Memory and Music
Little is known about the pottery’s output for the first fifty years, as pieces do not carry any form of identification. Museum pieces with known provenance suggest that Maling wares were little different from those being produced by other local potteries at the time. But when the business moved to Newcastle in 1817 the then owner, Robert Maling, began to mark pieces with his name. The output seems to have been mainly simple, domestic wares made for use by the local working people. Their interest lies more in the fact that they have survived, rather in any exceptional quality of potting or decoration.
It was Robert Maling’s son, Christopher Thompson Maling II, who took the business in a new and profitable direction in the 1850s. He devised a way to make pottery containers by machine, rather than by hand. This speeded up the production process and led to huge orders from manufacturers of goods as diverse as marmalade, meat and fish pastes, ointments and printing ink.
By the 1890s however, the company decided to go up-market and They employed their first in-house designer and imported porcelain from other factories which they decorated and sold on under their own name. Within a few years the quality of Maling ware saw it being sold by stores such as Harrods.
Today an active collectors’ society exists to find and preserve what information still exists on this diverse British pottery. Having spent the day in and around the old Maling pottery plant and warehouses in the Ouseburn valley, the warehouse of which is now Brinkburn Brewery’s hireable space, I spoke to a man who originated from Tyneside who has a keen interest in the Maling pottery. I'm hoping to use an exert from the conversation in my sound piece, to give another dimension to the sound ‘imprint’ of the area.
Echoes of Heritage
One of many traditional Tyneside folk songs evoking the life and work of industrial workers on Tyneside, The Keel Row was first published in the 1770s but may be considerably older. The opening lines of the song set it in Sandgate, a part of Newcastle which overlooks the river Tyne to the east of the city which is still overlooked by the long since closed Keelman’s Hospital.
The song’s English origin is indicated by the fact the ‘keel’ referred primarily to boats which carried coal on the Tyne. The lyrics which state ‘weel may the keel row’ mean let the boat be rowed Quickly and safely. The ‘unweildly’ keels were rowed from the back almost like a gondola.
Sandgate, the setting of the song, was once home to over 1600 people, the keelmen and their families, who lived there until 1905 when they had all gone. Since then the area has been significantly redeveloped.
There is a painting by Turner in the National Gallery, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, which shows the boats - 42ft long and 9ft wide, with a draft of only 4½ft. The top of the boat was made of oak for strength, while the more water resistant elm was used under water. The boats could carry a standard 21 tons which was a set measure in 1635.
Since they were using sails and oars, the keelmen needed to use the tides as efficiently as possible, so their working day shifted. Turner’s painting shows them working with torches as They ferried coal nine miles from the staiths to the large colliers moored at the mouth of the Tyne. The round trip took around 12-15 hours, and they were given one guinea per load. Each keel employed a skipper, two men and a boy (the peedee).
‘As I came thro’ Sandgate,
Thro’ Sandgate, thro’ Sandgate,
As I came thro’ Sandgate,
I heard a lassie sing:
‘O, weel may the keel row,
The keel row, the keel row,
O weel may the keel row
That my laddie’s in.’
‘He wears a blue bonnet,
Blue bonnet, blue bonnet,
He wears a blue bonnet
A dimple in his chin.
And weel may the keel row,
The keel row, the keel row,
And weel may the keel row
That my laddie’s in.’
Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich - The Worker's Maypole (2018)
An art piece dreamt up and realised as an act of both celebration and to bring focus to the collective values and moralities at the heart of the North of England, The Worker’s Maypole was installed as an homage to the north east’s achievements towards equality. Designed as a tribute and affirmation to northern heritage, folk and values, the maypole enveloped Grey’s Monument in the heart of Newcastle. The monument, which is itself a tribute not only to Prime Minister Earl Charles Grey, the 2nd Earl Grey, who led the passing of the great reform act, also represented the region and acted as a symbol for the area’s role in supporting a fairer society.
