The tilery was placed in the middle of a piece of clay land near to the Glass Works' cottages. These had been built in 1882 from clay immediately opposite to them, and it was supposed, from the depth of the clay pits, that there was plenty of it, but it proved to be a mere "pocket," for, on the north, it soon ran out in a field or two, besides being stony, and so it did in the direction of the town soon after: it became deeper further south where were afterwards the brickery and the pottery. The works were not on the same scale as those at Eccleston, where the Tweedale machine was used, and a shafting ran along both galleries of the shed, and was driven by the same engine that drove the rollers and pugmill; moreover, the shelving was not so high at Newton no so wide or well seasoned. More than all, there was no fire-clay at Newton, as there was at Eccleston, so that when the Legh estate was drained from the surface clay the works of necessity came to a standstill; and my uncle was so ill-advised as to open a pottery near to the Stone Row, where he had to boil and screen every pound of clay to rid it of stones, and in desperation to cart better clay from his tilery at Sutton. But the climax was to find that he had hired potters that put in as much again clay as was needful. The tile shed was a long, low range of wood shelving that ran out from the engine-house and pugmill, and was divided into right- and left-hand galleries. The kiln was on the north side so as to give access to the road past the Glass Works, and so into Crow-Lane. From the warping of many of the shelves, the wood must have been unseasoned and put up in haste, although when once in position it was subject to "a' the airts the win' can blaw." To protect the outer ends of the tiles in wet and windy weather, screens of sailcloth were used, which had to be unfurled and furled as rain or fine demanded. The shed was some 200 to 300 feet in length, and incidentally I may mention that my brother, cousin and I used it as a shooting gallery till stopped by the glass-blowers, one hundred yards further off. To begin with, the engine was an old one and needed much "fettling," so that we never seemed free from the attention of mechanics from the Vulcan Foundry, and the boiler, its companion, was no better, though it had worse water than some people thought possible "off clay." One day, in passing the engine furnace, I looked in and saw one of the boiler plates bellied out like a balloon and the engine "flying," so I reported the matter to my father, who promptly forced the plug and saved my uncle John, the engine-tenter, from sudden death, and the place from a general wreck. Our first manufacture was horse-shoe-shaped tiles of all sizes, then made by the Whitehead hand-driven machines, of which a from in Preston had then a speciality. The very large horse-shoe tiles were made by hand, mostly by John Platt, whom we brought with us from Eccleston, till a new shed, at right angles to the first, was built, in which my brother made the tiles while I carried them off. This carrying-off was no child's play, but one long-continued getting up steps (or stairs) and getting down again after placing each wet tile in its place; and this, at twelve or fourteen years of age, when repeated hundreds and thousands of times, made rest at eventide sweet and refreshing.
At first my employment was to rub up the cracks in the clay as the tile came under the horse-shoe iron washer on its passage through the machine that was driven by some poor Irish exile and fed by my uncle Thomas Mayor, the long-armed potter, who made chemical pots for Tennant, of Glasgow, and who slapped and cut the clods of clay most scientifically as they were wheeled from the pugmill. But this rubbing-up caused endless cuts to my right hand that no leather glove could quite cure, so that it is not without reason that I say the clay was too stony. By-the-by, there was just such another big stone uncovered as that at Rob-lane end, but it was covered up when the "fay" (soil) was replaced to whence it came and made into agricultural land. One winter we had all the inmates of the local workhouse getting turnips off that same land; and one of them, to earn a pipe of tobacco, stood on his head and sang "The Woodpecker," my friend William Ellam's favourite song. Once, I remember, all the Irishmen assembled near the pugmill and were harangued in Irish by a fugitive Fenian on his way to America. It was all hard work, and my father got more than his fair share of it, for he et all the tiles in the kiln, and was employed almost every Sunday during the season in burning them. For the security of his position on the establishment, he had also to do an extra day's work, and it never changed, so that at the end of his time he found himself earning no more than the merest labourer, indeed, he sardonically styled himself "labourer" though a skilled artisan. Moreover, he loaded the farmers' carts, but, when they came during meal-hour, he inflexibly made them wait his time, not, however, without several emeutes. Many thousand good tiles were made, and that very cheaply, and wages were very low.
