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In 1842 land records show that two young men from Leeds bought about 100 acres. These two men were called William Wilcock (aged 18) and John Lassey (aged 20). Early records show the business registered under the name of “Lassey and Wilcock- coal proprietors and brick makers” which provides evidence the two lads were making full use of the coal and clay and must have already built a kiln. Unfortunately John died at the age of 36 in 1858 leaving his share of the business to his 32-year-old widow, Margaret.
In 1863 Margaret Lassey sold her share of Rock Colliery to a man named John Holroyd- a rich businessman who owned Carlton Mills in Woodhouse, Leeds. The business now became registered as “Wilcock and Co.”.
In 1877 William Wilcock died, now lying to rest the last ties with the humble beginnings.
In 1879 James Holroyd, Johns youngest son, took over the managerial role at the pottery. He had interest in Architecture that gave him contacts important to the business. His first steps were to increase production of architectural salt glazed bricks and decorative tiles and production of pottery. He gave the name “Burmantofts Faience” to the pottery.
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The Burmantofts Works were able to provide tile cladding for existing buildings or entire brickwork schemes for new buildings.
Following the fashion of the time for tiled interiors, Burmantofts rivalled potteries such as Doulton when it came to quality and style.
The art pottery produced was very experimental to begin with but eventually found a level. Burmantofts were not alone in plagiarising and copying ideas from other pottery designs. It was easier for pottery companies to mimic designs that were tried and tested than to spend a lot of time stressing over misfired objects. Burmantofts followed the trend of adapting ideas to produce original items but were not ashamed to copy items that were of the mode. The styles of pottery produced came from diverse selections of sources ranging from objects from antiquity, gothic revival, the Orient, Anglo-Persian art, Shaker, neo-classical and any other form of revival you could name.
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The most available of all the wares were the monochrome glazed wares. Impasto was the second most popular item. These were advertised as “Páte-sur-Páte” in catalogues but are known as Impasto these days amongst collectors.
Partie-colour wares became the main production for the pottery. The way Partie-colour wares were produced was by incising a design into the wet clay to form a border to hold the glaze, or by tube lining the design with a fine outline to hold the glaze in place. This enabled the glaze colours to stay localised without running into each other.
Anglo-Persian wares began production around 1887 when the first of these wares were displayed at the Saltaire Exhibition.
Lustre glazed wares were produced all through the pottery production. These became more desirable at the turn of the century and over took the production of Partie-colour wares.
In 1888 the name of Wilcock and Co was re-registered as The Burmantofts Company, which probably made more sense as this made advertising of their wares less complicated.
A year later a number of potteries consolidated to become the Leeds Fireclay Company. This included The Burmantofts Company.
The other potteries included were William Ingram & Sons potteries of Worley, Joseph Cliff & Sons of Wortley, The Wortley Fireclay Company, Joseph Brooke & Sons of Halifax and Edward Brooke & Sons of Huddersfield.
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In 1904, due to the lack of interest in the art pottery department, it was decided that pottery production should cease. The later wares were not selling and cost of production was too high. The pottery decided to concentrate on its utilitarian wares, bricks and architectural commissions. After the war, production of extravagant buildings had gone into decline. Old buildings that had been bombed during the war were pulled down and replaced by cheaper brick buildings. The pottery was forced to close in 1957. The entire of the pottery was cleared out and boarded up. By the mid 1960’s the land was bought up by Leeds Housing Corporation and the remaining pottery building, kilns and chimneystacks were pulled down and the land cleared. The site has now got a school and a Housing estate build on it as well as blocks of flats.
If you would like to learn more about the history of Burmantofts pottery then click on the link at the bottom of the page to read about my ebook that contains detailed information about the pottery with over 230 pictures.
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