• Charles William Brown was born on 5th March, 1882 at Robin Hill on Biddulph Moor. 

• In 1894 at the age of 12 Brown left school and started work, hired out to a local farmer. After only a month at the farm he ran away for a job in a pit folowing the footsteps of his father who was a miner.  

• His first coal mining job was working at the coal face raking the coal from into to the loader.

• Less than a year later, on 14th January 1895,  there were 77 deaths in a flooding disaster at Diglake Colliery, a neighbouring pit.  Consequently all boys under thirteen were banned from mine work and Charles Brown had to give up his mining job and return to farm labouring. 

• He worked as a farm labourer for about two years, before going back to the mines for the higher wages.

• In 1901 Brown married Beatrice Bailey at Audley Church.

• In 1910 they moved into a terraced house at 14 Lord Street, Etruria. 

• By the age of 29, Brown was a 'deputy' mining manager and had begun attending Stoke-on-Trent Technical College for Mining classes. He gained his second Under-Manager's Certificate in 1915 and passed the First Class examination in 1920. 

• After working at various collieries,  he finally settled in 1931 and took a position at a North Staffordshire pit where he remained until his retirement in 1948 at the age of 66. 

• In retirement, Brown started keeping diaries and writing his memoirs and diaries.

• Painting had always been his hobby and after retirement now became his chief activity. 

• In 1956 Charles and Beatrices home at  Lord Street (by this time re-designated as 276 Etruria Road) was demolished in slum clearances and they moved to 12 Cavour Street, Etruria. 

• Charles William Brown died on 18th May, 1961.

"C.W.Brown - The Potteries' Primitive"
Booklet by the Stoke-on-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery