The Canal Era 175 



facturers and traders in the midland districts, and especially 

 when the Trent and Mersey Canal was supplemented by the 

 Wolverhampton (now the Staffordshire and Worcestershire) 

 Canal, connecting the Trent with the Severn ; the Birming- 

 ham Canal ; the Coventry Canal (which gave through naviga- 

 tion from the Trent via Lichfield and Oxford, to the Thames) ; 

 and others. 



Of the many districts benefitted it was, perhaps, the Pot- 

 teries that received the maximum of advantage. Fourteen 

 years before the Trent and Mersey Canal was opened for 

 traffic that is to say, in 1763 Josiah Wedgwood perfected 

 a series of improvements in the pottery industry which fore- 

 shadowed the probability of the manufacture of coarse 

 pottery already carried on in North Staffordshire for many 

 years developing into the production of wares of the highest 

 excellence, for which a great market would assuredly be 

 found not only throughout England but throughout the 

 world. The one drawback to an otherwise very promising 

 outlook lay in the defective communications. The roads 

 were hopelessly bad and the navigable rivers were far distant. 

 It was almost impossible to get sufficient clay for the pur- 

 poses of raw material, and the cost and the risk of damage 

 involved in long land journeys before the goods could be 

 put on the water, for carriage to London or the Continent, 

 almost closed those markets for the Staffordshire manu- 

 facturer. 



In 1760 three years before Josiah Wedgwood started 

 his new era in pottery manufacture the number of workers 

 engaged in the industry did not exceed 7000 persons ; and 

 not only were they badly paid and irregularly employed but 

 in their position of almost complete isolation from the rest 

 of humanity they were, as Smiles puts it in his " Life of 

 James Brindley," " almost as rough as their roads." They 

 were ill-clad, ill-fed and wholly uneducated ; they lived 

 in dwellings that were little better than mud huts ; they 

 had to dispense with coal for fuel, since the state of the roads 

 made its transport too costly for their scanty means ; they 

 had no shops, and for such drapery and household wares as 

 they could afford to buy they were dependent on the pack- 

 men or the hucksters from Newcastle-under-Lyme. Their 

 favourite amusements were bull-baiting and cock-fighting. 



