Miriam Hartwright nee Luckcuck
Work and Play at the Royal Worcester Porcelain in the 1920’s

We have two plates and a cup and saucer painted by my mother-in-law when she worked at Royal Worcester Porcelain during the 1920’s. At that time she was Miriam Luckcuck and she lived with her parents in St John’s, Worcester. In the 1980’s I asked Miriam to tell me about her time at the Porcelain Works and this is her story based on her recollections and my notes from some twenty years ago.

In 1919 there was a lot of unemployment in Worcester and the only job available to fourteen year old Miriam Luckcuck was at the Royal Worcester Porcelain. Miriam went to the Labour Exchange where they gave her a Green Card to take to the Porcelain Works. While waiting there to see the Under Manager, a friend from school, Hilda Everett, came along and told her that a girl was needed in the Gilding Room. As a result Miriam was offered the job at 6s. a week. The hours were 8 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. with about one hour for lunch. Saturdays were 8 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. and there were no paid holidays. Gilders and painters did not wear overalls, just their ordinary clothes. There were six people in the Gilding Room - three apprentices and three older girls in their twenties. Miriam told me that Hilda was not a gilder but a lovely painter who had her own little place with a table, colours and paintbrushes – away from the boys! In the early days she and Hilda would walk, run or skip their way to work. They sometimes had to try and dodge two girls from Williamson’s who used to wait on Warmstry Slip to throw bits of tin at them. Later Miriam would travel by tram or bus from her home on the Green, Bransford Road,

The Gilding Room had tall windows giving plenty of light, there were gas mantles for the darker days. Everyone sat on wooden chairs at a long table, each person had a wooden wheel and an adjustable arm rest which slanted down from the table. On the table there would be an old reject cup containing “fat oil” which was tipped from the cup into the saucer which contained some gold. The 22ct gold was initially in a “tot” and when it reached the girls it was almost black, because the gold had been amalgamated with mercury by George Harrison. Using a long slim pallet knife some of the fat oil and gold would be mixed together on a white glazed tile. The gilders used three different sizes of brush the ends of which were slanting not straight. A "liner" made of camel hair was used to apply the gold line.

Miriam recalled that the first thing she had to learn to do was how to knock the plate or saucer onto the middle of the wheel using her left hand. It took her half a day to learn how to do this as it skidded all over the place and there were quite a few breakages. Miriam was shown that when the plate or saucer was in the centre of the wheel the brush was taken in the right hand with the arm on the rest and the plate turned around on the wheel and the brush was placed on the edge of the plate, it made an edge of gold or if a line was needed the brush had to be held in a different position over the top. But for many months she had to practice using red paint, which she described as "horrible".

Miriam at work with Flo. Andrews watching

At fifteen Miriam was put on to "piece work" and earned about 10s. a week. As she was an apprentice the company took a proportion of her pay. At sixteen they took about 4d. in each shilling. Every so often they took more so that it wasn’t until she completed her apprenticeship at the age of twenty that she received a full wage. Her apprenticeship finished a year early because  one night a week she had been to evening classes at Art School. The boy apprentices went two days a week and possibly in the evenings too. When Miriam was still working in the Gilding Room she used to go up to the Paintresses on the second floor to learn the new dance steps, but Miss Mountford (pronounced Munford) who was in charge up there, used to get very cross and one day told her "to go and dance off back down to your own room".

Whilst Miriam was working in the Gilding Room Mr Hawkins the foreman retired and Harry Davies took over. He was quite a bit older than Miriam and a very reserved kind of man. His brother Ern. was a printer who worked in the Acid Room and was a very funny man. The brothers used to take the comedians roles at the Porcelain concerts in the nearby Institute. Ern. also performed a double act with the other printer Joe Smith. Ern. was very tall and Joe was very short. Their act was singing a comic song. Any one could have a go at performing and Miriam and three other girls dressed up in gym slips and performed a funny sketch which lasted about 15 minutes. Afterwards she was complimented that she was the only one of the three that could be heard at the back of the room!

