I have just picked up a pretty little bone china plate from an op shop. Where can I read about bone china?

Hello,

First off Congratulations on purchasing a piece of fine handcrafetd English Bone China. Your piece was made by the "Crown Staffordshire" (Royal Staffordshire) porcelain company, which reached a peak in its quality and production c.1920-1950. They produced fine Bone China in the "neatest fashion" and were considered competitors to the mid range products by companies such as Copeland Spode, Royal Albert, Paragon China, Coalport and Even Royal Doulton. Sadly when Josiah Wedgwood and Sons went on their "buying rampage" and purchased all of the little companies, they absorbed Crown Staffordshire along with the acquisition of the Coalport China Works. The name "Crown Staffordshire" was used until the 1980s, as only a name brand line among the family of Wedgwood Companies.

The company could trace its history back to Thomas Green who was employed at a Burleigh pottery factory in 1790, he officially founded his "Churchill Works" in the fall of 1795, with full scale production of quality wares only starting at the Minerva Works (the site where Crown Staffordshire operated from until the 1950s) in the early 1820s.

A good site for reference on English Bone China (which by the way is really made with Calcined Bone Ash) would be the Spode Museum and Trust site http://www.spode.co.uk/history/history_main_new.ht... (after all Josiah Spode did "invent" the recipe for Bone China) and also the Royal Worcester Museum Site http://www.worcesterporcelainmuseum.org.uk/ .

As for information on Crown Staffordshire, I actually think the best info on them can only be found in some of the published works on English Ceramics (W.B Honey's "Old English Porcelain" is a great start, as is G. Godden's encyclopedia on English porcelain manufacturers).

I hope this helps you to not only know more about your piece, but also appreciate its history and beauty even more. Merry Christmas!

I just did a search and got 16,5000,500 results for "Bone China".

Put what you are looking for in the Web Search bar at the top right hand side of this site and there you go.