The Story of Rockingham Pottery 1826-42, by the Leader brothers

 Thursday 27^th October 2011

The Leader brothers displayed their love of Rockingham Pottery in their talk on Thursday night. Leo Leader, the eldest, did the talking and was prompted from time to time by his brother Malcolm who also operated the two slide projectors simultaneously. He explained how the pottery came to be at Swinton, this was mainly because all the ingredients required were there, water coal and clay and records show that pots were made on that site from 1745. The pottery passed through several owners including Leeds Pottery until it came into the hands of the Brameld family. He explained that the pottery got its name because it was for some time  under the patronage of the Earls Fitzwilliam, indirect descendants of the Marquesses of Rockingham, who were the major landowners in the area, and lived just a few miles away. He showed us many pictures of the beautiful and intricate pottery produced by the factory over the sixteen years of its existence, much of this was commissioned by royalty and a lot of the remaining pieces are still owned by the queen. He showed us a slide of one of the famous pair of Rhinoceros vases which were the largest single-piece porcelain objects in existence unique at that time, they were elaborate displays of  the artistic and practical capabilities of the pottery, and one of these is now in the Victoria and Albert museum. Unfortunately the Brameld family were more artists than business men and after being bailed out several times by the Earls of Fitzwilliam, they finally went bankrupt in 1842 and closed the pottery down. The talk was informative and very well presented by the brothers.

Treeton Local History Group, Thursday 25^th August 2011

Placenames and Surnames by Mr Ray Battye

Talking about place names, Ray explained that it is possible to tell something of the history of a place by its name. Going through History starting at 600 BC when Britain was largely Celtic, through Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and Norman invasions, he showed how these peoples and their languages have influenced us and formed the mongrel language that we own as English today and have left their mark on our place names. There are many Celtic place names still in use; one example was pen which is a Celtic word for hill and forms part of many places. The Romans language gave us many words, one well used was Caester meaning castle which has become Chester and caster as part of some place names. The Saxons presence around the Home Counties was obvious from the old counties of Middlesex (middle Saxons) Essex (east Saxons) Wessex (west Saxons) – now existing only in Thomas Hardy novels, and Sussex (south Saxons). From the Viking we have many guttural sounding names and these are mostly in the North of the country, where their settled. Finally the Norman’s brought many French sounding place names. Our language continued to develop in this way, being a mixture of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and French until Edward the III in 1362 declared that Middle English should be our language, but it didn’t stop growing and new words are added all the time. Talking about surnames he said that originally no-one had a surname. In order to distinguish between people with the same first name several descriptions were added. Some were named from their occupation, Carpenter, Wheeler, Smith and Shepherd for example.  Some from their parents Robinson (son of Robin), in Scotland and Ireland, son became Mac or Mc. Also a place could be used to identify a person; Ray gave us a lot of example of these. He spoke very well and his talk was very interesting and informative.