Saut [Salt] Bucket, ‘From Cumnock Pottery, 1871’

Redware salt container topped with a hen and chicks in a nest, made by the Cumnock Pottery in East Ayrshire and dated 1871. This russet brown, black and cream glazed kitchen ceramic is of an ovoid or egg-shaped form with applied feathered decoration on the sides and a moulded brown-speckled hen and four chicks sat in a straw nest on the top.  There is a round hand-sized aperture towards one side embellished with chick motifs, below which is a white plaque decorated with the words ‘from Cumnock Pottery 1871’ rendered in a simple free-style hand.

Redware, also known as terracotta, is a type of hard, red stoneware, though the term is also used to describe any common clay pottery that is red in colour.   Salt containers such as this, for standing alongside a cooking stove, have a covered top to keep the salt dry and free from kitchen debris.  They are variously known as salt crocks, vases or pigs, the latter an old Scots word for a jar or pot made of earthenware.   The nesting hen was a popular whimsical motif in eighteenth and nineteenth century pottery design, seen frequently in early Staffordshire-made egg baskets or tureens and adopted in Scotland from the mid-nineteenth century.  The Cumnock Pottery made many styles of salt containers, usually embellished with ‘couthy’ sayings, but they are mostly plain in form.  The decorative hen feature seen here suggests a more expensive object than the usual output.

The Cumnock Pottery was founded in 1792 on the Dumfries House estate of Lord Bute by the inspector of mines there, the Leadhill-born engineer James Taylor, who also made celebrated contributions to the development of stream engineering.  The first potters were brought in from Glasgow but it was many years before the enterprise, which never employed more than a dozen craftsmen, was deemed economically viable and much of the early output comprised basic tiles or simple pots.   The fortunes of the business were transformed in the 1850s when the coming of the railway widened the market and acted as a spur to leisure travel.  The new owner, James McGavin Nicol, with family links into the grocery trade, expanded the output into more decorative domestic wares, colourful flowerpots, holiday souvenirs and commemorative wares to mark family occasions such as marriages and birthdays.   Cumnock ware also featured regularly in late nineteenth century Church bazaars and charity sales, alongside the more refined and expensive, Dunmore and Wemyss ware.

The striking feature of Cumnock ware is the decoration with mottoes, whose wit and rustic frankness in broad Scots, which were often quotes from the poetry of Burns, appealed to sophisticated urban customers who saw in these homely inscriptions an echo of earlier times.  But motto ware was not unique to Scotland and was made in several English potteries at much the same time.  The Watcombe Terracotta Clay Company of Torquay, founded in 1869, was particularly noteworthy and like the Cumnock pottery focussed on souvenirs manufacture for sale to holiday makers.

In an area best known for coal mining, textiles or fancy box making, contemporary accounts make light of Cumnock ceramic production, partly because the workforce was small and the output naïve in character.  A History of Old Cumnock of 1899, by the Rev. John Warrick, gives it only a brief and passing mention.  ‘Our local pottery maintains its reputation through the special brown ware, which it sends out under the name of Cumnock pottery, and also through its glazed flowerpots.’  (p. 356-7).

The Cumnock pottery was at its height in the late nineteenth century and pre-war years, but closed in 1920 as fashions changed and the local clay was exhausted.  But as with so many areas of distinctive Scottish craft production, as the industry came to an end the appeal to collectors began to grow – delighting the ‘connoisseur in Scottish domestic utensils’ and evoking a ‘glad smile from the Scot in exile.’ (Aberdeen Press and Journal, 20 July, 1925)  One of the best collections is housed in the Baird Institute in Cumnock where the oldest pot is inscribed ‘William McCroan, Weaver at Chapel, 1801.’