NEW: Chapter Six

Chapter 6

The Beauford takeover was never going to lead to plain sailing for Wade. Ultimately, Beauford was desperately trying to escape the decline of their old engineering businesses whilst running after new innovation in the ceramic industry. In the end they never really quite caught up.

The Wade companies had been exclusively owned and run by the Wade family till 1935, when part of the company (Wade Heath etc) had been floated on the stock market as Wade Potteries. The rest (notably George Wade & Son Ltd) joined it in 1958. Tony and his father Colonel Wade had continued to control the amalgamated company as major shareholders till their deaths in 1986/87.

Former Wade Heath MD Jack Johnston became chairman, and Wade continued to declare healthy profits, £2.3m in 1988 with a workforce of 1200. But profits slowly began to slip, and with shares disseminated amongst the family, a buyout was inevitable, and after takeover by Beauford in December 1989, the company changed its name to Wade Ceramics Ltd. By now the Wade family had little influence over the direction of the company.

Wade Ceramics Ltd (Beauford)

Almost everything (except Wade) seemed to be declining in Beauford. They had several big engineering companies under them working on heavy engineering projects like oil-rig platforms, coal-mining, railways and bridges, but the changing economic climate and the rise of foreign competition undermined their business.

Soon troubleshooter Edward Duke was brought in to speed up the Beauford’s transformation from old industries to new. He was certainly creative in reorganising the company’s finances, keeping the banks from the door, allowing for much of the loss-making engineering side to be closed or sold off.

With the Beauford share price tumbling (from 202p in March 1990, to just 30p in Dec 1991), he needed to move quickly. Duke: “1988 had actually been a very profitable year for Wade (the height of the Nat West Piggy Banks), but the recession loomed. The real problem was Seagoe Ceramics’ move into making tableware, which made huge losses forcing Wade to seek a buyer. Beauford bought Wade for £20m, an [overly] large sum even for the heady days of the 1980s. By the time I was brought in (October 1991), Beauford was technically insolvent, totally relying on the support of bankers. Several of their engineering companies were bleeding the group of cash, and these were disposed of; one for just £1, another for 1Dm, and one put into receivership.”

But Wade Ceramics was seen as the future of the whole company, and in 1996 Beauford acquired VZS near Edinburgh to work alongside Seagoe (Wade Ireland). VZS was thriving making a variety of industrial ceramics, including valves for faucets/taps and special pellets for the nuclear power process (for which they were the sole-supplier), whilst Seagoe made other technical ceramics such as rocket nose cones. Duke then went further and secured Allied Insulators Ltd, who made ceramic discs for electric pylons and underground train lines. Although sound investments at the time, there was always the risk that other materials would be developed to replace ceramics, and after many years glass insulators began to infiltrate the system being cheaper and (inexplicably) more ascetically pleasing.

As Duke claimed to shareholders in 1996, “The disposals of the engineering businesses have eliminated the Beauford Group’s exposure to the longer term engineering contracts which require significant allocations of working capital to support such business and concludes Beauford’s strategy of becoming a Ceramics Group.”

However, whilst the parent company struggled to tick over, Wade Ceramics had a hit on its hands. A big one.

The Wade Collectors Club

By the mid-1980s, the company was getting regular enquiries from collectors concerning their ware, past and present. The trickle soon became a torrent as collector Pat Murray’s 8-years of extensive research resulted in her innovative book Whimsical Wades in December 1986. Then Wade made headlines in 1989 when a Snow White & 7 Dwarfs set unexpected sold at auction for £410, several times what was expected. The secrets of Wade collecting were out, and in 1990 the extensive World Of Wade book appeared written by Ian Warner and Mike Posgay. With ceramic collecting in general evolving exponentially, Wade Ceramics were getting pestered incessantly not just for information but also requests for them to form a Collectors Club – I know, I was one such collector!

[The Genesis of Wade books, Pat Murray’s 1986 Whimsical Wades]

With the company slow to react to the collecting phenomenon, others began collectors’ clubs themselves. In America, Valerie Moody and Carole Murdock of Collector’s Corner in Arvada Colorado began their Wade club with the magazine The Wade Watch in 1988. Hot on their heels was Catherine Barlow’s Wade Collectors Club in May 1989, which was initially free to join but when subscriptions mushroomed almost immediately an annual members fee of £4 was introduced. These clubs worked together to distribute each other’s newsletters to avoid overseas postage/currency problems for collectors.

