Hands: Carley's Bridge Pottery

[Music] [Music] Enniscorthy in County Wexford is famous for its part in the rebellion of 1798 when Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen tried to achieve independence from England but over a century before that in 1659 two brothers from Cornwall arrived in Enniscorthy and brought with them the craft of the Potter their name was Karly and they found suitable clay near the town and started a pottery which survives in Wexford to this day Wexford is a beautiful County with gently undulating hills and meandering streams this is Carly's bridge over the river earn a delightful spot to stand for a while and listen to the ripple of the gently flowing stream and the murmur of the bees in the rhododendrons summer was the time for brick making - because when the wet clay was filled into molds it needed the Summer Sun and wind to dry it just as concrete blocks are made today lush grass grows now where the old brick yards used to thrive but the bricks that were made here still survived and buildings all around Enniscorthy in the walls of the post office and of saints Annan's hospital in the middle of the last century Carly's pottery belonged to George Carly Owens who built the present family house for his wife Mary Ann warned of spring mount Gauri but he died of pneumonia in 1875 before he could move into the new house the business stayed in the family and passed on to his son George Jackson owns when George Jackson owns died in 1931 his widow ran the Potteries for seven years and then Robert Carley Owens took over he was in the Irish Army during the emergency so the pottery was let for seven more years to a Miss Phoebe Donovan until World War two ended in 1945 this is the beautiful setting that great grandfather George Carly Owens chose on which to build his house for his bride Mary Ann Warren and here today Robert Kelly Owens Widow Dorothy has created a magnificent garden beside the river that flows under Carly's bridge and past the pottery reversing the pots on the board's seems to have cured the problem of the bottoms cracking question quite effectively and now the next generation takes over her son Jackson Owens and his brother-in-law Tony Sutton who is managing director and so the line of descent continues unbroken from the two brothers who came to Enniscorthy away back in 1659 this is paddy Murphy the master Potter his mother's name was brick Lee and her father and grandfather and great-grandfather were all master Potter's of carly's bridge so paddy Murphy can trace his professional craft back five generations for a family that makes bricks and tiles and pots to be called brick Lee is obviously not a coincidence paddy learned his craft from his uncles and grandfather and they in turn learned it from great-grandfather Sam brick Lee who lived to the ripe old age of 107 which says something for a life devoted to working with the clay and good clay is the first essential for a pottery and at Carly's bridge it's not far away on Saturday morning July the 19th 1879 mr. George Griffiths the printer published ads old-established printing office at 5:00 Slaney place Enniscorthy that week's edition of the watchman and County Wexford advertiser which contained a notice to say that Carly's bridge potteries was to be let together with the entire plant and a few acres of land adjoining on which the best material for the manufacture of flowerpots and earthenware is easily obtained and now a hundred years later James Pere John O'Rourke and Tom Doyle are digging up some of that material for paddy Murphy the Potter it's a simple task but very hard work they strip off the topsoil and there's the clay maybe seven or eight feet deep dig it out like turf and carry it away it's heavy and digging it breeds lean bodies and hard muscles it's hot work too because this is a summer job in winter the clay would be so wet and soft that the sides of the Morrow's would collapse in upon [Music] you [Music] good potters clay comes in many colors from white to cream pink red black humors produces the darker colors but this burns away during the firing in the kiln paddy Murphy's favorite clay is a nice blue mark and when the men arrived with a new load he wants to see it for himself immediately from his thirty years experience in the pottery he can forecast the behavior of the clay straight away how it would be to work with how it will fire in the kiln what sort of pots it would be suitable for he can even tell them exactly where it was Doug now begins the process of getting the clay into the right condition for the Potter it must be thoroughly soaked with water if the clay is allowed to become dry at this stage it will never develop the plasticity needed the clay is chopped with the shovel to make sure the water permeates to every part of the tile it needs to be turned three or four times and sprinkled with water stones and other foreign bodies must be removed the idea is to create a plastic medium of even consistency if during the winter frost should get out the clay the freezing of the water will break the clay apart