on what may be the very spot where Thomas Heath made his original Delft ware.[113] [Illustration: Vase by John Turner of Lane End. _d._ 1786. From the Stoke-on-Trent Museums.] John Turner, of Lane End, was another competitor of Wedgwood. He was almost as confirmed an experimenter, and produced a jasper ware very close on Wedgwood’s heels. He was born in 1738,[114] and started his own works at Lane End in 1762, and his chief productions were the fashionable cream colour and a cane-coloured stoneware. He was one of the first to appreciate the value of the newly discovered china stone for the cream-coloured body, and he therefore took an active part in opposing the extension of Cookworthy’s patent. Afterwards, in 1775, he joined Wedgwood in leasing some of the Cornish clay mines. A discovery of a good local clay at Green Dock, close by Longton Cemetery, led to his most characteristic production—the cane-coloured stoneware, ornamented with embossed decoration in the same colour. The material was also found very suitable for busts and statuettes. It is recorded that he could, in this material, make a most life-like representation of pie-crust, and that once, as a _tour de force_, he reproduced exactly an entire banquet with everything, from the roast beef to the custards, realistically translated into stoneware. It will be understood from this that there was room for a revival of taste in pottery. Turner’s jasper is quite different to that of Wedgwood, or of those who made it when the secret of the mixture had become known. Its ground is an unfortunate slaty blue, which does not improve the appearance of the ware, and the designs of the bas-reliefs are rococo, which is worse than neo-classical. [Illustration: THOMAS MINTON c. 1765-1836] John Turner died in 1786, and was succeeded by his two sons, John and William, who continued to produce black basalt as well as this strange jasper. Their business was ruined by the French wars, and in 1803 they were compelled to close down. John Turner, jun., became manager to Thomas Minton, then starting his historic factory in Stoke.