[The original Wade Collectors’ Club magazines from 1989/90]

But with Catherine based in Nottingham, and tourism in the Potteries blossoming due to the collectibility of the local ceramic industry (and their increasing number of factory shops), it made sense that another Wade club should set up in Stoke-on-Trent itself. Not only that, it also had a shop perfectly placed to welcome visitors at Stoke’s main railway station. It was set up by Alan Taylor and his family, and forged close links with Wade Ceramics. This club was also called The Wade Collectors Club, and distributed its magazine The Jolly Potter to a growing fan base. It was officially opened on 13th March 1990 by BBC’s Antiques expert Henry Sandon, and had the likes of Jeremy Wade writing in their magazine.

[Even Wade catalogues became valuable]

What was astonishing was the ability of these enthusiasts to gain access to the Wade factories in Stoke and Portadown, even arranging factory tours for collectors. They also got access to Wade’s customers such as the Tom Smith Christmas Cracker company and Bells (United) Whisky Distillers, and ran articles with exclusive information from all these companies. They even contacted and ran interviews with members of the Wade family, including Iris Carryer Wade (Colonel Wade’s daughter).

The clubs also began selling Wade collectibles themselves. Often these were factory surpluses, but soon they were offering commissioned pieces made to order at Wade Ceramics. Other organisations then commissioned pieces, one of the first of which was Scooby Doo, limited to only 2000 and individually numbered, and marketed as “The first cartoon character Blow Up for over 20 years!”

By 1992 pottery dealers David Chown & Russell Schooley were establishing C&S Collectibles in Arundel, commissioning their first figure Arthur Hare (based on a children’s book being developed by a local Sussex author), which retailed for only £16 (+£2.95 UK shipping). Soon they were commissioning their hugely successful Betty Boop figurines, and by 1996 had opened a shop and began organising Collectors Meets for thousands of visitors.

In 1992, Jenny Wright had joined Wade as a secretary for the Consumer Sales Division, and immediately realised that things had to change when it came to how the company interacted with Wade collectors. It now made sense for Wade themselves to transact and collaborate directly with collectors, rather than through intermediaries. First up was a Wade factory shop, which first opened in the Flaxman Works building in July 1991 by Stoke’s Lord & Lady Mayor. Like other factory shops of its time, it specialised in seconds and surpluses, even selling odd-shaped items from all corners of the company, including advertising ware and unidentified industrial ceramics.

One of the first events held by Wade was the bizarre destruction of confiscated pirate ware. This was mainly of imported fake copies of Wade “English Life” teapots made in Taiwan. Wade ware was now so popular that cheap knock-offs made for lucrative business. It was a sobering moment as it became clear that as foreign imports were far cheaper than British-made ceramics, companies such as Wade had to produce items of value exploiting their name and history to maintain sales. The Wade mark on the base added zeros to the price, as collectors soon found when trawling flea markets and car-boot sales.

Traders were getting wise, and prices on the secondary market began to rocket. But collectors seemed to snap up almost anything of Wade. As Russell Schooley wrote, when pondering whether to buy an item or not: “He who buys and stores away, lives to trade another day.” Oh, for that to be the case always.

However, it wasn’t until 1994, after a lot of deliberation, that Jenny helped launch the Official Wade Collectors Club alongside Wade executives Ralph Brough and Roger Ellis. It was 8 whole years after Pat Murray’s first book, and 6 years after the first unofficial club had been launched in the USA! The irony of this was that the early issues of the new Official Club magazine were actually compiled and edited by USA’s aforementioned Murdock & Moody team!

[The first 9 issues of the Official Wade Collectors “The Magazine”]

But although Wade Ceramics were late to the party, playing catchup proved a lot easier than it should’ve been. The new Official Club soon swallowed up or surpassed the other Wade Clubs, with their membership growing rapidly by the 1000s. Their initial monochrome club magazine was replaced (by issue 10 in 1996) by a lavish full colour brochure. Even London’s prestigious Phillips auctioneers admitted, “Wade seems to be the fastest growing of all the collectors’ markets”.

