Family dynasties often have substantial influence in the way the city is governed. One such family are the Clowes's.

In 1900 the Potteries was the sixth largest industrial employer of women in the country and yet the unions that represented them were scrappy and impotent. At the time there were more than seventy major pottery manufacturers in Stoke-on-Trent each one with hundreds of unique trades, and each trade had its own worker-representative.

In 1906 the three biggest unions, the Pottery Printers and Transferers, the China Potters Federation and the Hollow-Ware Pressers merged to form the National Amalgamated Society of Male and Female Pottery Workers (NASMFPW). 

In 1912 the new union became a member of the General Federation of Trade Unions, later known as the TUC. In 1917 the wordy mouthful was changed to the National Society of Pottery Workers (NSPW), morphing into the Ceramic and Allied Trade Union (CATU) in 1970, and Unity in 2006.

By 1918 it had some 60,000 members throughout Britain most of whom worked in Stoke-on-Trent. Many of these had been recruited by a charismatic 54 year old General Secretary evocatively known as 'Honest Sam' Clowes.

Samuel Clowes worked at Howson's Pottery in Hanley. Its founder was George Howson (1818-1896), a Chartist sympathiser whose radical socialism made it impossible for him to find work; and so he set up his own factory which he handed on to his sons who also promoted worker's rights.

The bandstand in Hanley Park was the benefaction of George Howson (1818-96). 
 A Chartist sympathiser, Methodist and a pottery manufacturer at the Eastwood Works, Hanley. He was associated (along with J W Powell) in the development of music in the area. He founded a scholarship for North Staffordshire students in the Tonic Sol-Fa College, London.

A street in Eastwood, Hanley was named after him

Clowes was encouraged by the Howsons to extend his union activities that had already marked him as the architect of modern Potteries' trade unionism. But Sam was already a public figure before this.

A member of the Independent Labour Party he was a councillor for the Hanley/Northwood ward in 1911 until he was elected to parliament in 1924. You need to savour the impact of this brief biography in that definitive accolade and the absolute recognition and trust given to him by his peers. He was the first factory pottery worker to enter parliament.

Aside from his forceful union activities Honest Sam was a councillor who was at the forefront of post-WW1 slum-clearances and the policy known as providing 'homes fit for heroes'.

But it was his son Sir Harold Clowes OBE, knighted for his services to Stoke-on-Trent, who saw the culmination of this during intense house-building after the Second World War. A builder himself, Sir Harold was chairman the Stoke-on-Trent Housing Committee during the period that oversaw the construction of Bentilee, then recognised as the biggest social housing development in Europe.

He became a councillor in 1953 and was made Lord Mayor in the federation golden jubilee year 1960. Labour heart and soul his political career came to an abrupt end in 1964 following his criticism of Longton's town centre redevelopment. He was passed over for aldermanic re-election and spent the last four years of his life dedicated to Bentilee's Harold Clowes Community Hall where he introduced amateur dramatics and even ballet to the community.

Alderman Harold Clowes
Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent 1959-60 

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Sir Harold's sister, Doris Robinson CBE, was Stoke-on-Trent's Lord Mayor in 1968, the year Harold died. And, like her father and brother, and indeed her husband Bert Robinson, a councillor in Meir, Doris dedicated her life to community regeneration. As chairman of the Education Committee she was influential in establishing North Staffs Polytechnic the forerunner of Staffordshire University in 1971.

In her Lord Mayor inaugural speech Doris referred to her father as someone who never shirked 'hard work in hard times'. An appropriate motto I feel for a family of true potters!

Doris Robinson
Lord Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent 1968-69