The Acid Room where Ern. and Joe worked had a blue brick floor and two printing presses. The original engraved copper plates came to them from the Engravers and were used to print the design onto Printer’s tissue paper. Ern. and Joe each had a woman and a girl working for them on a long table facing the window. The women applied and rubbed the tissue paper transfers onto the chinaware. They skilfully washed off the paper with water so as to leave the full print behind on the china. At the age of nineteen or twenty Miriam was involved with mending any broken areas of printed pattern, using a small brush.  She also took it in turns with Mrs Grace Rowberry to do a job which she hated which was “blacking up” the chinaware so that it was  covered with acid-resistant “Brunswick Black”, except for the area where the design had been applied. This meant that later in the process acid would eat into the glaze of the chinaware only where allowed to by the design from the applied tissue transfer.The main ingredient of Brunswick Black were bitumen and Stockholm tar and it was applied to the chinaware using a brush. After completion of the blacking and printing processes the chinaware was put out to dry individually on chicken wire which was stretched across the Acid Room 2ft off the ground. It was essential that the chinaware was solid black all over, except for the pattern area, so any finger marks were touched up the following day. When the treated chinaware was dry it was taken to the Acid Shed for dipping. From my notes it appears that there were handles on the racks of chinaware and these were used by the Foreman to carry them out to the Acid Shed. Holding his breath, the Foreman counted as he lowered the Chinaware into the acid bath. After acid immersion, a woman used to go out to the Acid Shed wearing "sil-skins" to wash off the Brunswick Black with paraffin. When all the blacking was cleaned off there would be just the design etched on the chinaware.  

Miriam said that "Snuffy" Teague was a marvellous gilder and it was he who put the gold around the etching using the wheel. Cups, saucers, plates, tureens, everything was done on the wheel. Then the chinaware was fired which left the gold looking dull, so it went to the Burnishing Room where just women worked. Miriam never went in there but she told me that they used to hold the plates in their laps to burnish them.

Farther away from where Miriam worked was the "White Room" where the china was made. Everything was covered in white alumina dust and the workers had to wear protective gowns down to their feet. As the girls used to breath in the alumina dust they had to drink a pint of milk each day to flush it out of their systems. Employees were allowed quite a lot of freedom in the early 1920’s and Miriam used to go to the White Room to see a friend Ann Bright who later married, but died young.

Mrs Grace Rowberry and Miriam alternated the blacking work until Miriam asked to be taken off the work as she hated it, and much to her surprise the company agreed. So by the age of eighteen Miriam had moved, without regrets, from the Gilding Room to be a paintress. Miriam enjoyed her time "up there". Grace became a paintress too, using her maiden name Grace Douglas. Her grandson Keith says that Grace remained a paintress until the 1960's when she moved back to the Gilding Room, where she spent the rest of her working life.

One of Miriam’s Apprentice pieces - based on a picture on a washing-powder box.

Miriam was paid piece work and her first week’s wages were about 30s. She could not believe how much more she got as a paintress. She had been given difficult and time consuming pieces to do in the Gilding Room and had only managed to earn about 10s. a week. Miriam’s steady hand and accurate eye meant that she was often given the job of putting right any errors on the application of the gold leaf on the rims and handles of the chinaware. Miriam said that wherever you worked there were "hard pieces", for example the handles of "Willow" pattern, for which it was impossible "get your money at". Saucers were not so bad, but always there were more cups than saucers. Even the Artists whose complicated work had to go into the kiln up to three times were paid piece work.

Working on the second floor in the high-ceilinged paintresses room were about twenty women whose ages ranged from 14 to 60 or 70. Miss Daisy Rea was in charge and then Mrs Mountford. The colours that the paintresses used were black, green, brown, yellow and turquoise blue - which nobody liked. The blue was a jelly-like paint which difficult to apply evenly all the way round a plate. Red was again the colour used for practicing. Colours usually came in powder form from the colour room where the girls would take down the appropriate jar and mix some of the powdered colour with turps. onto a tile. They would grind the two together with a big palette knife and scoop the mixture up onto one side of the tile where it would dry out. The trick was to get just the right proportion of colour to fat oil, it was the same with using gold. Getting the paint out of the brushes was quite a game. When Miriam was in her 80s she met Henry Sandon at a talk he asked her if she could remember her personal pattern of red dots that the paintresses used to "sign" their work – unfortunately she could not.

