The Souvenir Mug
This post is part of a series called A history of the world in 100 everyday antiques. My goal is to tell the stories of 100 “everyday antiques” that you could have in your home for under £100. This is a story about a 150 year old mug that I like to use for my coffee.
Coffee time
Since working from home has become a more permanent thing I’ve been really investing in my coffee setup.
It started with having a special old teaspoon for making my coffee (the fiddle pattern is the ideal coffee spoon, with a readymade stirring paddle at one end). Then I started getting into cups and got a little carried away…
I have a 2 year old daughter so the last year has seen a steady succession of smashed plates and cups as she gets to grips with helping in the kitchen. This is not a good time in my life to have a “favourite” cup. Or an expensive cup. I decided that what I need is a cheap, durable “genre” of cup that I could easily replace if damaged… ideally something not likely to get damaged in the first place.
Quick trip to IKEA? No. As an antique geek I should have figured out the right thing sooner. What I was looking for had been staring me in the face for years: the Victorian souvenir mug.
I’m a £10 mug
Here’s what I’m talking about. This mug was made in the 1860s by one of the large English porcelain manufacturers (probably the famous Coalport factory).:
On the side in gilded (real gold!) hand-written lettering is says “Wesleyan Bazaar, Shaw, 1864”.
Looks pretty posh right? Go into any antiques market in the country and you will probably find at least one of these souvenir mugs, if not a cabinet full of them. They were made by the hundreds of thousands throughout the second half of the nineteenth century in most of the great porcelain factories of England. And I absolutely love them.
I have realised they are the perfect solution to my coffee cup problem: they’re all of a standard design, they’re solid as anything (well, they’ve mostly done 150 years plus, so not bad) and they’re dead easy to replace, typically costing about £10.
And unlike the modern equivalent, every time you drink your coffee you get to handle a little bit of history. With a bit of research every one of these £10 souvenir mugs has a story to tell.
Victorian Stag-Dos
Souvenir mugs were churned out by porcelain factories as ‘blanks’ for decorators to make up to order with whatever writing or design the customer wanted.
And what did the upwardly mobile middle class Victorian want? Mostly to show off to their friends how wealthy and established they were in society. This was the era of the engraved silver platter, the monogrammed cutlery and the carving of pompous names on the side of public buildings… in context these mugs were a (relatively) affordable bit of personal aggrandisement.
You find everything on the side of a Victorian mug. Often they’re a snapshot of special occasions and family celebrations: Christenings, weddings, birthdays… but they’re also used by self-publicising industrialists and wealthy institutions to promote big social events like a factory opening, a new public building, an upmarket village fête or a visit by someone with an impressive title.
Here are a few more I’ve picked up over the last year:
For me they are wonderful time capsules of little moments in social history that are long forgotten. Like the Victorian version of the Stag Do t-shirt or the band tour hoodie.
It’s fun to try and explore these stories — and so much easier with a written clue on a mug than with something like a table where the history is pure speculation. The rest of this post is a little bit of the story and social context of my Wesleyan Church Bazaar mug…
PS if there are still some Wesleyans at Shaw and they read this and want their mug back then I’m very happy to restore it to its rightful place!
What’s a Wesleyan?
Stay with it, this is really interesting I promise!
The Wesleyan Church (The Methodists) emerged in Britain in the mid 1700s. It’s named after John Wesley, a clergyman who promoted a more proactive approach to Christianity. He toured the country, preaching in the open air and forming unofficial communities to “self serve” their faith without the need for the established frameworks of the Church of England. Who were understandably a bit annoyed.
The basis of Methodism (as I read it) is that supporting each other to live a good Christian life is something a community can do for itself. Core to the way of life is actively doing good deeds. The Methodists established schools, hospitals, soup kitchens. This formed the foundations of the Social Gospel, a movement that applied Christian ethics to the massive problems that emerged in the Victorian era, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality.
The Wesleyan movement took off fast and quickly came to rival the established Church of England in many communities. You can still see that even small villages in England have a Wesleyan or Methodist Chapel as well as an older C of E church.
By the time my mug was made in 1864 the Wesleyan Church was a global movement. It took off particularly in the fast growing industrial towns of England, which were under-served by the established Church of England and where the church was used as a mechanism to establish a lot of what we would now think of as the social underpinnings of the welfare state.