The piece saw the monument become a temporary ‘Worker’s Maypole’ during the great exhibition of the north from 23 June 2018 as well as displaying phrases such as ‘Leisure for All & A Life Worth Living’; ‘Eight Hour Working Day’ alongside ‘the accolades of society, health, education, science, art and fellowship for all’; placing at the heart of this civic space the shared principles that have been and remain significant to the communities of the North.
The worker’s maypole originally appeared in an 1894 drawing by Walter Crane, an illustrator and socialist who was a great advocate of improved employment conditions for workers in the industrial North. This image has been repeatedly employed to re-imagine the world through ideologies of equality, over the last 120 years. The Worker’s Maypole appears re-worked in 1924 on the Northumberland National Union of Mineworkers’ banner in a call for improved labour and living conditions. The mottos on The Worker’s Maypole 2018 all originate from Crane’s illustrations and, alongside the miners banners, are a clear cultural link to the north’s industrial heritage.
Responses to the artwork were hugely positive, with the maypole proving popular on social media with over 8,000 instagram posts of the installation alone. The Worker’s Maypole then mounted a temporary display in the Baltic Flour Mill Gallery in Gateshead - one of the three hub venues of the great exhibition of the North.
The display on baltic’s ground floor included a flower from the crown of The Worker’s Maypole piece to allow for visitors to see an up-close view of the ornate detail for the first time, as well as segments of the brightly coloured ribbons hung alongside large-scale images of grey’s monument and the historical Walter Crane illustration. The display also featured a short film documenting the installation and creation of the piece by artists Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich, the creators of the piece itself.
Walter Crane - The Worker's Maypole, An Offering for May Day (1894)
Illustrated by Walter crane, The Worker’s Maypole (1894) was first published in ‘justice’ and declared ‘the cause of labour is the hope of the world’. crane, born in Liverpool in 1845, was a prolific illustrator associated with the arts and crafts movement whose creations are some of the most enduring visual imaginings of the British socialist movement.
The worker’s maypole calls for ‘solidarity’ and ‘humanity’, ‘employers’ liability’, ‘eight hours’ and ‘no starving children’. In the centre of the scene Crane’s beflowered May queen welcomes the toilers of the world and carries their banners high. Powerful yet whimsical, The Workers Maypole brings together English folk tradition and the demands of the international labour movement.
In modern Britain, may day evokes scenes of maypoles and Morris dancers with varying degrees of old-fashioned-village-charm. the ancient festival borrows from pagan, christian, gaelic and roman symbolism but may 1st is also international workers day. For socialists in the late nineteenth century, however, May Day was a defiant and deliberate stoppage of labour by workers with ‘a message of strife and of hope’. Crane combines the symbolism of the traditional May Day maypole with the symbols of the international workers movement: the central tenets of international socialism are literally wrapped around a rural English maypole.
Andrea Bowers - The Worker's Maypole, An Offering for May Day (2015)
The Worker’s Maypole, An Offering for May Day 1894 (Illustration by Walter Crane) was, in 2015, recreated by Andrea Bowers as a large drawing in black permanent marker pen on reclaimed sections of cardboard boxes which have been assembled to form a rectangle with irregular edges.
It is part of a larger body of work that Bowers started in 2012 using the same materials, which were a reflection of the materials she saw in the occupy encampments in New York, in protest against social and economic inequality. The images for Bowers’s drawings were taken from political pamphlets and graphic campaigns from the 19th and 20th century, which she enlarged and adapted. Having been politicised by the writer, designer and activist William Morris (1834–1896) in the 1880s, Crane regularly contributed images to socialist publications in the 1890s such as The Comrade, Justice, The Commonweal and The Clarion.
Bowers’s work addresses contemporary political concerns through its use of everyday, inexpensive materials and through slogans and questions which address the viewer directly. At the same time, she reflects on the historical precedents of current political campaigns. Bowers also celebrates a continuity of political activism that links her work to a moment in the 1890s, anchored in the folk imagery of historical rural England.
Comments