Eighteenth-century health and social service in the pottery industry of North Staffordshire.

POrrERY MANUFACTURE became the staple industry of North Staffordshire at the end of the seventeenth century. At that time it produced coarse mottled and mostly salt-glazed jugs, butter pots and similar domestic articles together with a very limited output of 'ornamental ware' (Plot 1686, Thomas 1971). The main occupational risk in those days was from lead poisoning, caused by painting vessels with 'smithum' (Plot 1686) a process which in the 1750s gave way to 'dipping' the fired ware in fluid glazes containing either soluble lead oxide or lead carbonates (Meiklejohn 1963a). In 1720 Thomas Astbury brought the Dannean present of finely ground and calcined flint to the Potteries thus adding silicosis to the specific hazards of the potter (Shaw 1829, Meiklejohn 1969). As early as 1726 Thomas Benson, a local engineer, supported his application for the wet grinding of flint by saying ' . . . any person ever so healthful or strong working in this business'-meaning the dry crushing and grinding of flint-'cannot possibly survive above two years, occasioned by the dust sucked into his body . . .' (Meiklejohn 1963b). The risk from plumbism in pottery manufacture has been gradually, but not entirely, eliminated over the past 300 years by the introduction of leadless or lowsolubility glazes (Hamilton 1953-1970, Knappett 1969), the hazard from silicacontaining dusts-albeit in a much diminished degree-has remained with us until today (Department of Health and Social Security 1944-1970, Department of Employment 1971, Posner 1969). The long and painful history of nineteenthand twentieth-century factory legislation for the British Ceramic Industry has been amply documented in numerous official reports and comprehensively summarized by Meiklejohn in his Milroy lectures (1963a and b). The very early measures taken by some manufacturers and the self-help by their workmen in the eighteenth century has so far attracted little attention. The transformation of the peasant and cottage type of pottery production to the conditions and demands of the Industrial Revolution is inseparable from the names of Josiah Wedgwood Sr. (1730-1795) and his partner Thomas Bentley (1730-1780), a