The Making of Beswick Pottery

The founder of the Beswick pottery, was James Wright Beswick in 1892, it never become successful until 1894 when his son John joined him. It was due to their success that in 1897 they bought the Gold Street Works, sadly most of this area of Stoke is now occupied by a retail park, they traded as J.W. Beswick until 1936.

Their popularity stems from producing extremely colourful decorated tableware, plant-pots and jugs that adorned many a Victorian home along with reproduction 'antique' Staffordshire cats and dogs figurines. The Beswick production was synonymous with elaborate moulding and painstaking hand-painting which turned out their high quality figures. James died in 1921, with son John taking over the reigns,he died in 1936 and it was John's son John Ewart Beswick that took over the reigns and the Sales Director being Gilbert Beswick. The company was made a limited company in 1936, John Beswick Ltd.

1930's saw modernisation with more advance methods in producing the pottery wares which allowed J.W. Beswick to be very competitive in the market place, they had 400 people working for them at this time, the company also turned to producing animal figures which proved to be a wise choice and was a successful period for them. The modeller of these animal figures was Arthur Gredington, he used champions in their fields as the basis for his models of racehorses and champion dogs. They continued to expand their catalogue of animals figures which included fish, birds, farm animals and wild animals, these were all made to look so realistic.

The war years (1939 - 45) for Beswick were, like with all manufacturing in the UK extremely restricted and many of their pieces were not as highly decorated as usual, but Beswick grabbed the opportunity of producing for export, which was encouraged by the government also with the advantage that the export items could be more highly decorated than the items intended for the home market. Beswick exported to the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and New Zealand and it accounted for 80% of all items they produced.

Lucy Beswick came up with the idea in 1947 to make characters from the Beatrix Potter books and in 1948 it had acquired a licence to produce some of the characters which included Jemima Puddle-Duck, Peter Rabbit, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. And with the success of the Beatrix Potter Beswick figurines they started in the production of Walt Disney characters, some of those characters immortalised by Beswick were Snow White, Bambi, Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin, Eeyore, Piglet and Tigger figures.

In 1969 after three generations of the Beswick family and with no new generation of Beswick to take over the family business, the company was sold to Royal Doulton. In 1989 the Royal Albert or Royal Doulton mark replaced the Beswick mark. Finally in 2002 Royal Doulton ceased production of Beswick products.

2005 and it all changed when a Yorkshire entrepreneur, John Sinclair bought the Beswick name along with production moulds and archive material, from Royal Doulton. He is quoted as saying "I am committed to manufacturing a small, hand-painted range in Stoke on Trent, which will appeal to collectors." Two collections will be launched, "Beswick England" a prestigious range which will include limited editions which will made in Stoke-on Trent and "John Beswick" featuring animals in the style of the originals, which will be manufactured overseas.

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