One of the best recruitment days was 25th September 1994, as this was the first specialised Wade Collector’s Fair, taking place at Birmingham’s UK Motorcycle Museum . There were only eighteen exhibitors plus a Wade Factory stall all in one small room, so it took FOUR hours to get all of the queuing crowd of 1000+ in without breaking fire regulations! The limited edition of 1000 spaniel dog sold out in 3 hours, leaving many disappointed. The writers Warner & Posgay signed books for FIVE hours solid with no breaks!

[The first Wade Fair at Birmingham, shockingly over-subscribed!]

The organisers thus responded to this phenomenal success by announcing that next year’s fair in June 1995 would have…TWO rooms. And even that wasn’t enough! 44 exhibitors attracted nearly 2000 collectors, with 30 sleeping outside the main door so as to be first in.

Soon collectors’ pieces from the fairs were going for crazy prices, and a form of fanaticism set in. The Official Club’s membership numbers ballooned to 10,000, although how many of these were unique individuals is unclear as annual membership (at £15) included a free piece (like the initial Burslem the cat) and exclusive membership offers. [One or two family pets somehow found themselves signed up as Collectors Club members by their owners!]

[Recruiting for the new Wade club, with spurious “Wade history”!]

The fairs got bigger – there were 12 different shows in 1998! – and spread across the Atlantic, in collaboration with Jim Beam bourbon whiskey collectors. The hysteria felt like a minor Beatlemania!

However, maintaining the high standards of design and artistry began to play a part in the Wade collecting frenzy. With regular issues, collectors’ club specials, fair specials and a multitude of limited edition commissions from any number of organisations (including Collect It magazine, C&S etc), things were starting to get out of hand. As collectors just had to become more selective, with some simply running out of space on their many shelves, these pieces that had originally been snapped up in record time now occasionally lay unsold. Was there really a place for a thousand copies of Sid The Sexist (a vulgar character from the hilarious yet often crude VIZ comic)? There were also some alarming Beauty & The Beast characters, and curiously wide-eyed Snap, Crackle & Pop from the breakfast cereal. But most of the figures did make excellent additions to collections, in particular the elegant Betty Boop figures (by C&S), and the simple yet iconic Mister Men and Pokémon figures.

[Some of the many curious commissioned Wade pieces]

[The Wade magazine goes colour, issues 10-18]

But like with many phenomena, there was a tipping-point, and as everyone seemed to be climbing aboard the collecting bandwagon, the bubble burst. The rise had been meteoric, but the decline was slow and steady, and had to be monitored closely by Wade Ceramics, so as not to over-produce items.

Although they’d been prepared for sales to max-out, had Wade actually seen a serious decline coming? “No, not really,” observed Wade MD Paul Farmer recently. “I mean, in its pomp the Wade collectors’ market was doing over two & a half million pounds a year turnover. But then the whole collecting mindset changed, and it slowly drifted away, before reducing rapidly.” One of the main changes was the introduction of eBay and on-line trading in the late 1990s. Within a few years, collectors were finding that almost any obscure Wade item was only a click away, which for some replaced trawling flea-markets and car-boot sales. As the internet grew, along came social media, with the likes of Facebook and Instagram sprouting Wade Collectors groups encouraging direct interaction between collectors from all around the world.

[The Wade Fairs came thick and fast!!]

The Official Collectors Club continued with 4 newsletter magazines a year, reducing the size from A4 to A5 in 2007 to save postage costs (albeit increasing the page numbers from 16 to 20). It was then that the club was continued in collaboration with the endlessly enthusiastic C&S Collectables, whose annual Arundel shows had become a major date in Wade Collectors’ calendars. The magazine reported news of a seemingly endless number of bizarre sets of new figures and whimsies, plus fascinating historical articles. But by the end in the early 2020s, membership had slipped from 10,000 down to around 750, according to Paul Farmer. The club eventually folded on 30th September 2023

C&S still continue as the focal point for Wade collectors throughout the world, and every year there are new young collectors beginning new collections of Wade sets, and enjoying it as much as the previous generations did. There is still a belief that it will all come round again, and Russell Schooley’s prediction of buying and storing away may come true in the long run.

