Back in January, I received an email from Jody Simpkins wondering if the project would be interested in considering a work by her Great Aunt Lil. It was a pamphlet called ‘Pots and Plans’ and published by the local Communist Party in 1946 – then based on Albion Street up Hanley where the pamphlet was also printed. I was told that there was one surviving copy that was available to view in the British Library.
Maybe it’s because this speaks to my own writing, or perhaps it was owing to my work with the North Staffs Miners’ Wives Action Group this past year on the play, ‘The Miner Birds,’ and whose tireless activism over the past 40years felt very much in dialogue with this work, but I had to see it. Last Wednesday, in Humanities Room 1 at the British Library, I held Lily’s ‘Pots and Plans’ in my hand.
This is a pamphlet that campaigns for workers’ rights and better working conditions on the city’s pot banks, highlighting the daily issues faced – irregular working patterns, century old buildings and equipment, ill-health, poor wages – and the need for unionisation. I’d also requested to see the first edition of Cedric Beardmore’s ‘Dodd the Potter’ (Cassell, 1931) and Bernard Hollowood’s ‘Scowle and the Other Papers’ (Penguin, 1948) alongside; all very different works and yet not when all concerned with reflecting the city’s industry via place-politics that is sometimes glossed over by nostalgia. Though Beardmore’s is a work of fiction, Hollowood’s a satire when working on the Punch desk, I could still see the connection rippling through the three works when all three writers were seeking to represent how it really was for the pot-bank worker back in the day. All were “an observer of matters below the immediate surface,” (which is how John Harvey described the work of Frank Smith, ‘The Potteries Poet’ who published his poetry in 1971), suggesting that their subject was the political and that what the rest of the country admire on their dinner-tables, comes at a price.
As I read in ‘Dodd the Potter’ in Chapter 4: factory owners were bullish, conditions depressive and dirty, workers ‘contaminated’ by the drudge and the ‘make-do’ expansion tactics the workers were forced to endure. This is echoed in Lily’s pamphlet – “Out of date methods and unplanned development must not be allowed to hold up future progress of the industry, nor darken the lives of its workers.” And said in an era when the woman’s voice, despite the suffrage and her contributions to the war, was still suppressed. Or, as my own nan used to say, “we were too busy to go in for all that women’s stuff anyway.”
My own writing has always sought out the feminine in what was (perhaps still is) a highly masculinised landscape circumscribed by graft, brawn and mass production, and though the history books don’t disguise the poor pay and working conditions pottery workers endured, Lily’s pamphlet is far more urgent in its call for standards, and, more importantly, from the women’s point of view. Yes, it’s a political work, eloquently written and certainly of it’s time, but it’s the fact that it was penned by a woman that I find fascinating, that the front cover image is of a woman carrying an enormous stash of crocks down the stairs with one hand, and there is a whole section dedicated to ‘the status of women in the pottery industry’ (see p.3) when seen as ‘inferior to men’ and ‘used as a threat to keep down the men’s wages.’ She also goes on to make comparisons with the city’s other industries – coal mining and steel – and how pottery workers’ wages were way below their contemporaries and not a ‘level fit for a human and decent existence.’
It made me think of Woolf’s essay again, this paragraph, in particular, that highlighted how Bennett tended to nudge his women outside of the political sphere:
There are women in that factory who make twenty-five dozen earthenware pots every day. There are mothers in the Mile End Road who depend upon the farthings which those women earn. But there are employers in Surrey who are even now smoking rich cigars while the nightingale sings. Burning with indignation, stuffed with information, arranging civilisation, Mr. Galsworthy would only see in Mrs. Brown a pot broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner.
If it wasn’t for this project, I wouldn’t have known about Lily and what she was campaigning for back in 1946. If it wasn’t for our wonderful libraries and archives, their brilliant librarians and archivists, I wouldn’t have found another female writer – Stoke-born Nellie Kirkham who penned ‘Unrest of their Time’ (The Cresset Press) in 1935 – and is helping to address what is a startling gender imbalance in the first two decades of the canon, currently dominated by Bennett’s prolificity and works by the likes of Sir Oliver Lodge, Leslie Bishop and George H Barber, all of whom largely self-published works on themselves or by reflecting on their ‘male’ experiences within the potteries industry. So, it feels absolutely right to be hosting this project’s 6×6 Micro-Residencies in the city’s libraries – places that were so important to these writers when growing up in Stoke-on-Trent and which are going beyond in their support to this project – whilst ensuring we represent both male and female writers from the city who are writing now.
These Micro-Residencies will shine a spotlight on 6 ‘Made in Stoke-on-Trent’ authors known for their craft. Each will take up a 6hour residency bookended by a free public writing workshop and In Conversation event with myself. In between, the writers will be offering bespoke author services – from portfolio clinics to writing prompts to informal chats about their work. These residencies will offer opportunities to talk about the publishing industry and your contribution to it. They will also be encouraging everyone to compose their own 100word story for our ‘Don’t Lose Your Place’ bookmark stories; the idea being that whatever we write, whatever our story, this city’s landscape somehow plays its part in our craft.
Mel Sherratt (11th July, Hanley); Jonathan Taylor, (26th July, Trentham), and the prize-winning poet Natalie Linh Bolderston (21st July, Stoke) will be our first three residents.
Then in September, centenary poet laureate and consummate performer Nick Degg will take up residency at The Brampton Art Gallery & Museum, with Charlotte Higgins, non-fiction writer and the Guardian’s Cultural Editor appearing at Newcastle library. Finally, Norton-born Dr Michael Durrant, an expert in book history, will end the season by offering a unique workshop on the art of bookmaking as a craft. As Michael says, “This centenary is a chance to celebrate the voices, stories, and imagination that have shaped the city and continue to inspire it.”
To come along to one of our Micro-Residencies, click here for details.
I’ll also be talking about the project’s findings so far at this year’s Byline Festival on Saturday 12th July and have invited along Debbi Voisey, a writer making waves in the city now, and for the purpose of showcasing the women’s voice in our local literature: General 5 — Byline Festival.
Get Stoked about Writing
This month’s writing prompt takes it’s lead from Lily and the broken pots that Woolf mentions to create a fractured narrative with a political message at its heart. We often don’t consider the white spaces and gaps between paragraphs or stanzas but their use has been popularised by poets who consider them as pauses or hesitations before revelations; as a way to create narrative tension in building up to what really needs to be said; perhaps offering a space where the reader fills the gap with their own thoughts. Essentially, the gaps are as important as the words themselves and can speak volumes in terms of where they’re placed.
Or you might wish to try it out on the template here of a fractured plate that we used for our Places that Make Us Creative Writing Day when writing of the ghosts that haunt our potteries industry. You might wish to consider, like Lily Marshall and Cedric Beardmore did a century ago, the reality beneath the surface of what was, on occasion, by royal design; the idea being that beauty can come at a price when the workers’ voices went unheard. Think Pots, Plans and Politics.
Continuing in my celebration of women writers, this month I’m shining a narrative spotlight on Lynn Johnson. Born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent, Lynn’s novels are war-time romances often set in the city and drawing from her many family connections to the potteries industry. In this centenary year, Lynn will publish novel 5 of 6 of a historical romance series set in the Potteries during and after the Great War. ‘Heartache for the Tram Girls’ (Hera Books, 2025) will be published in July.
Read the July blog here
20th June 2025