Miriam recalled that Earl Beauchamp had shares in the Porcelain Works and he and his wife Lady Sybil and daughter Lettice, were sometimes seen walking around the buildings.

In the 1920’s most of the chinaware orders went to the USA. To make up an order the company used to rush through the decoration of single cups to replace those which had been broken and they went into a special small kiln. Although Miriam sometimes painted flowers she was skilled at painting lines to decorate handles. Best of all she liked to decorate the fancy handles of soup tureens and vegetable dishes. Their pattern of scrolls or leaves was traced round with a "tracer" (brush). Miriam was moved into a room where Miss Bloodworth was in charge of completing an order for two patterns of chinaware for The Dorchester Hotel, London. "First class" had a gold pattern on white and "Second class" was white with powder blue.

Dorchester Hotel 1st Ware	Underside	Dorchester Hotel 2ndWare

At the age of about nineteen Miriam learnt every new dance step - including the Charleston - in the Paintresses Room. On a Saturday evening she would go out dancing with her old school friends from St John’s, Joan Daniels and Ivy Millage, from the paper shop. They went to Britannia Hall, in Britannia Road which had a marvellous maple-wood floor. The dance finished at 10.30 but Miriam had to be home by ten. When she was younger and learning to dance she and Joan used to go to St Martins Parish Hall, London Road, where they learnt The Lancers and Quadrilles. They had to be back home by nine o’clock so they had to run all the way home to St Johns.

In the Spring some of the girls at the Porcelain, who used to stay for lunch,  would go down to the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, which runs alongside the factory and bring back a white bowl full of young tadpoles which they would keep under the table in an old ventilator. Every lunchtime they would take another container to get more water and then feed the tadpoles with bread and later when their legs began to grow – meat. It was at this time that a large stone was put in the middle of the bowl and some of the young frogs managed to get out. Miriam said that one of the old paintresses "had a fit" and the game was up and the frogs were put back into the canal.

There was another building at the Porcelain which contained the Engravers. On the top floor above the Engravers was an empty room which had a window specially made to take the fire escape. Miriam could never see the logic in this as nobody worked in there. On one occasion there was a fire drill and a thick canvas chute opened out from the window down into a big sheet, which was held steady by at least four men. The plan was that with arms up and head at an angle you would safely slide down the chute and land on the big sheet below. During the fire drill the girls had to climb on to a table to get out of the window. They tied string around the bottom of their skirts for modesty’s sake and down they went. Just as the men shouted "no more" Miriam had let go and found herself in an enclosed chute unable to retain the correct position, fighting her way down to the bottom where the men anxiously picked her out. She felt very giddy for a few minutes, but told them she felt alright. The following day the under-manager came to see how she was but as she felt fine that was the end of the matter.

Looking back to when she had first started working at the Porcelain Miriam remembered that the company was nearly bankrupt, but it was saved by Dyson Perrins. When business improved Dyson Perrins gave a dinner at The Guildhall which was attended by about 500 people in both the bottom hall and the ballroom upstairs. Miriam recalled the seven course dinner, followed by coffee and whisky to drink the toast. There was a bar, but drinks were not free. A whist drive took place in the bottom hall. Miriam remembered dancing upstairs with Mr Gimson but it was "like dancing with an elephant", he was such a big man. Miriam was taken home in a small car by Bert Oulsen from the Works office, who lived at Broadheath.

Miriam thought that the happiest period in her teens was when she was working with the paintresses. That was until working practices were tightened up!  

1924 Southsea
Three Bathing Belles
Hilda Everett and her sister Winnie with Miriam (on the right)

Miriam stayed at the Porcelain Works until she married Reginald Hartwright in 1931. She died in May 1994 just a few days before her 89^th birthday.

I should like to thank Wendy Cook, Curator of the Royal Worcester Museum, Ted Taylor, retired Engraver and Amanda Savage for their help and encouragement in writing this page.