I had only a few minutes to look round the Royal Pump Room museum at Leamington Spa but I saw these Staffordshire figurines and wanted to find out more about them. The museum label gives a little information about their date and place of production, and that Andromache was bequeathed by Mr F H A Jahn. The figurines of Bacchus and Autumn was sold by Jahn in 1950. I looked them up in Windows on Warwickshire, a publicly accessible database of Warwickshire museums collections, and found entries exist only for Andromache and Bacchus. This gives no extra information about Bacchus but says Andromache is a Leeds pearlware figure in enamel colours, which refers to a glazing type that produces a higher quality finish.

There is a rich intertwining of classical subjects and Staffordshire’s pottery industry as Edith Hall and Henry Stead discuss in their chapter on ‘Pottery Workers’ in People’s History of Classics (Routledge, 2020). It’s one though that my interest in is personal as much as academic; my Dad’s side of the family worked in Stoke’s potteries until my Granddad benefitted somehow from post WW1 mobility and ended up as a headmaster. His family’s firm was on Lascelles St, Tunstall. It was a small pottery works that I think finished biscuitware, and was bought out (and is now, family history is again somewhat hazy, Roy Kirkhams Ltd). Leonard Millington was already a teacher when Margaret Jones was scolded by her parents for standing on the corner of the road and talking to him. Times were different then. When she met my Granddad, Margaret was working at another firm putting the gilded rings on plates and cups, and doing pottery transfers, paid at a piece rate that varied depending on the customer. I think it was Woolworths work that was particularly well paid. The potteries had long employed substantial numbers of women – by 1870 half the British pottery workforce was female – so Grandma’s circumstances were pretty usual. Once Grandma got out of the factory through her (long and as far as I can tell happy) marriage she didn’t look back beyond retaining a taste for fine china; I have her Royal Doulton ‘Windflower’ figurine, cracked down the back from when a WW2 bomb blew out their window. That bomb also filled a waiting cradle with glass – thankfully my uncle was born a week late. Almost contemporaneous with Grandma’s earlier life was the Burslem potter who Hall and Stead say recollected impenetrable smoke in the town that made washing of curtains and upholstery a frequent chore; my grandma could also have told them that – and of her haste to bring line-dried washing inside before it got ‘soots’ on it and added to her work. The ‘soots’ were acidic and would burn holes in the fabric if not swiftly removed.

Returning to the pieces in the Pump Room’s case, I also looked up the donor, who must be Francis H. Aloysius Jahn who lived on Meadow Bank Avenue, in the Nether Edge suburb of Sheffield. His father Ludwig came from Thuringia, Germany, and was a china painter and designer who became Art Director of the Minton factory in 1893, in Stoke. Hall and Stead discuss how in the eighteenth century the pottery workers became expert in the classical subjects that they used to design and produce their fashionable wares before in the mid-nineteenth, with some false starts, workers’ institutes were set up offering artists’ education. One of the first of these institutes to be successful was the Minton Memorial Institute. It opened in 1858 and offered a museum to illustrate the history of pottery, a (free) library, and a studio for art teaching. It may be then that there is some connection between this institution and Ludwig Jahn’s later appointment at the Minton factory. His son Francis became a metalworker, painter and jeweller, who also collected glassware and, it seems, these figurines. He retired to Leamington and sold his collection to Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, bequeathing the museum this figurine of Andromache.