Mr. Dillwyn, who visited the Nantgarw works in 1814, at the instigation of his friend Sir Joseph Banks, found these two men making an admirable soft-paste porcelain, remarkable for its translucency. ‘I agreed with them,’ so Mr. Dillwyn reported, ‘for a removal to the Cambrian pottery [_i.e._ to Swansea], where two new kilns were prepared under their direction. When endeavouring to improve and strengthen this beautiful body, I was surprised at receiving a notice from Messrs. Flight and Barr of Worcester, charging the parties calling themselves Walker and Beely with having clandestinely left an engagement at their works.’ Beely was in fact no other than Billingsley, the wandering artist and ‘arcanist’ who in 1774 was apprenticed to Duesbury at Derby, and had there learned the art of painting flowers on porcelain. We hear that in 1793 he was also landlord of the ‘Nottingham Arms,’ but in spite, or perhaps rather in consequence, of thus having two strings to his bow, he soon after left Derby, and for twenty years led a roving life. In 1796 he was at Pinxton, and it was here, says Mr. W. Turner (_The Ceramics of Swansea and Nantgarw_), whom I now follow, that he perfected his famous granulated frit body. Then follows an obscure period, during which we hear of Billingsley at Mansfield, and again as a china manufacturer at Torksey, in Lincolnshire. Finally, in 1808, he settled down to work at Worcester under the name of Beely. His later migrations to Nantgarw, to Swansea, and finally to Coalport, we have already referred to. Three years after Billingsley’s removal to Swansea, the manufacture of porcelain was abandoned by Mr. Dillwyn: this was in 1817, barely six years from the time when Billingsley started the Nantgarw works. It is not quite certain whether the marks that distinguish the two wares--‘Nantgarw’ above the letters ‘C. W.’ in one case, ‘Swansea’ sometimes with the addition of a trident (PL. E. 80) in the other--can always be relied on to distinguish the two factories: the former mark may have continued in use after the removal to Swansea. The paste of some of the ware made at Swansea was very different from that of Billingsley’s glassy porcelain. We know that both china-clay and steatite from the Lizard were employed here, producing a somewhat hard and opaque body.