The Wade Buy-out

The 1990s continued to be traumatic for the Beauford Group, and things finally came to a head in 1998. By now Edward Duke had left Beauford to head up the political organisation Countryside Alliance in their bid to thwart the new and popular Labour Government who were hell-bent on banning fox-hunting. Duke, who rode with the Middleton Hunt in Yorkshire, became a controversial character in what became a grotesque and bitter struggle. The Independent newspaper reported that he was (amongst other things!) “loud and brash”, and that was before he’d quit the Alliance and later linked with the more hard-line Real CA that produced crass posters (funded by Duke himself) whilst encouraging civil disobedience! [What the Whimsy-animal-loving collectors must’ve made of all this is unclear. There were already many cute Wade fox figures in existence, but then intriguingly C&S produced the Edward Fox figure in 1997, although it was more likely named after the actor rather than the Beauford exec…despite the fox conspiratorially winking!]

Meanwhile, back at Beauford, a downturn of markets (such as Allied Insulators’ struggle against rival glass alternatives) resulted in a crisis resulting in the company putting itself up for sale in early 1998. As Paul Farmer remembers, “Goldsmiths were in charge of the sale, but they didn’t really get any interest. Edward Duke had stayed on as non-executive director, and so after 6 months of this he claimed, “I could do better than this!” So, they said, “Well, go on then!” As I lived in Yorkshire, I’d handed in my notice to take a job nearer home, but then Edward rang and said he was thinking of trying to put a buy-out together, and would I be interested in taking on the [Head Of] Finance job.”

Duke and Farmer spent the next 6 months putting together the deal which finally went ahead in May 1999. “It was exciting but bloody hard work. The last 3-4 weeks before the buy-out I was probably working 100-120 hour weeks. There had to be an extraordinary general meeting because we were buying a significant part out of the Beauford Group. When the approval phone-call came through, Edward took off his tie and said: “I’ll never have to wear a tie anymore at work!”

“We decided to just pick and choose what we could, so we bought Wade and Allied Holding out of it, and we left VZS behind and we left it in a cash-rich PLC, which eventually got sold off. There was also a separate management buyout for VZS and the Northern Ireland (Seagoe) bit.“

The new company was called Wade Allied Holdings Ltd. Edward Duke became the company’s major shareholder and Chairman of Wade Ceramics. Paul Farmer became Wade’s Managing Director. As Paul remembers: “We took on a LOT of debt, but what we bought was a company that had just short of £50 million turnover and a massively strong balance sheet.”

For Wade Ceramics to survive though, the new company needed to be rationalised and the debts paid off. This was done by selling off certain specialist parts of the business (such as the “fires” business, including the ceramic fibre coals for gas fires, both in Burslem and Kentucky). Former Allied sites were closed and sold off (eg the Tamworth site became a Morrisons supermarket), but some evolved from management buyouts. As much as possible, the rest of the business was consolidated in Burslem, mainly at the Hilltop (Royal Victoria) site.

Dominant in the Wade portfolio was whisky/gin ceramic decanters. The Scottish whisky companies were of great importance to Wade, in particular Chivas Regal, who at the time were demanding up to 30,000 decanters a week, but were soon wanting to ramp this figure up. [Ironically the flagship Chivas’ order with Wade took a sudden dip shortly before the 1999 buy-out, which was so unnerving for the Beauford board that it gave Duke and Farmer the leverage to secure the buy-out!]

But although Chivas was a major Wade customer, there were also other companies such as Allied Distillers, which was Balantines whisky, plus Tullamore Dew whiskey in Ireland. It was important prestige-wise for these companies to be able to claim that their decanters were bottled in Scotland/Ireland, so a prestigious and trustworthy British ceramic company was preferred. [One company tried a cheaper Portuguese ceramic company, only for their whisky to react with the porcelain causing discolouration as the surface wasn’t properly “vitrified” like Wade’s quality products.] The problem for Wade was keeping up with demand.

Other major business included Allied Insulators’ multi-million-pound contracts for the electrical distribution industry with major companies like Balfour Beatty and the National Grid. More sexy was the promotional ceramics made by Wade PDM, which also included bar-towels, pub mirrors and metal trays for the spirits and brewery industry. “We used to make 10,000 ashtrays a year for Guinness,” recalled Paul Farmer.

