+-Enoch Wood, Master Potter of Fountain Place. (1793-1852) | +-Edward Wood, Master Potter of Fountain Place, and Borax | Manufacturer. (1796-1882) = Elizabeth Schofield. | +-Edward Herbert Wood of Newbold Revel (1847- ) | +-A. H. Edward Wood of Browhead, co. Cumb. b. 1870. [Illustration: MAP OF BURSLEM IN 1800] CHAPTER VIII. SPODE AND BLUE PRINTING. When earthenware or salt glaze was enamelled at Hot Lane it required artists to do the work. But the eighteenth century was the age of mechanical invention, and the hand artists were continually being superseded by mechanical processes. Saddler and Green, for instance, invented the method of printing designs on top of the glaze, so that the artist had only to fill in the outline with colours. But there was something hard and crude about the effect of the on-glaze printing, which prevented it ever really competing with the best hand-painted ware. The under-glaze printing, particularly the under-glaze blue printing, was a more difficult competitor for the artist to meet; for the glaze gave a rich soft tone to the colouring matter underneath it which was partly absorbed in the biscuit ware. And if this blue printing, with which the willow pattern will be always associated, drove out the girl artists from their pleasant work on the pot-banks, yet the new decoration caused an enormous expansion in the demand for cream-coloured earthenware. From 1790 onwards “blue printed” seems to have superseded every other sort of earthenware. It was the first opportunity common folk had had of getting a decorative plate to eat off; and it made the fortunes of the Spodes, the Adamses, the Bournes, the Mintons, the Ridgways, and many another master of the good old days. As a mechanical process under-glaze printing was an unqualified success, and in course of time the artists too rediscovered their work in decorating that porcelain which, on the tables of the rich, replaced the now vulgarized earthenware. The last ten years of the eighteenth century were devoted to blue printed, but with the new century came that development of Staffordshire porcelain with which run the names of Spode, Minton and Davenport. The first Josiah Spode made no porcelain. He set the fashion in “blue printed,” and his blue printed is probably the best of its kind ever made. Born in 1733, Spode was apprenticed to Whieldon, and after leaving him about 1759 he worked for Banks of Stoke.[144] It is said of him that he dearly loved to play the fiddle, and he would go out any evening to play at public-houses for his friends. So that “ready and willing as Spode’s fiddle” became a proverb in the Potteries.