into fine particles making it smooth and even when the water thor's again rather like the way a farmer achieves a good spring tilt from leaving roughly dug soil to weather when the heap is properly moistened it must be kept dump so it is covered first with wet sex and then sheets of polythene this keeps away the burning Sun and the drying wind the clay is left to slacken the main constituents of play are silica and alumina and various oxides and chemical activity goes on as the clay rests how long the clay should be left to mature as a matter of choice the longer the better one Chinese Potter is reputed to have refused to work with any clay that had not been maturing for at least 300 years the longer the clay is allowed to slack the easier it is to work with it becomes more elastic and there is less trouble with big pots when the clay is even and smooth when the clay has had some month to slacken to mature it begins to develop the consistency that the Potter likes so the time has come to bring it to the pug mill wet clay is a very heavy substance and working it can be exhausting some African tribes to this day work the clay with their feet rather like the treading of the grapes and the making of wine but the Industrial Revolution and the electric motor have combined to produce a mechanical mixer for the clay so the time has come to bring to the pug mill here it is put through a series of rollers to squeeze it and press it together until there are no hard areas left in it no air bubbles no holes no one takes any chances with the preparation of the clay so it is put through the mill a second time just to make sure period of waiting is over and the clay moves nearer to its date with the Potter Patty Murphy now starts the final working of the clay this is called wedging he can judge the weight of a ball of clay with great exactness and knows precisely how much will be needed for the party has in mind now he takes it to the potter's wheel to be transformed from an inert lump of shapeless clay into a flower pot he keeps a supply of hot water handy in case the clay needs an extra drop it also keeps his fingers warm prevents him becoming caked with the clay he begins by cleaning the wheel [Music] next he puts a pot of the required size on the wheel and sets the gauge markers [Music] it looks so simple but when paddy started at 14 years of age he began with a small four inch pot and it was a couple of years before he was allowed to progress to a five inch behind this apparent ease lies thirty years of dedicated and concentrated work a piece of wire is used to cut the pot loose from the wheel it's very important to clean your hands of all excess clay before you attempt to pick up a newly made pot otherwise finger marks will be left on the smooth surface as the wheel spins it tends to throw the clay outwards through centrifugal force as the term to throw a pot as the Potters fingers tell the clay what shape it must become total concentration is needed if my mind wanders at all paddy says as sure a god I'll put my fingers clean through the pot as the clay spins one can see what damage could be done to these creative hands if they're remained in the clay a sharp stone piece of metal or glass as the pot dries later it will shrink and paddy has to estimate how much larger to make the initial pot to allow for this different clays shrink different amounts and only years of experience can give the answer the condition of the clay is all-important if it is too hard and dry it is almost impossible to work if it's too wet and soft it will collapse when you were attempting apart as large as this one the only limit to a Potter of paddy skill is the length of the Potter's arm to reach down inside the pot as it's being formed the base of the pot too is extremely important if it's too thin the pot will collapse later and when the pots are stacked in the kiln this could cause a real disaster if the base is too thick the pot will dry unevenly and that leads to the park cracking [Music] patty can throw nearly 200 medium-sized pots in a day but here's a piece that takes a week to complete it begins in the usual way with a ball of clay slapped down in the center of the wheel a touch of his fingers and the pot begins to rise brings it up on the inside and shapes it with a rib [Music] and it's ready it's put carefully aside to dry out of it after two days it has reached a stage called leather hard which means that it has set and dried to the point where it can be cut or drawn on of the pencil and the edges of the marks will curl into small shavings and not crumble away it goes back on the wheel upside down and is held in place with lumps of fresh clay then a small hole is opened in the base and is raised up into a cone when the cone is completed the pieces put away for another four or five days now a little bit of surgery and a few sections are removed now what you do with it well I'll tell you you get a ladder climb on the roof and put it on top of your house and it would prevent jack doors from nesting in your chimney when the pots are thrown but