However, the massive sprawling Greenhead Street site (the Manchester Pottery) began to be wound down. It no longer produced tiles, whimseys, components for gas fires, and soon Wade PDM’s business began to collapse. Firstly, the brewers, distillers and tobacco companies stopped giving away promotional products free to pubs and clubs, expecting publicans to buy them. So instead of getting 20 Guinness ashtrays for free, publicans were expecting to fork out £10 for each one! Instead they bought cheap glass ones, and even less of them when the smoking ban for pubs was introduced.

Meanwhile, Whimsy production was outsourced to Vietnam. Effectively, there was only one major customer, and that was Red Rose Tea in the USA. They were still all hand-designed, modelled, blocked and cased in the UK, but the manufacturing was done in Vietnam. The Whimsies were then shipped direct to Red Rose Tea in Little Falls, New York.

By 2004 almost everything had now moved into the Hilltop (Royal Victoria) works -including 25 paintresses still decorating hand-painted collectibles and jugs – and the Greenhead/Manchester Pottery was closed and sold off to a property developer along with The Royal Works. Pickers appeared as if from nowhere to dig old whimsies etc out of the ground below and behind the factory (where many seconds were dumped or had been used as hardcore many years before). The historic old Flaxman works was heartlessly demolished, and the beautiful Van Hallen frieze on the top of the building entrance was pulled down and disappeared in one of the worst travesties to Stoke historical buildings. The new housing estate at least kept some names from Wade’s history, like Hallen and Rockingham Court. (It was almost like they’d read The Wade Dynasty book!)

After all the changes to Wade Ceramics, it was time to analyse what the future was for the company. “Edward looked at the business,” observed Paul Farmer, “and we’d (predominantly) become a decanter business. We were a niche market.” Although the Collectors Club and Wade PDM still produced pieces, they were dwarfed by the likes of Chivas. If the company was going to survive and thrive, fundamental change was needed.

The Road To Festival Park

[The Hilltop factory workshop on a good day!]

One of the problems of consolidating the business under one roof was the choice of that roof: the Hilltop! PF: “It had FIVE floors, slope-y slopes, people pushing trolleys up and down…it started at one end of the factory, went to the other end of the factory, stopped in the middle for a bit, went back downstairs, then upstairs, and around before it came out!” At times it looked like a Heath-Robinson set-up (or the cover of the first Wade Jolly Potter magazine in 1951).

For 140 years the Wade companies had been manufacturing in the Mother Town of Stoke-on-Trent, so it was quite a wrench to consider moving away. But it was time to make the break from historic old Burslem in order for the business to be dragged into the 21st century (“from the 19th century,” as Edward Duke often claimed).

Other companies had migrated from Burslem and gone on to success, most notably Josiah Wedgwood who had moved out of the town centre (Queen St where the Wedgwood Institute is now) to create a renowned purpose-built ceramic factory, The Etruria Works…although that had been back in 1769! [The village and area of Etruria owed its origins to Wedgwood’s iconic factory, which Josiah named after the ancient pre-Roman Italian region.] It was certainly an extraordinary idea for Wade to try and replicate the Wedgwood legend, although they weren’t planning on housing their workers there, as Wedgwood had.

The move was set up by Edward Duke with a deal involving developers St Modwin. Just a mile down the road from the Hilltop was Etruria’s Festival Park site. Originally the area had been immortalised in the 18th century by that Wedgwood’s factory, although in those days it was still fairly rural. It was very different now. Wedgwood’s house Etruria Hall may have survived the years up on a hill to the east overlooking the area (it is now a prestigious hotel), but the factory down on the west bank of the Trent & Mersey canal (another of Wedgwood’s innovations) had eventually begun to drastically sink into the ground! Subsequently, the Wedgwood company up-sticks in the 1930s and had completely moved to out-of-town Barlaston (several miles to the south) by 1950.

Almost all of the Etruria area was by now heavily industrialised with the massive Shelton Bar steelworks (the Nazis had even tried to bomb it in the last war), but most of that closed in the 1980s, leaving a polluted wilderness behind. Thankfully, the area had been rescued from these barren remains by the 1985 National Garden Festival project that had reclaimed most of the land. But redevelopment was painfully slow, and it was taking decades to get new projects rolling. There were three areas: retail, entertainment and business, with the larger business park – particularly west of the canal – being the slowest to take off; even the city’s largest investor, the now world-famous bet365, didn’t establish themselves in their prestigious headquarters until much later in 2016.