As seen on TV — Poldark
If you want to get a sense for how the early Methodist movement grew in working communities in England then look no further than Season 3 of Poldark. “Those Wesleyan renegades” in the 1790s are seen as fomenters the kind of working class radicalism that might lead to French-style Revolution.
Where’s Shaw and why was it a big deal?
Shaw is in Oldham, now part of Greater Manchester. In the 1860s when this mug was made, Oldham was the most productive cotton spinning town in the world.
The Wesleyan Chapel at Shaw
Shaw was exactly the sort of place where the Wesleyan Church took off. There was massive inequality (and urban poverty) brought about by industrialisation. This brought into sharp focus problems of health, education and what Dickens might call “vice”. This was just what the Methodists where all about — taking action to build schools, orphanages and hospitals. And running programmes to encourage abstinence from alcohol.
The Wesleyan church attracted rich and poor alike. And at Shaw (as suggested by this mug) there was clearly quite a lot of money sloshing around — as you can see from this modern picture of the front of of the chapel:
But 1864 was not a good year in Shaw. 1860–4 was known as the ‘Lancashire cotton famine’. Due to the American civil war there was no cotton arriving in the town to be spun. A government bill was passed to fund Keynesian style investment in public infrastructure to avoid mass unemployment. The Wesleyan Chapel at Shaw was completed in 1863, very likely as a project undertaken to create local jobs.
So it’s 1864 and you have a new Chapel… but the community is in crisis. You want to extract more cash from the wealthier locals to invest in worthy social projects. What do you do? You have a Bazaar of course.
What’s a Bazaar?
Well, normally a bazaar is the name given to the main marketplace of a town in the Middle East or India. The word was appropriated in Victorian England to give an exotic air to church fundraisers where you might be selling anything from home made cakes to the wares of local crafts-people.
I can’t find any records online about this specific Bazaar at Shaw, but luckily there are lots of contemporary descriptions of other Wesleyan Bazaars (like this one in Rushden in 1890). They often featured exciting entertainments, floral displays and all sorts of “fancy goods” for sale.
You’ll be excited to learn that there was even a guide book written in 1905 to help you put on your very own Wesleyan Bazaar. Sadly the Wolverhampton City Archives have not yet put this important document online.
My mug was probably commissioned as part of a batch to be sold at what must have been a particularly upmarket Bazaar at Shaw in 1864. The proceeds very likely helped to fund the new school that the Wesleyans at Shaw went on to open in 1870.
What happened to the Wesleyans at Shaw?
It wasn’t till 100 years after my mug was made, in 1964, that Oldham stopped being the world’s largest centre of cotton spinning.
Sadly, literally as I was writing this, the chapel has been pulled down as it was becoming unsafe and there was no funding to maintain it. Here’s a picture from google streetview:
Cool mug — what if you smash it?!
Mugs like the ones I’m using for my daily coffee have often been a prize possession handed down in families through the generations. If you know the story of the mug and particularly if you’re part of the story (like if it has your great grandmother’s name on it) then that’s a really special thing. You’d probably keep it somewhere safe. And you might not choose to drink your coffee out of it or leave it out for your 2 year old to play with.
But if these objects become disconnected from their original homes then they lose a massive part of their sentimental value.
So call me a heathen and desecrator of history if you will, but I’m happy to use 150 year old mugs for my coffee. I love them as everyday, usable antiques not as museum pieces. I think it’s a fitting tribute to their history to enjoy using them and to try and appreciate a little bit of their story.
What if they get smashed? Well I’d be sad, but I’d probably still glue them back together and use them to keep paperclips in or something… Would you feel the same preserve/re-use/recycle instinct about your IKEA mug? I bet it would be straight in the bin.
Looks a bit familiar?
You might have found the shape of these Victorian mugs a little familiar, even if you’ve never seen one. That’s because a softened version of the design has been adopted by the popular pottery brand Emma Bridgewater. Typical price of a new Emma Bridgewater mug? £22. 150 year old Victorian original? ~£10. Full disclosure, I have both. But I know which one brings me more joy.
More stories like this
Thanks so much for reading this story about an old mug! It’s a bit of an experiment so I’d really appreciate your comments and feedback.
This post is part of a series called A history of the world in 100 everyday antiques. My goal is to tell the stories of 100 “everyday antiques” that you could have in your home for under £100.
