F Winkle potters mark on chamberpot base
As I’ve written elsewhere,
chamber pots were very much a feature of Victorian life, and even
more so in rural Australia, where often luxuries such as town water
and town sewerage often did not arrive until the end of the nineteenth
century, and on farm stations, the dunny out the back possibly lasted
as late as the the 1950s.
So where were these chamber
pots made?
Staffordshire. Or more
accurately the pottery manufacturing area centred around Stoke on
Trent.
And from Australia:
While now owned by a
multi-national, Fowler’s survives as a brand of sanitary ware, but
Hoffman’s is long gone.
How do I know this?
Out of curiosity I spent an
hour or so going through Victorian Collections to look at examples of
chamber pots as an aid to recognising the sometimes cryptic potters' marks, and basically, most were made in Staffordshire, and
none appear to have been imported from either of the other two major
manufacturing countries of the late Victorian period, Germany and the
USA.
Which suggests that if items
as mundane as chamber pots were imported most domestic pottery must
have been imported, despite the obvious expense of bringing cases of
pottery half way around the world.
But then perhaps that's not so surprising.
Despite Felton and Grimwade establishing a glass bottle works in Melbourne in 1872 to make primarily medicine bottles, Australia was still importing glass medicine bottles in the early 1890s as evidenced by the wreck of the Fiji in 1891, so it is quite possible that while 'brand name' pottery was being imported, there was a local industry producing the more utilitarian unbranded, undecorated domestic pottery.
Equally, a substantial proportion of the unbranded items could also have been imported. It's important to understand that the wash set, the ewer, the basin, the chamberpot would possibly all have been on display on the nightstand, and that for middle class people having a good matching imported set was a sign of affluence, while poorer households would have made do with cheaper, unbranded items, and perhaps simply used an enamel metal pot that went under the bed - the 'gazunder'.
It's possible this unbranded pottery, whether being made locally or imported being less cherished, was more likely to be broken and discarded - judging by the number of pottery fragments in the soil in our back yard, quite a lot of broken pottery was simply dumped - and hence does not show up in the historical record.