It was in 1842 that my father came partly to superintend matters and get affairs ship-shape. He lodged with Johnson, the cooper, in High Street, till we could come from Eccleston. A Freemason, he soon found out others in Ashton, and, being a well-read man, he was very good company. He was a constant reader of Pat Kean's itinerating library during the time he was burning tile kilns. The making of tiles was a simple affair, and yet there were degrees of skill in it. If tiles were burned too soft they would not stand the weather nor last half the time they should, and if fired too much would run like treacle, so in this seemingly simple matter caution had to be used. The kiln was well built according to the fashion then in vogue, and the bricklayer of the estate had to make any repairs that were needed from time to time. Coal could always be had when wanted at the coal-wharf, where a man named Owen was the collector. Such parts of the Legh estate as needed draining were drained, and Mr. James Wilson had the over-sight of the drainers. Some of the land was closely drained, some more widely, but, besides this, many smaller estates were drained. The bricks for the Glass Works were made in the fields behind them and Vista-road. Those for the general public were in the main good, because both the material and the men were good, in the sense that the clay was good and the hand-made bricks were made by Liverpool experts like Tom Jones and his family, who lived in Stone Row; and, except as to some differences as to sizes and moulds, all went well till the demand ceased and all went out.
The tilery was erected in the time of Thomas Howard, and the tile kiln was built by Richard Bate, both Estate foremen. The pottery kiln was built by John Lowe, of Ashton, as well as the warehouse, planned by my uncle and carefully inspected day by day by myself. Many of the workmen lived in Ashton-in-Makerfield. - P.M.C.
Charlie Brown, the riddle maker, was one of my earliest acquaintances. He often came to the Tile Works with riddles which were used for riddling the pebbly sand that we got from Parkside and used in making pan tiles, etc. He was habitually silent and sad. He had led an eventful life. While as yet quite young he kept the Sunbeam Inn on the old Wargrave-road, when a robbery of church-plate took place, and the articles were traced to the attic of his public-house. He was accused of the robbery, and although he protested his innocence, he was convicted and sentenced to twenty-one years' penal servitude and sent to Botany Bay, where he served his time in a chain-gang. The law, as it then stood, exacted he extreme penalty; indeed it was found that he was innocent, yet so exacting was the law that, once sentence was passed, it had to be fulfilled. he was offered land to live on, but his longing to see his old home and friends was so great that he refused the offer, preferring his old humble home on Newton Common, then a golden glow of gorse. But, alas, three times seven years had removed his wife and all he held dear to a better land, and he returned only to vindicate his character in the eyes of the world, and to die in the arms of his brother, a victim to an unjust judgment. - P.M.C.
When my uncle Peter Mayor, the potter, gave up the manufacture of pottery ware, the kiln and warehouse passed into the -hands of Messrs. Walton Brothers, who began a manufacture of ornamental glass, of which they were adepts, and for a while utilized the kiln, that we had built; but finding some difficulty in the way of a native manufacture, began to import glass and adapt it for the English market. This seems to have been highly successful, for the elder of the brothers, dying, left the property to the younger brother, who, having lost both sons, left the bulk of his fortune to Wargrave Church, of which he was a very devoted adherent. Many and long conversations I had with both brothers, for I lived for a time in one of their houses in Crow-lane. There was something tragic in the lives of both these men. The elder related to me that he went to Japan to supervise the erection of some glass-making furnaces for the Japanese Government, but declined to tell them any of the secrets of his trade, and so left them to lead an aimless life, having lost his wife and children in a monsoon while going East. The younger brother was similarly unfortunate, with the difference that the blight was by disease. Who continued the business I never knew; but, whilst I was travelling for the Haydock Colliery Co., I called upon several firms who manufactured pit lamp glasses, so I argued that these were not among the collectanea of the brothers, whose specialities were lamp shades. - P.M.C.
