George Hood

HOOD, George (floruit 1831), pottery manufacturer, Tunstall.

George Hood  was in business in Tunstall as a pottery manufacturer from about 1822. He built Highgate Pottery, Brownhills, in1831 and took over Walton's figure and toy factory in Navigation Road, Burslem, in 1835.

In January 1841 the warehouse of the Walton factory, holding about ten tons of ware, collapsed, and three of the 20 women workers below were seriously injured. George Hood sold the Highgate Pottery in 1841. He started up in business again in a works on Bourne's Bank, making figures and dogs.

It is generally accepted that George Hood is the 'George H.' referred to in Charles Shaw's When I was a Child. Shaw provides a vivid and fairly sympathetic portrait of him, stout, cheery despite his financial misfortunes, employing only a dozen people in his toy manufactory instead of the scores he had previously employed, in a broken- down works which produced mostly figures of Napoleon.

Sources:  IGI Staffs; M and H; VCH viii.