Messrs Bullers’ most formidable rival in the making of insulators is the firm of Doulton’s Limited; and this last firm carry on also several other variations of the staple trade. Sir Henry Doulton (1820-97)[213] began by making sewage pipes at Lambeth. His trade increased, and he started branch works for making these things at St Helens and at Rowley Regis and Smethwick in South Staffordshire. Between 1867 and 1873, however, he diverted his attention to the more ambitious “Electric” and “Sanitary” ware, and also to the characteristic stoneware known as “Doulton’s.” This new stoneware caught the public fancy, and to it he devoted his Lambeth works. He continued to make the drain pipes at Rowley Regis, and at Burslem he bought in 1877 Pinder & Bourne’s works in Nile Street for his other manufactures. Here Doulton’s produce high-class china and earthenware as well as sanitary and electric pottery and employ nearly 1,300 hands. Sir Henry Doulton was knighted in 1887, the only potter ever so honoured, and died in 1897. In 1899 his son, Henry Lewis Doulton, converted the business into a limited company.[214] But the branch of the trade known as sanitary pottery owes most of its development in Staffordshire to Mr Thomas William Twyford. His father Thomas Twyford started making plumbers’ ware about 1860, and when he died in 1872 both the Abbey Works and the Bath Street Works in Hanley were making basins and closet-pans of an elementary kind. But no real advance took place till the eighties. In 1885 the wash-out Pedestal closets were introduced, made entirely of earthenware, and in 1889 the latest “deluge” type followed. Those who can remember the old dirty enamelled iron pans will recognize the debt that sanitary science owes to the enterprise of Twyford. All Twyford’s sanitary pottery was in 1887 concentrated at the present Cliff Vale Works, and experiments were at once set on foot for yet another branch of manufacture. This was the production of very large clay pieces coated with a smooth white surface and suitable for baths and lavatories. The common or fire clay is coated while in the plastic state with a porcelain enamel, which on firing gives a surface enamel polished as marble and more adhesive than any enamel on metal. Very large pieces are coated in this way, and the earthenware article has since 1890 been replacing alike the enamelled metal of Wolverhampton and the marble of Italy. Messrs Twyford’s chief rivals in Staffordshire are the firm of John Taylor Howson of Hanley.