Poor Crisp
And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers…
Rev. 2:27, King James Version
i
More broken pots. More pots to break. It is Tuesday and early and no one else is in the studio, except the dog who has taken herself to her bed and is snoring already. The kiln is still too hot for me to reach into and extract the new black-glazed jars I’ve made. The temperature gauge of the vast green gas kiln shows 120 degrees but that doesn’t mean much as the thick kiln shelves and the pots themselves will be much hotter. You don’t open kilns, you crack them. This holds good even if it is several tons of steel, a heavy hinged door.
I crack the kiln. There is a black jar near the arch at the top of the kiln, eighteen inches inside, half hidden behind a flotilla of small bowls. This black is my current favourite glaze, dense, river-stone dense, slightly metallic. I can see that the flame has worked up across the side, so that there is a run, a fluxing that you cannot control yet hope to see. The jar looks beautiful in the shadows.
I’m wearing my heavy red heat-proof gauntlets but I manage to burn my wrist on the kiln shelf as I reach in to lift it out. It is the wrong weight. The glaze has run off the jar – I leave jagged porcelain on the shelf and bring out a jar with no base.
Two of the seven bowls have glaze that has run in the same way. They are plucked.
For a few hours after you take porcelain out it sings. It settles into the world with high-pitched ticks.
I tally this firing. One extraordinary bowl, donum dei. Three pots for the hammer.
ii
I built my first kiln in Herefordshire in the lee of an old yew tree next to a damp barn. I had finished an apprenticeship and spent a summer working with silent potters in Japan. I had bought the kiln bricks from a Herefordshire potter who had gone bust. I had also bought his wheels, his ware boards, an oak table for wedging clay, buckets and sieves, brushes, rock-hard bags of terracotta clay, jars of oxides, kiln shelves. I counted out £1,000 and he looked relieved.
My first kiln looked like a very small chapel. I used a plan from Michael Cardew’s Pioneer Pottery, a bible of self-reliance, full of tips on how to prospect for raw materials. It was five feet long and four feet wide and I could crouch inside to load my stoneware casseroles, lidded soup bowls, teapots, tea bowls, jugs and mugs onto the shelves. The arch above my head was a bit wobbly. My chimney wasn’t particularly straight. I had to brick up the front each time I fired and little orange flames would find the gaps and lick.
Kilns work on the principle of directing heat evenly around all the pots, stacked on their heavy kiln shelves, and then out of the chimney. Kilns shouldn’t leak, they should contain heat. I built mine so poorly that I found myself awake at three in the morning trying to coax the temperature higher, caulking the gaps between bricks, altering the dampers to see if I could get more pull of air through the kiln, praying.
Gaps in the kiln also meant that it cooled unevenly and damp Herefordshire air would sneak in. And the pots would dunt. They would crack. Sometimes you would discover this when you unbricked the kiln. Sometimes days afterwards you would pick up a pot and tap it and it would sound dull, and as you ran your hands over it you would find the latticework of fine cracks, and another batch was unsellable, unusable.
I tally forty-two firings over two and a half years at the Cwm Pottery, Rowlstone, Herefordshire. Twelve total failures. Twenty mostly wrong. Ten with enough celadon-green, oatmeal or tenmoku-black glazed pots to sell in the Herefordshire Guild of Craftsman shop near the cathedral, or pack in newspaper and hawk around my friends in London. Hundreds and hundreds of pots dunted. Dozens chucked over the hedge into the stream below the workshop. I broke several thousand.
Today, a Tuesday thirty-five years later, I pick up a hammer and reduce three pots to shards, fragments.
Broken to shivers.
iii
In the eighteenth century there was a potter in Bovey Tracey, a very small town in Devon. He was called Nicholas Crisp. He had a wife and three daughters.
Crisp had problems.
A visitor to his workshop was unimpressed. ‘When I came the kiln was burning, and some promising samples were drawn, but for the last twelve hours they advanced not a lot in point of heat and were short of fire after a burning continued for 43 hours’. ‘Our Potter is a poor fireman’.
And quite frankly it was a tip. Long brick out- houses, tiled roofs that gave up halfway along the ridge, no glass in the windows but half-hearted shutters that banged in the westerly wind. It was, wrote the greatest potter of the age, Josiah Wedgwood, ‘a poor trifling concern, & conducted in a wretched slovenly manner.’
Crisp had form. He had been a goldsmith with a jewellery business at Cornhill, bought a long licence on a soaprock mine on Lord Falmouth’s lands, established a ‘manufactory of china’ in Vauxhall and invested substantially in a cobalt mine in the Ochil hills in Scotland. Each stage of his progress was luridly illuminated by announcements of discoveries, by the possibility of great successes, by the patronage of persons of note, by pamphlets.
He had been arrested for appropriating money from a dissenting meeting house, for failing to discharge obligations, for bankruptcy. ‘Obsconded’ was written in judgement. He was dogged by creditors and fled to the West Country, asserting in the London Evening Post that a ‘considerable manufacture of English porcelaine is going to be established in a cheap country, a few miles West of Exeter’.
I know this man, I think, the serial bankrupt, leaving a chain of damaged people in his choppy wake. Bluff and irrepressible, his friends say. A shit, say his creditors. He is ‘a misfortune’. ‘Nothing will be recovered.’
He died in 1774 leaving three daughters and a widow.
Wedgwood passes by the workshop and offers judgement: ‘A Mr Crisp endeavoured to make a kind of porcelain here, but did little more than make some experiments and these unsuccessfully.’ ‘Crisp – poor Crisp – haunts my imagination Continually – Ever persuing – Just upon the point of overtaking, but never in possession of his favourite subject! There are a good many lessons in the poor Man’s life’.
And, looking at Crisp’s porcelain, ‘I never saw but two pieces of all their productions but was smoked.’