HIGH FLYING SAUCERS
THE RARE PORCELAIN FETCHING TOP PRICES
When Quaker entrepreneur William Weston Young and the gifted ceramic artist William Billingsley set up a porcelain factory at Nantgarw, near Cardiff, neither could have realised they were bequeathing today’s collectors a legacy of rare Welsh porcelain of exquisite beauty.
Its particular appeal was its soft white translucent body, which provided a perfect “canvas” for highly detailed and colourful botanical and landscape painting.
Billingsley and his son-in-law, the master potter Samuel Walker, set their sights high, attempting at Nantgarw to emulate the products of European manufacturers of fine porcelain. Sadly, however, the “glassy” nature of the porcelain body required such high temperatures to cause it to vitrify that losses in the kilns grew to unacceptable levels and the venture resulted in near financial ruin for everyone involved.
The factory opened in 1814 and closed in 1820, Billingsley and Walker doing virtually a moonlight flit to work for Coalport in Shropshire.
Today Nantgarw porcelain is rare, sought after and valuable.
That might have been the end of the story. Except that on its closure, thousands of pieces of undecorated Nantgarw porcelain described as “in the biscuit and the white”, remained.
Here was a chance for Young, the majority shareholder, to salvage what was left of the business.
Enter one Thomas Pardoe (17701823), described as a “China and glass enameller and gilder, wholesale and retail”, who took over where Billingsley and Walker left off.
Like Billingsley, Pardoe was both born in Derby and, in the 1780s, also apprenticed at William Duesbury’s Derby porcelain works in Nottingham Road.
His somewhat less celebrated father, William, also worked there and is described on his son’s birth certificate simply as a “china painter”.
Thomas’s talents as a painter of flowers and birds were quickly recognised and he found work at the Worcester factory and then in 1795 at the Cambrian pottery factory in Swansea. There he came under the influence of the founder, botanist Lewis Weston Dilwyn, and his son, Lewis Llewelyn.
Pardoe remained in Swansea until about 1809 when he moved to Bristol, where he worked on his own account as an independent decorator and gilder, painting glass, porcelain and pottery, the latter supplied in the white by Coalport.
Collectors today seek out pieces signed “Pardoe Bristol” but these are rare. Interestingly, when he was looking for work at the Cambrian Pottery, Billingsley is known to have approached Pardoe, his old friend from their apprenticeship days. Like Pardoe, Billingsley had previously also moved to the Worcester factory where he was instrumental in refining the firm’s recipe for porcelain production, signing a contract preventing him from disclosing its secrets to any third party. However, the contract did not prevent Billinsgley from using it himself and in 1807 he made approaches to various manufactories, including the Cambrian, before setting up the Nantgarw factory with William Young. Billingsley’s soft paste porcelain recipe was used at the Nantagrw factory, but production ran into early difficulties. Pieces collapsed or shattered in the kilns and wastage ran cripplingly high.
With finances running low, Billinsgley turned to the Cambrian Pottery for assistance.
Proprietor Lewis Dillwyn was an admirer of the Nantgarw product and with the offer of sharing his factory space, its machinery and workforce, production using a recipe modified further moved there in 1814. The venture was short-lived, however. With little or no improvement on wastage, Dillwyn withdrew his support in 1817, leaving Billingsley and Young to return to Nantgarw.
Young succeeded in finding further investment from local businessmen, but with Billingsley producing perhaps his finest work, furnishing the best homes and dining tables in Europe, the business was running at an even greater loss.
After its closure, it was natural for Young to call in his friend Pardoe to help him recover some of the losses he had suffered. The two men had worked together when Young was a painter at fellow Quaker Lewis Dillwyn’s Cambrian Pottery.
They conducted multiple experiments to perfect a glaze for the remaining stock of biscuit ware, and Thomas and his son, William Henry, laboured to decorate as much of the ware as they could salvage.
Without access to Billingsley’s secret recipe, the men were unable to add further blank pieces to stock but sales of finished porcelain between 1821 and 1822 raised sufficient sums to cover Pardoe’s and his staff’s salaries but fell somewhat short of recouping all of Young’s total losses.
Young had no choice but to sell the Nantgarw works to Pardoe and his son in 1833, after which he returned to flower painting. Young’s family had interests in a firebrick manufacturing company, which supplemented his earnings and he also illustrated a guide to the Neath Valley.
Thomas Pardoe remained at Nantgarw until his death, while son
William built new kilns and established a factory on the site to produce salt glazed and vitrified brown glazed earthenware domestic ware and bottles “for spirits, porter, ale, ginger beer…warranted not to absorb and withstand acid”.
Collectors also seek out clay tobacco pipes made at the factory, said to have been produced at the rate of 10,000 a week.
In 1871, his widow was described in a trade directory as a “pipe-maker and potteress” employing 11 men and 10 women. The firm continued under the name of Pardoe Brothers from 1871-95, and until 1920 under Percival Pardoe, by which time the popularity of cigarettes killed the market.
William Billingsley’s porcelain can be seen in abundance at Derby Museum and Art Gallery, while the National Museum Cardiff has displays of Nantgarw porcelain, as does the Nantgarw China Works, which is now a museum.