Ellgreave Pottery Marks: Dating a Burslem Teapot

Ellgreave Pottery Co Ltd operated from 1921 to 1981 at Ellgreave Street in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, which immediately puts a sixty-year ceiling and floor on anything carrying the name. Within that span the wording does most of the dating.

• ELLGREAVE POTTERY CO. LTD with BURSLEM and ENGLAND is the standard form.
• Lottie Rhead Ware appears on the designer line from about 1923, created by Charlotte Rhead.
• Heatmaster is the trade name for insulated ware and belongs to the post-war period.
• Royal Crownford Ironstone is a pattern and body name found on later output.
• A div. of Wood & Sons was added after the firm went into voluntary liquidation in 1967 and production moved to the Wood & Sons facilities. That phrase is the single cleanest dividing line in the factory's marks: with it, after 1967; without it, before.

The word ENGLAND in the mark also behaves normally for a Staffordshire pottery: it followed the American import requirement and was not used before 1891, which is no constraint here since the firm did not exist until 1921, but it does mean an Ellgreave mark without ENGLAND should make you look again.

Ellgreave never stood alone. It was one of the associated companies of Wood & Sons, the Burslem firm established in 1865 by Absalom Wood and his son T. F. Wood, trading first as Wood & Son, then as Wood & Sons from about 1907, and incorporated as Wood & Sons Ltd in 1910.

The parent's later history sets the boundary conditions for Ellgreave marks. Wood & Sons became a public company in 1954 as Wood & Sons (Holdings) Ltd, entered receivership in December 1981 and closed in 1995. Trade names used across the group include Wood's Ware, Bursley Ware, Woods Ivory Ware and Ivorine China, the last produced in the 1930s. Bursley Ltd, later renamed the Susie Cooper Pottery Co. Ltd at the Crown Pottery in Burslem, was another associated company.

For practical identification this means two things. First, a base carrying both Ellgreave and Wood & Sons is not a contradiction, it is the normal late form. Second, group trade names such as Wood's Ware or Bursley Ware belong to sister operations, so a piece marked with one of those is not Ellgreave even though the ownership was shared.

The Ellgreave name that carries the most collector interest is Lottie Rhead Ware, the line associated with Charlotte Rhead, whose work appears on Ellgreave pieces from about 1923.

Rhead's characteristic method is tube lining, in which a fine trail of slip is piped onto the surface to outline the design before colouring, leaving a raised line you can feel with a fingertip. That raised outline is the practical test, and it is the reason her work is hard to fake convincingly by printing. Run a finger lightly over a decorated panel: a tube-lined design has physical relief; a transfer does not.

A typical Rhead-associated Ellgreave mark spells out the firm, the designer line and the town, for example ELLGREAVE POTTERY CO. LTD, Lottie Rhead Ware, BURSLEM, ENGLAND.

Later output is different in character. The Heatmaster insulated ware of the post-war years and the Royal Crownford Ironstone range are production lines rather than designer pieces, and they are priced accordingly.

Three things send Ellgreave identifications wrong.

• Reading the parent as the maker, or the reverse. A mark saying A div. of Wood & Sons is still an Ellgreave mark, and it dates the piece after 1967.
• Treating a range name as a date. Heatmaster and Royal Crownford stayed in production; the name gives a period, not a year.
• Confusing Charlotte Rhead with Frederick Rhead. They are different designers within the same well-known ceramics family, and their work appears for different firms. Read the line name on the mark rather than the surname alone.

The absolute limits are firm: nothing genuine carries an Ellgreave Pottery Co Ltd mark before 1921 or after 1981. If a seller dates a marked piece earlier than that, the mark and the date disagree, and the mark is the harder evidence.

For the general dating levers used across English potteries, see pottery marks identification.

These are printed marks, usually in black or brown under or over the glaze, so the problem is legibility rather than shadow.

Use soft, even light and avoid direct flash, which reflects off the glaze and washes out fine lettering. Fill the frame with the whole mark including any smaller line beneath the main name, because that smaller line is often where A div. of Wood & Sons appears. Take a second photograph of the whole piece, and if there is tube-lined decoration, a third at a raking angle so the raised outlines show as ridges.

Photograph it and the app identifies it, and the exact wording in your own photograph is what you match against the dates above.