In the beginning
A Henry Hallen Letterhead
Much of early Wade history covering the origins of the Wade companies in the 19th century was based on fairly flimsy evidence.
The problem is that 90% of these stories of the Wade firm have as their original source a 1951 article written by Colonel George Wade himself in the firm’s own magazine, which itself was based on a short resume he wrote in 1930. The other 10% have just been made up! The vagueness of the Colonel’s article leaves almost every aspect of it open to interpretation. Maybe this was deliberate on his part, not wishing to tie himself down to a founding date for the firm. On the other hand, he may not have had all the facts in his possession; he was mistaken on certain aspects of the origins of Wade Heath & Co. What is worrying though is that he is the only source of information concerning the origins of the Henry Hallen firm before they moved to Burslem, and he based most of this information on a ceramic plaque, supposed to have been made by a Henry Hallen at his Red Street Works. But more on that later.
But why all this confusion over what should be a fairly simple tale?
The story so far…
Pat Murray’s pioneering ‘Whimsical Wades’ book kicks off with an unfortunate over generalisation; that:
“George Wade & Son Ltd was founded in 1810 at Manchester Pottery in Burslem, Staffordshire.”
This would have taken some doing as George Wade hadn’t even been born. In fact, assuming Pat refers to the first George Wade – for there were quite a few – even his father, John Wade, was only 4 years old at that time.
Manchester Pottery, meanwhile, was not even a twinkle in an as yet unborn architect’s eye. In 1810, the area where the pottery would be was open land with an old run-down chapel and graveyard, later evolving into Burslem Ragged school and then Shaftesbury Church (recently bought and transformed into a Wade warehouse). It had almost a century to wait before any Wade company would move in.
In 1810, Burslem was indeed a major Potteries town in North Staffordshire, and not yet part of any Stoke-on-Trent, which would not be created for another 100 years; Stoke-on-Trent being federated from six towns, with Burslem known as the Mother Town. However, it could be said that the Wade connection with Burslem in 1810 is misleading, and that the history of the Wade dynasty points elsewhere for its origins, ie. Colonel Wade’s story of Henry Hallen at Red Street in 1810.
It is hardly fair to pick on Pat Murray as even the excellent ‘World of Wade Book 1’ has a boy of only 3 years of age founding the company!
It is not surprising, though, that writers and historians have been hoodwinked in this way. The highly esteemed ‘Victoria History Of The County of Stafford, Volume II’, generally thought to be the definitive historical reference for the area, came up with the following in 1967:
“George Wade started an important branch of earthenware manufacture in Burslem in 1810, the market for which is indicated by the surviving name of the principal Wade factory, Manchester works.”
The Manchester works? What gives the game away is that the source for this gem is the ‘British Bulletin Of Commerce (1955)’. When you dig out the Bulletin, you find that all the articles have been written for it by the companies involved; and sadly, the editors of the ‘Victoria History’ have been fooled by the rather woolly worded Bulletin article, written by Wade themselves, which begins:
“Originally started in 1810…the various Wade firms are now producing many different lines”.
and the source is Colonel Wade again. You begin to get the picture of what has happened to Wade history when you read 1957’s ‘The City Of Stoke-on-Trent’, a local annual, grandly issued by the ‘Authority of the Stoke-on-Trent Corporation’. Again, a lot of the articles were prepared by the companies themselves. The article on The Wade Group begins:
“The Wade story begins in the early 19th century when the businesses of George Wade and Henry Hallen were combined – the first step in what was to be a century and a half of continuous progress and expansion.”
Oh yes? Well, no, not really. It’s merely another interpretation of the Colonel Wade story. But this quote does highlight the key to all the mystery concerning the origins of the Wade companies: age.
Age gives a company an assured form of security to prospective customers, allowing them to believe that if your company has been around for 150 years, it’s not going to disappear overnight – although, after saying that, how many household names have crumbled into dust in the recent recessions? Most of all though, age gives a company something that no amount of money or publicity can buy: prestige.
When you consider the following quotes, also from the 1957 Stoke-on-Trent book, and all written by a company representative:
- “Josiah Wedgwood founded what was to become Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd in 1759”
- “Thomas Minton founded Minton(s) in 1793”
- “Josiah Spode set up Spode in the 1760s” and
- “John Doulton ‘had an interest’ in a Lambeth firm in 1815 that became Royal Doulton”
you begin to see that age plays an important part in the marketing of a company. More important, though, is whether or not you believe it.
Recently it has become plain that Wade executives have come to believe it. In a history of Wade Potteries given in a special 1985 advertisement feature, a Wade executive came up with the following cracker:
“After some years, this ended by Mr (George) Wade buying the Hallen business and uniting the two concerns in 1865 in a new works called the Manchester pottery.”
Not bad seeing that in 1865 George Wade’s company hadn’t even been founded.