In 2008 there wasn’t a single manufacturing unit there, so St Modwin wanted an “anchor site” to get things moving, agreeing to buy the Hilltop site from Wade (for some future housing redevelopment) in a part-exchange deal. St Modwin would even build a 40,000 square foot “shed” on the new site for Wade to move into.

But the project was fraught with risks. Apart from the world business climate – the banking crisis had just hit – other pottery leaders were deeply concerned by the Duke/Farmer plan, which not only involved new premises but also new revolutionary manufacturing processes. As Paul Farmer remembers, “A good friend of mine, Royal Stafford’s Norman Tempest, called and said, “Are you mad?! You’re putting everything on the line!” I said, “Yeah, but it’ll work.” As one guy in the States told me, if you’re investing and you believe in what you’re doing, now’s the time to invest because when you come out the other end, it’ll be amazing. I always remember Edward rang just before signing the papers asking if I thought that we should pull out. I said, “No, I don’t.” So, Edward rang the chairman who said, “Well, if Paul’s in, I’m in!””

There was one worrying complication that delayed the new building by 9 months into 2009. Due to the industrial history of the site (Shelton Bar steelworks and the Bessemer furnaces) there was a main underground high-pressure gas pipe running across the back of the site that supplied the whole city. This was good news for Wade to get their gas supply, but the Wade branch required a “governor” fitting, which basically reduced the extreme high gas pressure to a level that the Wade factory could use. The delay made it a frustrating and nail-biting time for Wade, but eventually the work was completed and they started moving in January 2010, and Wade’s Festival Works was officially opened by The Duke Of Kent in October 2010.

Now in their new premises, Wade could steam ahead, particularly producing decanters for their main customer Chivas Whisky. Paul Farmer: “In 2006-07 [production of decanters] was starting to peak again, and we were struggling to keep up with demand. 30,000-40,000 pieces a week grew to 50,000-60,000, and that was sort of the Hilltop ceiling.” Worryingly, Chivas was even having to get some decanters made by a French company, despite them wanting Wade to be the sole supplier. “That was when the plans came to build a new factory.

“The final piece of the jigsaw was proving that we could use high pressure casting technology to manufacture decanters because everyone said that you couldn’t do that. With [traditional] slip-casting, you put liquid clay into a plaster of Paris mould, the plaster of Paris absorbs the moisture, creates the skin, you tip off the excess clay, and [after opening the mould] you’re left with a hollow piece. But with pressure casting, using resin moulds that are porous and much more accurate than plaster, you have to keep the pressure on the skin else the bottle will implode, which means you can’t easily remove the excess liquid clay, so you end up with a mould full of clay instead of a hollow bottle. So, what you’ve got to do is vacuum the clay out, but at the same time keep the pressure on the skin. The real secret is there’s two pipes in there, one of them vacs the excess clay out, the other one pushes it outwards by pushing compressed air in at the same time.

“We bought effectively a supposed prototype machine, and put it into Hilltop to prove that it worked before we committed to the new factory, where the production process was set up as a big loop. We still had hand-casting, but the machines all ran 24-7. We put in new glazing machines, so we were able to spray 4000 pieces a shift with just 3-4 people. You’d never be able to get 1000 pieces a shift out of a “dipper”. [A dipper was a worker who immersed biscuit-ware into the liquid glaze, which (after firing again) created the protective glassy coating so crucial for the decanters.] So the efficiencies were huge. Eight people produced as many decanters as 40 would have done previously by hand. But you know what? We never made anybody redundant because the business grew as we grew. As we had a government grant to help with the move (11% of the £8m cost) we had to guarantee to protect 146 jobs for 5 years. But by then we were employing 250 people.”

[Wade – Manufacturer Of The Year!]

As the government’s investment had been such a success, Wade’s move was acclaimed as a big success story, and as a result Paul Farmer was honoured with an OBE. “We had built the first factory in Stoke for 50 years that was making ceramics!”

Boom and bust!

Sir George Wade would have been proud of the innovations and entrepreneurial spirit of the new Wade regime. And at first, despite the world economy, Wade flourished. By 2012, Wade were making a colossal 95,000 decanter bottles a week! But there was always a risk that concentrating on one area of ceramics might be dangerous. And again, politics played a major part in the future of the company.

