Description:Pottery factory interior with a view of a jiggering workshop. The picture includes the caption "Jolliers Making Saucers and Plates" but this process is normally known as jiggering. The jiggerers are making plates and saucers and the mouldrunners are supplying them with moulds.
The plates and saucers are being made on a jigger. A flat piece of clay is placed on the rotating mould and a levered profile tool is brought down upon it. The mould shapes the eating surface of the plate as the profile tool shapes the reverse. These machines are semi-automatic. The rotation of the wheel is powered but the levering arm for the profile tool is manual.
Taken at Hudson & Middleton China Ltd., which was part of, or based at Sutherland China, Sutherland Road, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent.
Terminology
The terms jolleying and jiggering are often used to describe the same thing.
Jolleying is the older of the two terms and has regularly been used to describe any pottery making using rotating moulds and profile tools.
However, large sections of the pottery industry have made distinctions between the two terms. These seem dependant on whether hollow or flat ware is being made.
Jolleying - where the profile tool forms the using side of the ware, such as the inner suface of a cup.
Jiggering - where the mould forms the using side of the ware, such as the upper surface of plates and saucers.
Taken from the Gladstone Pottery Museum Photographic Collection.
This photograph is part of the collections at Stoke-on-Trent Museums.