When Lady Stafford opened the long overdue Wade factory shop in July 1991, Wade’s senior sales director announced to the press that Wade Ceramics had been privileged to have been manufacturers in Stoke-on-Trent for 180 years. Privileged? possibly. Stoke-on-Trent? doubtful. 180 years? totally out of the question.
What is clear is that George Wade & Son Ltd was not founded in 1810, nor was it founded at the Manchester Pottery. So what is the Wade connection with 1810, if there is one? The only way to find out is to go back nearly 200 years.
1810
So, what was happening in 1810? Well, George III had been king for 50 years. Since 1788, he had suffered apparent bouts of insanity, and in 1810, at the age of 72, this insanity became permanent. He’d been a popular king, and had overseen many far-reaching events in world history: The American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and ultimately the war with France, which had dragged on almost uninterrupted for 17 years. Despite Nelson’s naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805, hostilities would only cease after Napoleon’s final defeat by the Duke of Wellington’s forces at Waterloo in 1815.
The slave trade in Britain had just been abolished, steam locomotives were being introduced (no doubt marketed with an exaggerated history of their own!), and Methodism was sweeping the country (particularly North Staffordshire) 20 years after the death of its founder, John Wesley.
But the most significant event of George’s long reign was Europe’s Industrial Revolution; the sudden acceleration of technical development that transferred the balance of political power from the landowner, where it had been almost indefinitely, to the industrial capitalist. What with new innovations such as the introduction of steam engines in industry (pioneered as early as 1712 in Staffordshire), cheaper iron-smelting (using coke instead of charcoal), and the expanding labyrinth of canals and waterways, industry in the North West was booming.
The textile industry, producing cotton and wool, was particularly affected. With James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine, it was only natural that the textile industry would become a major beneficiary, opening the way for larger factories that weren’t dependant on their location in relation to older power sources.
And whilst all this was going on around the year 1810, a man not called Wade at all, but in fact called Hallen, is said to have opened a small pottery works, not in Burslem, but on a main road near the small village of Red Street. Red Street was one of the oldest earthenware manufacturing areas in the country, although by 1810, tile and brick making was more popular at the remaining works in the Chesterton/Red Street district. Red Street was thought to have got its name from the red pottery anciently made there; or, more romantically, from the blood spilt in some conflict between Saxons and Danes.
The Red Street Old Works, as Hallen’s pottery was supposedly known, was on the other side of the Trent and Mersey canal two miles west of Burslem, and nearly four miles from Newcastle-Under-Lyme and its market. It was very much out on a limb as far as the area known as The Potteries was concerned, on the Audley Road that connected The Potteries with Crewe and Nantwich.
Looking at the semi-rural area today, it is hard to see why this Henry Hallen should choose such a remote site for a pottery works, particularly as he would have to transport his wares some way to sell at market. But although the area had originally looked very much like it does today – a small agrarian hamlet overlooking rural surroundings – the discovery of a rich seam of coal had changed all that by 1810. The bulk extraction of coal brought a large scale workforce to the area and railways to transport the bulky product to the local factories and potteries. One of the more famous collieries was Diglake near Bignall End, where 75 men and boys lost their lives in 1895 after being incarcerated underground by a sudden flood of water and subsequent cave-ins.
The whole valley was a seething industrial morass, with small steel and pottery works rubbing shoulders with farmhouses. Just the remains of one steel furnace are left, Partridge Nest Iron Works at Springwood, with little sign of the maze of railway lines that had existed there.
Hallen had been drawn to the area to get out of the towns where a diphtheria epidemic was rife. Many Hallen children had died within months of each other in 1802. His family had been living in the Burslem/Wolstanton area, although they were not originally from the Potteries. It is possible that he had family links out towards Audley, and that this family owned a farm.
With raw materials not hard to come by – quarried nearby, in fact – the area turned out to be ideal for Hallen’s needs. His premises were supposedly a curious little building attached to the side of a house, which consisted of just a workshop and bottle oven. “But”, as Colonel George Wade was to write 150 years later, “inside the workshop worked a man who was slightly different from most other men because the spirit of enterprise burned in his heart, and he was willing to stake all his possessions against the risk of failure and destitute.”
Initially, though, this great man of vision produced normal run-of-the-mill items, such as bottles etc. But these items were also being produced by the dozen, in maybe hundreds of similar small potteries that were being set up in back yards in nearby towns, anywhere that a kiln oven could be used for firing pottery at a great temperature.
(Firing is the hardening process after the clay pot has been shaped.)
But Hallen soon discovered what marketing men yearn for: a hole in the market. His secret of success went on to sustain the later Wade companies. Rather than necessarily sell pottery direct to the public, an uncertain market at the best of times, why not sell regular orders of specialised pottery merchandise to other industrial manufacturing businesses?
