From ODNB News: July 2025
On a visit to Staffordshire on 5 June 1925, King George V granted the title and status of a city upon the federation of six towns (Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, and Tunstall) which constituted the county borough of Stoke-on-Trent, and which were at the centre of the industrial district known as the Potteries.
Over 120 lives recorded in the ODNB are known to have had personal connections with the six towns, whether by birth, education, or residence, and many more were linked in other ways to the wider Potteries district. Twenty such lives are highlighted in this month’s update:
 John Lightfoot (1602–1675), Hebraist and biblical scholar, born in Stoke-on-Trent, went on to become a pioneer of modern Hebrew scholarship, displaying ‘an archaeological, historical, philological, and even anthropological understanding of the biblical past’. |
 Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), master potter, was born in Burslem into a family which had a long connection with Staffordshire pottery. He became a leading innovator in the pottery industry, with close connections with artistic and scientific networks in the midlands. In 1769 he established the celebrated Etruria works, on the outskirts of Stoke. Wedgwood was ‘the most innovative of English potters and, in his time, the most enlightened’. His epitaph stated: 'He converted a rude and inconsiderable Manufactory into an elegant Art and An important part of the National Commerce'. |
 Josiah Spode (1755–1827), potter and merchant, born at Stoke-on-Trent, belonged liked Wedgwood to a family of potters, and entered the family firm. Like Wedgwood, he was adept at marketing, establish an outlet in London to promote the Spode bone china. ‘He was perhaps the most successful bone china manufacturer of the early nineteenth century’. |
 Hugh Bourne (1772–1852), founder of the Primitive Methodist church, son of a farmer and wheelwright in the parish of Stoke-on-Trent, was a co-organizer of a revivalist camp meeting on Mow Cop, near Harriseahead, north of Stoke, in 1807, out of which the new denomination was formed. Its first formal meeting took place in Tunstall in 1811. |
 Peter DeWint (1784–1849), landscape painter, was born in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, the son of a physician in practice in the Potteries. Rather than follow his father into medicine, he studied art and established a reputation for his paintings of the English countryside. |
 Sir Henry Doulton (1820–1897), pottery manufacturer, the son of a London manufacturer of functional brown stoneware products, developed an interest in art pottery, and established a business in Burslem producing some of the finest hand-painted china of the time. |
 Dinah Maria Craik [née Mulock] (1826–1887), writer, born at Hartshill, near Stoke-on-Trent, received an early education at a private academy nearby at Newcastle under Lyme. She moved to London where she became a governess and wrote for a living. ‘Her best-known novel, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), is the archetypal story of a poor boy who makes good through honesty, initiative, and hard work.’ |
 Henry Faulds (1843–1930), general practitioner and developer of fingerprinting, born in Scotland, became a medical missionary in Japan where he observed the impressions of fingerprints left by potters on the rims of ancient pottery, and recognized the possibilities for identifying criminals. He settled in Stoke-on-Trent in 1892, where he was in medical practice for thirty years and was police surgeon for the Potteries district. |
 Thomas William Twyford (1849–1921), sanitary ware manufacturer, born in Hanley, the son of an earthenware manufacturer, assumed control of the family firm after his father’s death. From 1879 he developed a range of sanitary ware, manufactured from 1887 at new works built at Cliffe Vale, Stoke, where he manufactured robust fireclay sanitary ware, used widely in public places. |
 Edward John Smith (1850–1912), merchant seaman and master of RMS Titanic, was born at Hanley, the son of a potter, and was educated at the British School, Etruria, established and maintained by Wedgwood firm, before becoming an ordinary sailor and subsequently captain for the White Star Line. He went down with his ship in the disaster of 1912. |
 Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge (1851–1940), physicist, born at Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent, had his early education at a local dame school, subsequently going on to study in London, and becoming principal of the new University of Birmingham in 1900. He was known for his work on x-rays and atoms, and radio waves. |
