Brief Chronology of Events: 1948/1958

My Job

“Job Specification” and “Contract of Employment” were terms rarely, if ever, heard in 1948, or for many years after, in the North Staffordshire ceramic industry. I restarted at Richards in January 1948 as a “Technical Assistant” and went on to become “Technical Manager” and eventually “Technical Director”. Titles were rather fluid and meant little. For a period I used the title “Ceramic Engineer”, which I had picked up from American technical journals, because I intended to eventually take a job in the USA.

My boss, Lawrence Bullin, was a very good technical man, from whom I learned a lot and was to succeed as Technical Director. By that time, the technical department had grown to comprise:

(1) a laboratory carrying out control testing of materials,
(2) a body research section for the formulation and improvement of body compositions,
(3) a glaze research section for development and improvement of glazes,
(4) a general research section,
(5) a kiln department and
(6) a mechanical and electrical engineering departmentroutine.

They were headed respectively by Gordon Whalley, Cyril Barker, Derek Watkin, Foster Rogers, Bob Udall and Harold Warillow. There had also developed a seventh section; which directly aided departmental and factory managers with production problems. I headed that section with assistance from all the aforementioned other sections.

1948 to 1958

My job evolved during this period. I was involved in improving the fuel efficiency of tunnel kilns, improving routine testing procedures, improving equipment layouts within the various factories and improving “potting results”. The latter function was of great importance. Ceramic production is subject to losses resulting from poor raw materials, unsuitable formulations, faulty machinery or unsuitable manufacturing processes, among many other factors. If, for example, a factory unit was unfortunate enough (and many were) to be potting at, say, 80% first quality in the biscuit stage and 80% in the glost stage then less than 2/3rds of the originally formed tiles were available to be sold at first quality price. Some of the less faulty tiles were sold at “seconds” price and non-saleable tiles were reprocessed. However, poor potting resulted in a very large reduction of saleable output and irrecoverable loss of added value. The first necessity to tackle these problems was to have detailed representative statistics of faults.

During this eleven years period and, in fact, for a further five years, we had full order books. There was, therefore, constant pressure to produce more. This was achieved by squeezing more out of the existing plant which, more often than not, conflicted with attaining better potting results. We also squeezed more plant into the existing factories. Many of us wanted to introduce shift work and have the various factories work steadily around the clock. Our tunnel kilns were, of course, already operating continuously so we would have needed to install more of them but that was not a problem.
Our Chairman and major shareholder (Richards was a private company until 1964) was resolutely opposed to shift work because; “it would take wives and mothers away from their family duties”. The term “unsociable hours” had not yet been coined. Shift working would, of course, have greatly increased output, reduced costs and enabled us to better use our assets and replace machinery in a shorter period of time.
But Geoff Corn was not to be moved and it was not until 1956 that we introduced a “twilight” shift at the newly commissioned Adderley Green factory. That came into being at the request of female operatives whose husbands or older children could baby-sit while they worked.

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