Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/722

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
606
DEVONSHIRE CHARACTERS

the Plymouth China Works were removed to Bristol and the patent was assigned to Richard Champion, a connexion by marriage of the Cookworthy family. The endeavour to make the porcelain manufactures there a paying concern failed as it had at Plymouth, and Champion removed his works to Staffordshire, where the fuel was close at hand. The Bristol patent-right was transferred to a company of six partners. Champion received through Burke, who was then in office, the appointment of Deputy-Paymaster of the Forces, in 1782, when he left Staffordshire, but on a change of Ministry he lost the post, and went to America, where he died in 1787. Neither his family, nor that of Cookworthy, ever received any benefit from the important art and industry they had been the means of establishing. William Cookworthy died on the 17th October, 1780. Among the worthies celebrated in the memorial windows of the Plymouth town hall is "William Cookworthy, Chemist and Potter, the discoverer of the English China-clay, and the first maker in England of true Porcelain."

Abundant information relative to Cookworthy exists.

Memoir of William Cookworthy, by his Grandson, G. H. Harrison. London, 1854.

Relics of William Cookworthy, by John Prideaux. London, 1853.

"William Cookworthy and the Plymouth China Factory," by R. N. Worth, in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 1876.

William Cookworthy, by Theodore Compton. London, 1894.

Strangely enough, though Cookworthy has not received the recognition due to him as a discoverer. Ure, in his Dictionary of Arts and Manufactures (London, 1853), makes no mention of him. Nor does Tomlinson