%20Arnold.jpg) (Enoch) Arnold Bennett (1867–1931), writer, was born at Hope Street, Burslem, the son of a solicitor who had begun his working life as a potter. After education in Burslem and Newcastle under Lyme, he moved to London where he began the series of novels on life in the Potteries which made his name as an author. A prolific and successful writer, he prided himself on his professionalism, and ‘profited in most senses of the word from the fact that his career coincided with the pre-eminence of the printed word in cultural life.’ |
 Eleanor Constance Lodge (1869–1936), historian and college head, born at Hanley, was the younger sister of Oliver Lodge. Educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme and at Oxford, she became a noted medieval historian, publishing on English rule in Gascony. |
 Reginald Joseph Mitchell (1895–1937), aircraft designer, was born at Butt Lane, near Stoke-on-Trent, and attended schools in Longton and Hanley before serving an apprenticeship at a locomotive engineering firm in Stoke. Moving to the Supermarine Aviation Works at Woolston, Southampton, he established a reputation as ‘the foremost aircraft designer in Britain’, best remembered for Spitfire single-seat fighter, designed between 1934 and 1936. Mitchell’s Spitfire ‘provided RAF squadrons with a fighter capable of matching the most formidable German aircraft for the duration of the hostilities’. |
 Clarice Cliff (1899–1972), ceramic designer and art director, born at Tunstall, the daughter of an iron moulder, and attended elementary school in Tunstall, then served apprenticeships while attending evening classes at Tunstall School of Art. Her brightly coloured geometrical patterns in art deco style for the Newport Pottery were an immediate success and remained in production until 1963. ‘Her major talent was perhaps not as a design originator, but lay in her ability to assemble a range of pottery which captured the mood of the period and the imagination of the public.’ |
 Susan Vera [Susie] Cooper (1902–1995), potter, was born at Stansfield, near Burslem, and attended school in Hanley and evening classes at Burslem School of Art. She made her career as a designer in the Potteries, setting up in business on her own account aged twenty-seven. Over her lifetime she designed about 4500 patterns and 500 new shapes. She became ‘a Potteries heroine— one of the very few women to own, manage, and design for her own potworks.’ |
 Sir Stanley Matthews (1915–2000), footballer, was born at Hanley, the son of a barber, developed into an outstanding schoolboy footballer at elementary schools in Hanley, and aged seventeen signed as a professional with Stoke City beginning a long playing career until his retirement aged 50. Never cautioned or sent off, ‘this modest loner not only became emblematic of his birthplace but also came to exemplify the good name of English football wherever the sport was played.’ |
 John [Jack] Ashley, Baron Ashley of Stoke (1922–2012), politician, born in Lancashire, began his working life in a copper smelting plant, and was a trade union organizer. He was elected MP for the safe Labour seat of Stoke on Trent South in 1966 and was destined for office until in 1967 a routine operation resulted in total deafness. Subsequently he gained a ‘justified reputation as a parliamentary campaigner for the disabled, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized’. He retired from the House of Commons in 1992, when he was made a life peer, as Baron Ashley of Stoke. |
 John Barrington Wain (1925–1994), writer and poet, born at Stoke-on-Trent the son of a dentist, grew up at Penkhull and went to school at Newcastle under Lyme. His publications included a biography of Samuel Johnson to whom, as a fellow north-midlander, he brought a special understanding. In the 1950s he belonged to the group of nine poets known as the Movement and was associated with the so-called Angry Young Men. His novel The Contenders (1959), set in a Staffordshire town, is thought to have drawn on his early life in Stoke. |
 Ian Fraser [Lemmy] Kilmister (1945–2015), bass guitarist and singer, was born at Haywood Hospital, Burslem, and brought up first in Newcastle under Lyme before moving with his mother to Anglesey. He achieved success in the bands Hawkwind and then Motörhead, and while associated with hard-partying stereotypes, ‘his music was fiercely intelligent and deeply political’. |