I began writing back in my early teens. My early efforts weren’t very good and I put them in the bin long ago, but by then the bug had definitely bitten me and I’ve been writing ever since. By the late 1980s, I had turned my attention to local history and my first book was published in 1992. My latest work, ‘Farmers and Potters : A History of Pre-Industrial Stoke on Trent’, came out in 2002. Why the Potteries happened? It was in the mid-’90s shortly after starting work at Gladstone Pottery Museum in Stoke on Trent, that I considered writing a history of the area of England now known as the Potteries. | "Following the destinies of the locals from age to age proved to me that there was much more to the history of Stoke-on-Trent than mere pits and pots.." | |
However, dealing with the public on a day to day basis, made me realise that though many people had a reasonable grasp of the history of the Potteries, the reasons as to how and why the industry developed here in the first place were less clearly defined. Spotting a more rewarding line of historical research than the wider study I had originally planned, I wrote a book dealing with the earliest history of the region to the 1800s. The history.... I decided to start at the beginning - so to speak! How the coal deposits came to be here, and how Bronze Age man decided to settle here. In fact, the growth of the early settlements was a very gradual affair and ultimately did depend on their location to the reserves of coal and clay that lay just below the surface. Early man discovered these and exploited them, though by no means thoroughly. Even the industrious Romans only scratched the surface, though they were engaging in small scale potting and iron working. I followed the history of the area through the centuries that follow as Angles, Vikings and Normans left their mark on the area; and numerous small settlements developed, dominated on one side by a castle and on the other by an abbey. From wars to independent farmers Life was feudal, ordered and quiet until a series of plagues, and wars, the Tudor dissolution of the monasteries, and the rise of independent farmers, changed society and the way the land was worked. Across the country, improvements in agriculture gave this new farming class the means to indulge in supplementary trades.  | | Gary Cooper |
I found it particularly fascinating to examine these changes via certain buildings - for me, profiles of the 17th century Ford Green Hall (which is still standing in the Smallthorne district of Stoke on Trent) and the Leigh family Cottage (where the "witch" Molly Leigh resided) proved to more tied in to the natural history of the area than one might have guessed. In North Staffordshire, it became clear - for those local communities situated over the clay and coal reserves, pottery and mining were obvious choices to exploit. Thus the crafts developed that would eventually become the great industries that shaped the region. Writing the book was an education. Following the destinies of the locals from age to age proved to me that there was much more to the history of Stoke-on-Trent than mere pits and pots - and that the rise of these industries was far more complex than we are often led to believe. By Gary Cooper | 
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