Chivas’ biggest market was China, where its Chivas Regal 21-year-old whisky was seen as a prestigious gift in its beautifully decorated decanter. This was most notably in the armed forces and civil service where lieutenants would gift up to captains, who would gift up to colonels and other officers etc etc, with (in such a big country) huge numbers of dignitaries involved. But then in 2013 Xi Jinping became China’s president. Xi believed there was too much gifting and influencing, where it could be interpreted as bribery, so he brought the practice to an abrupt halt. [It was part of his “Six Nos” or “Six no-nos!”, which included gift-giving, luxurious birthday celebrations, bureaucracy and hedonism.]

Chivas’ demand for whisky decanters “fell off the end of a cliff”. The result of all this was Wade profits crashing from £3m to just breaking even, before making a slow recovery as the market stabilised. Thankfully Wade had other brands/fires in the fire. The Collector’s Club was still muddling along, and there were other liquor decanters, in particular Ireland’s Tullamore Dew.

Another rising Wade success was Gluggle Jugs. The concept of the fish-shaped jugs/pitchers that made a “gluggle” sound when you poured water from them wasn’t new. They were believed to be a Thomas Forrester creation from his Langton Phoenix Works in the 1870s. But it was Wade that turned them into a new phenomenon. Competing potters on the recent TV series The Great Pottery Throw Down were even asked to make their versions of them!

Originally, the Gluggle Jugs were made in the main Wade factory, but the process was so different from decanters that it began to “mess up the factory big-style!” as Paul Farmer put it, requiring their own premises as demand increased. “The Gluggle Jugs factory was set up by me to satisfy demand. I’ve got about 26 of them myself! They went from nothing, slowly growing in the UK, before getting a brilliant European distributor, Sophie Mahlo. Production had gone from 300 a week to 3500 a week, so we moved the business to Longton, setting up a factory at the old Ainsley China building.”

Although the business only employed about 30 people, it brought in £2-3 million profits, and is still going today in Longton, run by Sophie Mahlo, who has created a huge on-line presence for the Gluggle Jugs. The company has invested in new dipping machines and a new kiln to keep up with demand, in the region of 4000 pieces a week.

But the COVID pandemic (2020-22) and the (Ukraine-war) energy-crisis put Wade Ceramics on the ropes. “Our energy bill,” remembers Paul Farmer, “went from a million to £3 million a year. And then Chivas decided to go for glass with their decanter. This added £2 million on the cost line and dropped £7 million off the top line, and so the company simply ran out of cash! And that’s why the business went bump.

“Frustratingly, we’d got in place developing businesses and contracts worth £6.5 million for Tequila and Mezcal decanter and others, and they were fabulous – the quality and product was mind-blowingly good. One of the biggest contracts was already in production when we went bust. Another big contract was for a Texas tequila company for 3/4 million bottles a year – two deliveries had already been made to them. We just hit a very unfortunate set of circumstances really.”

Sadly, on December 2nd 2022, Wade Ceramics went into administration. The perfect storm had finally amassed, taking a good ship down. Despite the tragic turn of events, Paul Farmer had every right to be proud. “We had had a successful business that had employed 200 people for 23 years. So we weren’t a flash in the pan that went down. Just that unfortunate set of circumstances.”

The Wade legacy

The Wade companies had survived 155 turbulent years in Stoke-on-Trent, through world wars, stock-market crashes, economic depressions, radical social changes, ever evolving marketplaces, extraordinary technical advances and an ever changing customer base.

The company and its products had changed the world that we live in, and had touched the lives of billions of people. Those Wade innovations involved the power industry (electric, gas and nuclear), telecommunications, transport, space exploration, weaponry, building construction, leisure activities, fine art, toys and games, medical developments…the list seems endless. It was ironic that to many they were just known for producing tiny animal whimsies given away with tea or in Christmas crackers, but that was just the tip of an enormous iceberg of revolutionary products.

Those who worked there should be rightly proud of these achievements, and of being part of the remarkable journey that the company made from the back-streets of Burslem to being a household name and a global player.

Even to the end the company was full of innovation and excitement. With Wade, there had never been a dull moment. A great company that was never afraid to embrace the evolving world around it.