Mr Robert Davies, solicitor of Warrington, inherited the property of the Newton Glass Works from his father, who was the first proprietor, and sold it to Messrs. Ackers, Abraham and Co., by whom it was held while I was a boy running about the Tilery in 1848. From them it passed to Messrs. William Stock and Son, who in 1851 built new furnaces and the chimney with that date on it. They introduced the manufacture of German sheet glass, for which purpose they obtained the services of some Belgian glass blowers from either Charleroi, Gosselies, Jumet, La Louvière, or Mons - great centres of that industry - and who spoke the Walloon patois and French. This for a time secured the trade to the Messrs. Stock, but ultimately led to a deplorable quarrel between the English and the Belgian workmen, and the manslaughter of an Englishman named Rose, who had lived next door but one to me in Crow-lane, opposite St Mary's. Rose was in the wrong, for I saw nearly the whole affair, which tool place in Spurr's public-house, the Old Crow Inn, and was the result of trade jealousy, for the Belgians came under contract and earned very good wages. Messrs. Stock and Son meditated great extensions to the premises, and got my uncle, Peter Mayor, to make a million bricks for them, but the project failed, either through the depression in trade caused by the Crimean War or the pressure put upon them by the St Helens companies. Anyway, it collapsed, and Peter Mayor had half-a-million bricks thrown on his hands, on one pleas or another, that were sold to the arbitrator for eight shillings a thousand, and found there way into the foundations of houses then being built for the Railway Company in Earlestown. At that time I was in my uncle Mayor's brick, tile, and pottery office, which was opposite the centre of the Glass Works Row. These houses were being built when the glass-making started in 1832, as a consequence of the opening of the railway. In 1857 I left my then employment and was offered a situation in the Glass Works office by Mr. James, who was at that time the manager. While I was yet a mere boy I used to run in and about the Glass Works, and saw all that was going on in it. Next door to us in the High-street (after the Shaw's left) lived the Wallaces, glass-makers who came from Newcastle, and, with whom we kept up an intimacy after they went to St Helens, and with the Locharts and McCulloughs. I knew Barnes, the potter, and often watched him building up pots for the glass-metal. I also watched the Belgians swinging the huge pieces of it their punts in the air and in the pits over which they stood - in fact, the whole process of glass-making, cutting, packing, and despatch. At times there was a congestion, but that ceased when the branch line from the colliery was changed from the front to the back of the houses in Crow-lame and modernised. For a time the works were closed. Messrs. William Stock and Son, however, continued the trade in the works at West Leigh for other ten years, having spent a fortune in building expensive furnaces. In 1857 Mr. T.S. Beasley, of Manchester, tried to revive the trade, but in the same year assigned his interests to Mr. Robert Gardiner, who in turn assigned them in 1861 to the St Helens Crown Glass Co., who promptly closed them and effectually prevented further competition. About the same time the Plate Glass Works in Sutton closed as a result of competition. In the interim, while the works were at a standstill, the dwelling-house and garden of the manager were tenanted by a commercial traveller named Robert Taylor, whose business lay in the Manchester district. His two daughters were in the Congregational Church choir, and the youngest of them was one of our first sopranos. I frequently visited their home, and on one occasion was shown a stained-glass window that was said to have been one of the manufactures of the first glass firm there. - P.M.C.
In 1866 the Glass Works were re-opened as a Glass Bottle Works, by Mr. Charles Bell Ford Borron, under the title of Messrs. Charles Borron and Co. Mr. Borron was afterwards joined by Mr. John Little, of Glasgow, as partner. I was well acquainted with Mr. Little and family, and his younger son Alex was in my office for a twelvemonth. Mr. Borron I also knew from living in the next house to him in the enclosure before Wargrave Church, and my very last service was to do some translation in connection with his glass bottle business. Long may it flourish! I also saw the fire in 1883 that destroyed two of the warehouses. - P.M.C.
The first gas tank was sunk and meter erected while I was still at the pottery office. The excavation was not more than fifty yards off . and of course I duly inspected the work, and wondered why the old clay pit not farther than twenty yards away had not been utilized. I very well remember the first manager, Mr. Swann, and his son Sam who fell in the Boer War. Of the further extensions I had but little knowledge; but at the first introduction of gas I had a striking experience. My aunt Mc Arthur kept a provision-shop in Crow-lane end, and finding her gas bill for the quarter rather high, resolved to return to the use of the tallow candle, her former illuminant, and did so for the whole of the next quarter. But, remorseless as fate, another bill came in for a still larger sum, and when the collector called, he said, "You have been going at it this quarter!" "That is strange," said Mrs. McA., "for I have never turned it on!" "Ay, at, that may be so; but did you ever turn it off?" Next door, my uncle John nearly blew up our house by blowing out our gas. What a mysterious thing is gas! - P.M.C.
Newton in Makerfield:
Its History,
with some account of its people.
Compiled from Authentic sources
by
John Henry Lane,
with Notes and Reminiscences
by
Peter Mayor Campell.
Printed and Published by the Compiler
1914.
This version copyright © John Rouse, February 2001.
A reprint of this book (Volumes I and II) is available from Peter Riley
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