The obvious choice was the fast expanding textile industry, which soon dominated the North West and exported cotton and woollen goods all over the world. Huge mills had been springing up all over Lancashire, all with dozens of weaving machines such as looms, that required a hard substance, say pottery strips, to keep the fast moving strands from getting caught in the wooden machine parts. These were called ‘guides’, as they guided the cotton across the machine, through holes and around corners without snagging; this was because the thread only came into contact with the guides made from especially hard smooth pottery – or porcelain – rather than the wooden frame.
Shuttles. One of its eyes on the right is marked ‘w’
Another requirement of the textile trade was the shuttle. This passed (or weaved) across the loom carrying the thread. On the mechanical looms, the shuttle shot violently back and forth across the frame at a terrific velocity, requiring them to be particularly sturdy. They were about 30cm long and mainly hollow, with a metal arm down the middle holding a reel of yarn. Every shuttle on each machine had at least two ‘eyes’ in it to aid the distribution of the yarn through holes in the shuttle, and to prevent the yarn from cutting into the boxwood that the shuttle was made of. These eyes were also made of the hard porcelain, and it was not uncommon for larger shuttles to have several eyes.
Creels (top right) in a typical textile machine
There were also ‘creels’, which are still used in spinning equipment. The bobbins, which looked like large cotton reels, needed to spin frictionlessly around on the spindles on top of the machine. To ensure they did, hard glazed cup-like porcelain bearings called ‘creel steps’ were used for them to sit on.
In fact, there were many different specialised shapes and sizes of pottery required to be used as ‘guides’, ensuring yarn ran smoothly, in the ever changing variety of Textile machines. To just produce shuttle eyes would not be viable, as finished shuttles themselves were literally ten a penny. But specialising in the production of a selection of textile ceramics, servicing a whole industry, was viable, and it would have lifted Henry Hallen, the Red Street Potter, head and shoulders above his contemporaries…if he had existed.
Sadly, this is where this theory falls to the ground. Few Hallens left Burslem/Wolstanton during the diphtheria outbreak, which was why so many of the family died. In fact there is no record of any Hallen activity in the Red Street area, apart from one pottery piece (owned by the Wade family). It is “an oval shaped plaque, originally made in a white body and later blackleaded to imitate basalt”, to quote Colonel Wade’s 1951 article. Scratched on the reverse side of the plaque are the following words:
“Henry Hallen made this picture at Red Street Old Works, May 14. 1831 – John Hallen”
Colonel Wade later said that it was signed by Henry Hallen himself, which it was not; although as a result of him saying this, many people then repeated this mistake. This mark is even recorded in the definitive Encyclopedia of British Pottery and Porcelain Marks by Geoffrey A Godden, who, after claiming the piece has the incised signature of Henry Hallen, goes on to state that “The working period of this potter is subject to doubt.”!
Many have interpreted the inscription to mean that John is possibly Henry’s son, and is honouring his father’s work for others to inspect in the years that were to follow. However, this does not ring true. It is more likely that John is the proud father of young Henry who has made the piece; or at least has helped make it by, say, filling the mould with the liquidy clay ‘slip’ in its preparation, a job that a seven year old could easily do. His father then has marked the piece on the back for him – as Henry was probably too young to be able to write himself – to commemorate their special weekend visit to a friend’s country pottery; May 14th was a Saturday, albeit still a working day.
The Henry Hallen plaque (9½” in height)
There is evidence of only one John Hallen and only one Henry Hallen living anywhere near that area (ie. North Staffordshire/South Cheshire) at that time, and, perhaps not surprisingly, one is indeed the father of the other. (The significance of this is greatened by the fact that Hallen is such a rare name.)
The John Hallen was a potter who lived not at Red Street, but in the centre of Burslem itself on Queen Street. And he was particularly proud of his eldest son Henry. So much so that when his beloved Henry died in July 1840 at the tender age of 16, John took out an advertisement in the deaths column of the Staffordshire Advertiser, announcing the passing of his cherished son. The Advertiser was a long-running weekly newspaper, published every Saturday, pre-dating other local newspapers, such as the Evening Sentinel. This type of announcement, although standard practice now, was only very rarely done by ordinary pottery workers in the last century. In fact, the only other time that an announcement appeared for a Hallen throughout the whole century was, not so coincidentally, a month before when John’s father, Samuel Hallen died. It is with him that the real Hallen story starts.
The Hallens
Samuel Hallen was a self-employed lathe maker from Stoke originally (that is, the pottery town of Stoke-Upon-Trent, a few miles south of Burslem), and he worked on the Longport side of Dale Hall, Burslem. His job was very specialised; but then so was his name. However, it didn’t stop people calling him Allen rather than Hallen on many occasions, or even the more common Hallam. For example, when he married he was called Hallen, but when he advertised his trade or when his many children were recorded in parish records, Allen was often interchanged. It is more likely that his name did in fact originate from the more common Allen than the flamboyant Dutch name Van Hallen or Vanhalen. (It has been suggested that the name descended from some Van Hallens who supposedly came over to England in the 1680s with William of Orange, later William III.)
