The Bridgeness Pottery Spongers, ca.1910

The Bridgeness Pottery Spongers, ca.1910

Glass and Ceramics

Production processes in Britain’s potteries were largely divided by gender until the twentieth-century. This is a portrait of a group of female workers at the Bridgeness Pottery in Bo’Ness near Falkirk. On the board in front of the group is chalked the words 'Bridgeness Pottery Spongers', showing them to be the young women responsible for hand decorating domestic ware in the pottery’s sponging department. The Bridgeness Pottery was founded by C.W.McNay in 1888 and operated in the Bo’Ness area until 1958.

Spongeware is the term used to describe pottery decorated by applying colour using a piece of natural sponge. It is widely considered to be a Scottish technique that was first used in the 1830s and then put into commercial production a decade later by Staffordshire potter William Adams. Sponging was an economic means of producing simple, two-dimensional patterns in one or two colours on inexpensive pots. The women in the photograph would have used carved pieces of natural sponge to apply repeat patterns to the unglazed pottery (biscuit-ware) before firing. Popular spongeware patterns included flowers, animals, ornamental lozenges and borders.

Female workers were nearly always employed at the finishing end of production where they decorated wares using a variety of techniques. Hand-painting and gilding demanded specialist training at an art-school, whereas applying transfer designs and sponging were techniques learned on the job. Nevertheless sponging required a coordination of hand and eye and a sense of design as described by Margaret Finlay who worked in the sponging department at the Bridgeness Pottery from 1916 to the 1927. She described the process of sponging as part of a working day that started and 6 o’clock in the morning and finished at 6 o’clock at night:

“I was in the Sponging and you had a wheel… you worked it with this hand and you did your sponging with this one and you had an arm rest and you could do your colourings with the plates for the different colour stuffs you had. You had a bit of sponge in every one of these things…Every time you worked it you turned the wheel round with your fingers underneath and you turned it round and got the pattern on. If you were going to put lines round plates or anything, you had a wee brush, long to a point… and when you turned the wheel round this was going all the time and your hand was making a line round it.” (http://bonesspottery.co.uk/fim.html)

Bridgeness was just one of a number of potteries operating in Bo’Ness in the nineteenth century with six different works operating out of the district between 1766 and 1958. The McNay family were also partners in the Bo’Ness Pottery (est.1784), which went into liquidation in 1898 transferring its trade in transfer-printed goods for Empire markets along with machinery and copper-plates to the Bridgeness works.

Nevertheless, emphasis at the Bridgeness Pottery remained on serviceable goods in the form of functional sponge-decorated household pottery rather than luxury productions. In a dinner to mark the opening of the pottery, the founder C.W.McNay described its activities as not ‘attempting to do what the great potteries in England did, who could get large sums for making a single pot’ but instead competing ‘with the best of them in producing the more common article… broken day after day to the grief of all housewives’ (Falkirk Herald, April 21,1888). Perhaps for this reason very few examples of Bridgeness Pottery spongeware have survived. But the technique was used widely in Scottish potteries and surviving examples have been accredited to potteries in Kirkcaldy, Glasgow and Prestonpans

©Falkirk Community Trust: Ref: P14070

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