Waterford Wedgwood’s financial troubles have been ongoing for some time now, but according to reports this week things have now taken a turn for the worse, with 300 jobs to go from the company’s factories in Germany.
It turns out that the redundancies are part of a restructuring plan for German ceramics company Rosenthal - I hadn’t realised until now that Rosenthal were owned by Waterford Wedgwood.
As its name suggests, Waterford Wedgwood incorporates Waterford Crystal, Wedgwood (which itself includes Coalport and Masons) and also Royal Doulton - as well as Rosenthal. The company recently reported funding and supply chain problems that prevented it meeting Christmas seasonal demand - a bitter blow at one of the most important times of the year.
In 1999, the Wedgwood Museum at Barlaston closed to make way for a new factory visitors’ centre. Since then, Wedgwood’s vast collection of ceramics, manuscripts and other historical material has been kept in storage, unavailable to the public.
That’s all set to change this summer when a brand new Wedgwood Museum is due to open in Stoke-on-Trent. It will have cost £10m and is expected to draw 100,000 visitors a year.
The new Museum building itself is almost complete and is due to be handed over to Wedgwood on the 23rd January - leaving around six months for the Wedgwood Museum Trust team to fit out the museum ready for opening in late summer.
The Trust is the custodian of more than 8,000 pieces of Wedgwood ceramics together with more than 75,000 manuscripts and documents - a unique and utterly irreplacable collection.
For almost 250 years, Wedgwood have produced some of the finest quality decorative ceramics in the world. It should be fantastic to be able to have some of this material on display again - we will certainly be making a beeline for the new museum this autumn.
We received a pleasant surprise in the post this morning - the latest (May/June) edition of Antiques Info magazine, containing another of our articles and a selection of photographs from our archives.
The article is “20th Century Ceramics: Are We Exporting Our Legacy?”, and takes a look at current collecting trends for Carlton Ware and Wedgwood lustre wares, observing how many of the finer examples of these pieces are presently being sold to overseas collectors.
The article has been well-illustrated with a range of photos from our archives and those of Antiques Info, and this is always one of the more interesting antiques magazines on the market, with lots of good quality information. It’s well worth a look if you are passing a newsagents.
We should have one or two more articles appearing in various antiques and collectable magazines in coming months - I’ll post updates here as and when they are published as the dates aren’t all fixed yet.
The bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade has been much in the news recently, but what is less known is a connection between one of Britain’s oldest and finest potteries and the 18th century slave trade abolition movement, the Society for the Abolition of Slavery.
Josiah Wedgwood was a fervent abolitionist, and through his creative talents, created a memorable and lasting reminder of the cause he believed in so passionately.
The emblem of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery was a kneeling, chained slave, beseeching mercy from his masters. Around him were the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” This motto was also
adopted by Britain’s Committee To Abolish The Slave Trade, and in 1787 Wedgwood arranged for a Jasper copy of the emblem to be made in the form of a medallion.
The Slave Medallion was widely adopted and worn with fashionable jewellery by the growing number of supporters of abolition. Made from white jasper, the medallion was decorated with a black basalt relief figure of a kneeling slave in chains. We have never seen a Slave Medallion, but two fine examples and more information on Wedgwood’s anti-slave activites can be found on these two sites:
thePotteries.org - Josiah Wedgwood was a keen advocate of the anti-slave movement
Wedgwood Museum - Slave Medalion: When Fashion Promoted The Cause of Humanity