BRITAIN’S HAND-MADE GLASS

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 159, 8 July 1938, Page 12

BRITAIN’S HAND-MADE GLASS

people realise that just outside London is a factory where glass is blown in substantially the same way as it was three or four thousand years before Christ, Writes a correspondent in the Observer.

Until fifteen years ago this ancient glass works was in Tudor-street, where it had been since the year after the Great Fire.

On February 23, 1669, Samuel Pcpys on his birthday went to the Duke of York’s playhouse, “and there, finding the play begun, went homeward to the Glass House, and there showed my cousins the making of glass and had several things made with great content; and, among others, 1 had one or two singing-glasses made, which made an echo to the voice, the first that ever 1 saw; but so thin, that the very breath broke one or two of them.” He referred to the Whitefriars works, which are flourishing to-day. The miracle is that 269 years after Pepys people should still w'ant handblown glass, W'ine-glasses, glasses of amber, sea-green, amethyst, and ruby, glasses copies from Roman models, and tht innumerable rich hues used to make stained-glass windows.

When, fifteen j’ears ago, the Whitefriars—so called from the London neighbourhood to which they belonged—moved to the suburbs, they lock with them a cutting from the figtree at the old factory. It grew and flourishes now outside a structure which resembles those described in sixteenth and seventeenth century treatises on glass-blowing. To the uninitiated, everything about tht glassworks is actually beautiful, ano although strictly practical the method has the romantic interest that belongs to ancient processes. The furnace on the ground floor has been burning for three years this spring—the coal slowly shovelled in so as to maintain a steady temperature—and its eye is on the first floor standing under a hut shaped like an old well-cover, with a number of arches under which the huge pots of raw glass will stand to become molten. The pots themselves are of three shapes, the commonest like a beehive foi white glass, other shapes for coloured glass and for experiments. In a cool room on the ground floor is stored in bins the fireclay powder from Stonebride and Yorkshire. It is trodden down by bare feel to make the right consistency of clay, since no mechanical method is so successful in squeezing out the air and moisture. When made, the pots are dried for a

year in a store-house whose temperature is kept at a certain height and the moisture recorded on a chart. They are then worked up slowly to the heat of the furnace before being brought to it.

The rooms containing the ingredients for the glass are even more surprising.

1000. Years-Old Craft

The finest English glass—which in tha eighteenth century was the envy of all Europe—is flint glass, and the ingredients are sand, red lead, potash, and saltpetre, with smaller quantities of borax and arsenic. Sand is stored in more bins, but it is not like ordinary sand; it is almost as fine as powder and nearly silver. For this hand blown glass only sand frem the forest of Fontainebleau is used, as it has been for generations. The reason is that it is over 99 per cent, pure silica, and the percentage never varies through hundreds of years. When the ingerdients are made up into “batch,” ready for loading into the pots they are the colour of vivid tomato soup from the red lead, but the colour evaporates in the heat. Entirely utilitarian, but most attractive to look at, are the great barrels of “cullet” that stand ready to be mixed with the “batch.” They are small pieces of broken glass and of every shape and colour. One barrel looked as if it were filled with glittering amethysts; another as if it were full of overflowing grapes. In the great barn-like room where the actual glass is blown the men are grouped round fires, and each centre is called a “chair,” from the chair in which the glass-blower sits. The chief blower is called the gaffer, and he is helped by the servitor and the boy. There are also footmakers, and one of them who has worked in this factory for fifty-four" years rejoices in a name similar to that of the King George Windsor. Round the “chairs” the blowers go tx> and from the blaze, holding in their hands long tubes, at the end of which are “blobs” of literally molten, writhing glass. It seems miraculous to see one “blob” stretched out 80 feet, cooling as it goes, until from flame-coloured it becomes quite white and of the thinness of the bulb of a thermometer, for which it is actually intended. At other “chairs” men whirl and twirl fine glasses until they become perfect wine-glasses or jugs. The making of the coloured glass is, of course, purely a matter of chemistry, but some colours, such as amethyst, are tricky and fugitive. If left a little too long, all colour will vanish. In another room cutting is done, and in another is a museum of various rare pieces made in these works through the centuries. Here are mosaic and glass tiles, and a chalice made of three layers of glass, white with gold leaf covered with blue covered with ruby. Here is a sample of a set of seagreen wine glasses made for the Prince of Wales, engraved with the three feathers separate, as on the tomb of the Black Prince. Another glass Is engraved with the legend “Ye Princesre of Wales,” i.e.. Queen Mary, “saw me made 28th February, 1908.”