taken to the drying rooms where they will remain for five or six weeks there's no glass in the windows here so that the reserved free circulation of air it's important that the pots dry out slowly and evenly before they go to the kiln and of course different size pots take different lengths of time to dry in winter brassieres have to be lit here sometimes to keep out Frost which could wreak an entire batch in a few hours then comes the day when the pots have to be moved into the kiln for the next stage of the process firing there are days in the drying room are over and the stacking of the pots in the kiln begins the standard flowerpots go up bottom under built-up row-by-row the ornamental pots with our curved shapes must go on top it takes up to two days to fill the kiln it's 15 feet wide and 10 feet high and can take 20,000 pots stacking them is an art in itself the heat must reach all the pots evenly and allowances must be made for the fact that the pots will expand at first as they're exposed to the heat and later contract this is their downdraft type of kiln and the heat is sucked down past the pots and out through holes in the tiles and the floor on Wednesday when the kiln is full James pear mixes up a mortar from yellow marl clay to brick up the doorway because no normal door could withstand the heat from the series of cold fires which would be lit all around the walls of the killer lay between three and four tons of coal will be needed the ball has made a fire bricks because the temperature inside the kiln will rise to nearly 1,200 degrees centigrade 12 times hotter than boiling water this kiln is a beehive type replacing the older bottleneck killers and this one the fires are lit around the walls the heat is drawn into the kiln and rises to the roof is then taken down through the pots in a downdraft and finally the hot air is ducted out through a chimney it's very important to let the heat build up slowly and evenly and ashes are being raked out or new coal added it must be done with great care so the temperature doesn't drop suddenly [Applause] Willie Cogley is the expert on the firing of the kiln and he will be on duty now day and night until the fire has transformed the dull gray clay into the warm and rich colors of the finished pot now it's Friday night and the fires have been burning for more than two days and nights and Willie Cogley is still on duty [Music] [Music] Oh [Music] Monday morning if you are feeling the effects of a late night last night there is no better way to get rid of it and by emptying the kiln even though everything is cooled down by pottery standards it's still very hot by human standards in the old days Karlie's bridge pottery used to make drainage pipes and other articles of that sort but this size of pottery cannot cope with the work required for that kind of commercial operation transport charges are high and breakages in transit very costly okay this is really a place for the skilled handmade craft and in order to survive in this commercial age Karlie's have taken on agencies for plastic pots and bitumen pots for nursery men and gardeners and so the craft of the Potter can survive it's like the recording giants using the profits from the sale of Pop Records to finance the recordings of the great classical orchestras and with Patty Murphy only the best will do passed rejected much of the output of Charlie's bridge pottery goes to market by a Kilkenny design but people come from near and far to select their parts here at the pottery the process of making a flower pot is so fascinating in itself that it's easy to forget what the point of the exercise really is to make a container for a plant and to sell it some people come to the pottery with a truck and buy 200 300 500 pots others are commercial growers who might talk in thousands who knows what future these pots are going to have tomatoes in the greenhouse geraniums on a patio coordinates of good products Jackson Owens and Tony Sutton planned the commercial ventures that will make sure that the craft of the Potter will not die out Patty Murphy loves his craft and doesn't want to do anything else with his life he has tried to teach apprentices the skills that were handed down to him but so far no one has shown any great fondness for the work as patty says that's a class of a sin to see that craft dying of because there's nobody to follow me because I am the last of the platters attached to defend but paddy himself has no intention of retiring he's going to go on making beautiful things on his potter's wheel but I can see meself making putts for number 20 or 25 years I don't see why not when my great grandfather made Pat sunny nearly 90 years of it which he did [Music] you

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Views: 89,929

Rating: 4.9352517 out of 5

Keywords: Hands, RTÉ, documentary, Ireland, Éire, Irish, Wexford, Enniscorthy, Potter, Potters, Pottery, Potteries, pot, clay, Carley, Carley's Bridge, tradition, craft, kiln, bricks, pot making

Id: Rh9zoAQMTTg

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 16 2016