Samuel married Elizabeth Riles in June 1794. The Riles family who lived in Chesterton were good friends with the Hallen family of Wolstanton, and there were other Hallen/Riles marriages. But the 1802 diphtheria outbreak claimed baby sons William, Harding, Samuel, George and Henry, and daughter Judith. They had further children, and, as was the custom at that time, they gave them similar, or the same, names to those recently lost. Samuel himself fell ill in 1820, and was confined to his bed at their house in Burslem, where he stayed until his death in 1840.
The surviving sons, John, Samuel, Harding, and William were often sent to stay with the Riles family in more rural Chesterton. There, they befriended local workers such as Benjamin Myatt and Richard Moss, the last earthenware manufacturers in the area. (Pottery making died out there altogether in the 1830s.) Myatt and Moss each had works beside Red Street, although Myatt soon moved out of the area and set up works further south. However, after succeeding his father and uncle, Moss briefly produced the more specialist Egyptian Black and Victorian Crown ware in the early 1830s. It is here that Henry and John Hallen undoubtably produced their plaque.
The Hallen family was not poor, and, despite widespread illiteracy, the children were relatively well educated for the time, proving that John wasn’t just able to write on plaques. Soon they were setting up small pottery businesses in Burslem. The second oldest son Samuel Hallen married, had several children, and still found time to establish a small china manufactory in the Sytch, down the hill from the more prestigious Hill Top and High Street sites.
However, 25 year old Harding Hallen beat brother Samuel by a few years, setting up an earthenware manufactory with younger brother William along Newcastle Street in 1840. Within a few years, they had moved across town to 29 Pitt Street, which was off Waterloo Road – the then relatively new main road linking Burslem to Hanley – where they lived with their mother Elizabeth (at number 128). They manufactured the aforementioned creel steps and shuttle eyes, but also pioneered the production of earthenware gas burners. In 1851 Harding wisely patented the idea to stop others from copying it. By patenting, Harding protected his lucrative investment, and his business thus survived the constant economic ups and downs of this period.
Samuel’s business did not survive, and his family quit their base in the Sytch, and took over 2 Newcastle Street. However, his son William Henry Hallen took a keen interest in his Uncle Harding’s business, which soon moved round the corner to 29/31 Wellington Street (now Auckland Street) and was briefly known as Hallen & Co.. Harding, who by now had moved into Wellington Street himself, remained a bachelor all his life, and William Henry soon became his partner and heir. Harding remained the innovator to the end, even patenting items such as ‘Pickers for Looms’ shortly before he died in 1880 at the age of 65. Brother John had remained a humble potter all his life, and died in 1852.
Until George Wade’s firm came along, the Hallens had the local market to themselves – their nearest rivals being in Wednesbury and Wolverhampton. This was their ‘purple period’. However, William Henry Hallen (often, and rather confusingly, just called Henry Hallen to avoid confusion with his Uncle William) soon found himself running the company himself as the Hallen family dwindled almost into non-existence. None of his immediate family left children, and at work he relied more and more on his friend Alfred Adams. Alfred was an engineer by trade, but William Henry soon made him a partner in the firm that now went under the name of Henry Hallen. Alfred’s influence on William Henry’s son, Harry Robinson Hallen, resulted in Harry training as an engineer rather than studying ceramics. This was beneficial initially as Harry and Alfred went on to design and improve machines to manufacture shuttle eyes. But after the death of William Henry Hallen in 1891 at the age of only 50, it left Adams and the 18 year old Harry in charge of the firm that was beginning to feel the rivalry of George Wade’s company. Neither were experienced businessmen like Harding and William Henry, and soon the company was losing out to Wade. Then just after the turn of the century in 1905, Harry Hallen sold out to George Wade, and the Wellington
Street pottery closed. The deal involved a substantial lump sum to live on, plus a good pension for Harry’s wife after his death.
And this is how the Hallen firm became involved in the Wade story. After being founded originally in 1840 not 1810, in Burslem not Red Street, they were copied by Wade, bought out in 1905 and closed down (although ‘incorporating the business of Henry Hallen – established 1810’ remained on the George Wade & Son letterhead until the 1950s). And they are best remembered for a plaque made by Harding Hallen’s nephew nine years before the company was formed.
Harry Hallen died aged 50, but his wife Lizzie went on to live to the age of 84. Their son, Harry George Hallen, went to sea. But before he did, he married a young lady who was to greatly influence the future Wade dynasty.
