DATE: 1920s to 1970s PLACE: POTTERIES

Pride in the job was a top priority for old-time pottery workers who made most of their products by hand.

Before the onset of automatic processes, they practised their traditional skills as throwers, decorators, cup handlers, platemakers, oven firemen and numerous other jobs.

Some were so happy in their work that they spent a lifetime doing the same job at the same potbank. It wasn't uncommon to hear of women still at work in their 80s.

This was in spite of the dangers to health which were a daily hazard. Even in the 1950s silicosis or pneumoconiosis was a contributory cause of death among nearly 800 workers.

In the first of two features recalling the lost skills of the industry, JOHN ABBERLEY presents scenes from the potbanks in an era when craftsmanship was all in a day's work.

Hensleigh Wedgwood, a direct descendant of Josiah Wedgwood, throwing a vase on a potter's wheel in the old Etruria factory in 1930. In that year the company was preparing to celebrate the bicentenary of Josiah's birth.

Clarice Cliff, one of the best-remembered pottery designers of the 20th century, working in her studio at the Newport Pottery, Middleport, in the 1930s. Her Bizarre range of brightly decorated ware made her internationally famous.

Pottery workers at Longton carrying out a sticky job on a blunger, which mixed raw materials to the right consistency in preparation for making a clay body.

Even decorating the humble chamber pot was a work of art for this pottery paintress, seen at the Bradwell works of Arthur Wood and Son around 1970.

Millie Simms, a cup handler at the Hanley Pottery of Johnson Brothers, carrying a board of ware ready for firing. The picture was included in an exhibition in 1950 entitled The Changing Face of the Potteries.

Wedgwood chief designer Eric Owen working on a black basalt plaque of the Five Towns novelist Arnold Bennett in 1960. It was placed in Burslem as a public memorial.

Right, A pottery worker demonstrates his manual skills making a plate on a jigger. Picture from Cup and Saucer Land by the Reverend Malcolm Graham.

A saggarmaker's bottom-knocker sounds like a leg-pull to modern ears, but it was a genuine job in the pottery trade, carried out mainly by boys like these pictured in the early 1900s. Their tools knocked the bottom piece of the saggar into place.

Paintresses carry on with their work while being filmed for a television programme in the 1960s. There is no information regarding the factory where this took place. Does anyone recognise the scene or the women being filmed?

Not quite what it seems. The paintress seen in deep concentration was Kathleen Hyde, who played the role in a documentary film called Five Towns made in 1947. She later became widely known as Sentinel Woman's Editor Kath Gosling.