Transferrer | Pottery industry Jobs
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Transfer printing was developed in response to a call by English consumers for less expensive, mass produced wares. Customers wanted embellishment on their previously plain utilitarian wares. Initially the patterns were oriental in flavour.

Transfer printing is a process by which a pattern or design is etched onto a copper (or other metal) plate. The plate is then inked and the pattern is "transferred" to a special tissue. The inked tissue is then laid onto the already bisque fired ceramic item, glazed, and fired again.

 

postcards from Wedgwoods

Applying transfer to teapots
May 2000

'walk' around Burgess & Leigh 

No. 263. Thomas Wiltshire, aged 12. [Who worked at Davenport's pottery in Longport c.1840]

Note his families occupations: Father prints the transfer, sister cuts paper, which will be for the transfer printing and mother is a 'transferrer'.

I am employed by Mr. Davenport to sweep the cutting-shop, run on errands, break pummice-stone - nothing else. I can read and write. I went to day-school before I came to work. I go to Sunday-school now, at New Methodists. They teach me to read the Bible and that. I come to work at half-past six, sometimes a little before, and go into the hovel until the cutting-shop is open, to warm myself. I go home to breakfast at nine o’clock, and always take my half hour. I go in the other bank to dinner with my sister; she is a transferrer; father is a printer; mother is dead; another sister cuts paper; a young brother stops at neighbour Knowles’s between school-times. Two of the other boys can read in the Bible. I don’t know much about the others. I get plenty to eat and drink. I get holidays at wakes, and races, and at Christmas.

Examples of "transferrers" from the 1881 census for the Potteries area:-

1881 census:
Dwelling: 91 Broom St (Beerhouse Outdoors)
Census Place: Stoke Upon Trent, Stafford, England

1881 census:
Dwelling: 26 Providence Court
Census Place: Stoke Upon Trent, Stafford, England

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