Our knowledge of the existence of a factory at Chelsea before 1749 rests on the survival of two little cream-jugs of white ware moulded in the so-called ‘goat and bee’ pattern. Like some other pieces to which an early date may be assigned, these little jugs bear as a mark a rough triangle scratched in the paste (PL. E. 68), but they stand alone in the fact that beneath the triangle has been added, _before baking_, in a scrawly hand, ‘Chelsea, 1745.’[210] Thanks to them we are able, upon material evidence, to put back the origin of English porcelain for five years at least.[211] In the year 1747, we are told in the _London Tradesman_, that at a house at Greenwich, and at another at Chelsea, _the undertakers had been for some time trying_ to imitate the porcelain of China and Dresden, and in the same year a number of Staffordshire potters migrated to London to find work in the Chelsea factory (Shaw’s _Rise and Progress of the Staffordshire Potteries_). In a London paper of December 1749 there is an advertisement of the sale of a freehold messuage in ‘Great China Row, Chelsea.’ This was no mere misprint--China for Cheyne--(the two words were pronounced alike at that time), for we come across the same spelling in more than one instance at a later date.[212] There is a real confusion of the two names, arising probably from the interest taken in the porcelain factory lately established in the neighbourhood; and this very confusion is good evidence of the extent to which the china question was occupying people’s minds at the time. Two months later, in January 1750, we hear for the first time of Mr. Charles Gouyn, but he is already, at that date, the _late_ proprietor and chief manager of the ‘Chelsea House.’ Of this Gouyn, presumably the founder of the works, we know nothing. He was probably of French or Belgian origin.[213] Of Gouyn’s successor, Nicholas Sprimont, we know something more. Like his contemporary Duplessis, at Sèvres, he was a silversmith, working at one time in Soho. Sprimont entered his name at Goldsmith Hall in 1742, and his mark is found on a pair of silver dishes ornamented with shells and corals now at Windsor.