Maling pottery

Maling pottery was produced in the north east of England for just over two centuries. The name of the pottery derives from the French surname of Malin. The family were Protestant Huguenots who fled their native land in the sixteenth century to escape the threat of religious persecution. They settled in England and prospered in a variety of business enterprises including coal, shipping and timber. Somewhere over the centuries the name was anglicized by the addition of a final "g".

The pottery was founded at North Hylton near Sunderland in 1762, and transferred to Newcastle upon Tyne in 1817.

Increasing business allowed the Maling family to build two further potteries, each bigger than its predecessor. The last of these occupied a fourteen acre site, and was claimed by Maling to be the biggest pottery in Britain.

Little is known about the pottery’s output for the first fifty years, as pieces do not carry any form of identification. Museum pieces with known provenance suggest that Maling wares were little different from those being produced by other local potteries at the time.

When the business moved to Newcastle in 1817 the then owner, Robert Maling (son of Christopher Thompson Maling I), began to mark pieces with his name. The output seems to have been mainly simple, domestic wares made for use by the local working people. Their interest lies more in the fact that they have survived, rather in any exceptional quality of potting or decoration.

It was Robert Maling’s son, Christopher Thompson Maling II, who took the business in a new and profitable direction in the 1850s. He devised a way to make pottery containers by machine, rather than by hand. This speeded up the production process and led to huge orders from manufacturers of goods as diverse as marmalade, meat and fish pastes, ointments and printing ink.

A Victorian visitor to the pottery records that he saw an estimated one million jars in storage, waiting to be shipped to a marmalade manufacturer. Given the size of Britain’s territorial ambition in those days, these jars can still be dug up in many parts of the world. Usually they originate from Keillers of Dundee.

By the 1890s, Maling had decided to go up market. They employed their first in-house designer and imported porcelain from other factories which they decorated and sold on under their own name. Within a few years the quality of Maling ware was such that it was being sold by stores as prestigious as Harrods of London.

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Wikipedia