000, with the site closing in 2005,” summarises Paul.
“I received a pittance – I think it was £5,800 for 21 years of service. Money was less important to me than the principles of the situation and I managed to find another job straightaway.
“You only saw a senior manager if you’d done something wrong, and this reminds me of when they started making people redundant. There was a telephone near to the machine that we worked on – and we knew that if the phone rang, it would be one of us being asked to come to the office to receive our cards and be escorted by security off the factory.
“It would perhaps be the last time you would see your workmates, and it was a horrible time. The way that management did this was inexcusable. You had to continue doing your job but if that phone rang, you took what felt like the walk of shame to the office to be made redundant.
“Security colleagues would then accompany to your locker, which would be emptied, and then you would leave, without saying goodbye to anyone.
“They didn’t think about the friendships you’d built up with those you’d worked with in the workshops. Perhaps the management thought that if they handed a bloke his redundancy notice he would smash everything in sight before he left.
“Prior to closure, people from Jakarta in Indonesia were visiting our factory so as to be trained up by us on the machines we were using. We did this, even though we knew that this would lead to redundancies with jobs going abroad.
“I am a realist – I knew that all the shouting would make no difference and that nothing would change the fact that a factory would be built in Jakarta. In fact, the Jakartans were producing, for example, mug sets – clearly stamped as being produced in Indonesia – even before we knew about the factory. For me, there was nothing we could do about these winds of change.”
Paul, a resourceful chap, ultimately forged a different career with the prison service but his old artistic skills still find an outlet. The ex-potter’s meticulous animal paintings show once again the wealth of creative talent in our area.
Mervyn will present a Mervyn’s Mondays talk entitled A History of Royal Doulton, Burslem at the Victoria Lounge Bar, Adventure Place, Hanley, on Monday at 11 am. Admission is £3.50.