Bill Walker’s journey with Wade Heath & Co. Ltd began in 1940, when Britain was gripped by war and a 14-year-old boy walked through the factory gates for the first time. Now, at 100 years old, Bill recalls a remarkable career that would span over four decades and see him rise from office clerk to Commercial Manager of one of Stoke-on-Trent’s most beloved potteries.
“I started in the office at 14,” Bill remembers. “And then I went right through the factory.” It was 1940, and as the war went on, young Bill found himself taking on responsibilities far beyond his years. When older workers left for military service, the teenager stepped up. “I couldn’t go because I’d had a mastoid operation and they wouldn’t pass me,” he explains. Left deaf in one ear, Bill was deemed unfit for service, but Wade Heath needed him.
An interview with Bill Walker in the Evening Sentinel just before his retirement in 1985
The wartime years brought unique challenges. According to a 1985 newspaper article from the Evening Sentinel, Bill’s duties included fire-watching on lonely night patrols of the factory during blackouts. “During the war, they had asked somebody to check what was going on,” Bill recalls. “We’d got bottle ovens, we got five. I had to climb up every day and answer the phone at four o’clock to the government to say everything was all right.”
What did he yearn for during those long, dark nights? “A free plateful of bacon and eggs,” the newspaper reported. Food rationing was severe, and Bill raised his own pigs and chickens to supplement meagre rations.
But the young man proved capable. Over the years, Wade switched him between departments, from clay preparation to decorating departments. “They used to keep switching me around, so I knew everything about pottery,” Bill explains. “I knew about the clay, I knew about the kilns, the gloss, decorating, and even then, I come onto the costing of it. I used to do all the costing of the pottery.”
Wade beer steins with hinged lids, estimate £15 – £30
The Bottle Ovens
Working with the old bottle ovens was dangerous work. Bill remembers one particularly tense confrontation: “One day we were with the Placers, and it was very, very hot to draw. They said, ‘it’s too hot and we’re not going to draw ’em.’ I said, ‘I want them drawing.’ They said, ‘we are not gonna do ’em.’ I said, ‘well, I will.'”
Bill and the management team climbed to the top of the oven in sweltering heat. “When you go to the top of that top, believe me, it was bloody hot,” he recalls with a laugh. The pottery was needed, and the job got done. “We usually had the ale between all of us but that day, it was just management”.
Later, Wade modernised, replacing the bottle ovens with continuous kilns. But even these could be treacherous. “You had to go in and clear it out and it was red hot,” Bill says. “You could only stay in that oven – it was about a thousand degrees – about two or three minutes to get the stuff out to clear it.”
Meeting Joan
It was at Wade that Bill met his wife, Joan, who worked in the decorating department. “She was in charge of the girls there, looking after them,” Bill says. Joan was a gifted artist whose watercolours still hang in Bill’s room, one even painted when she was just eight years old.
“She was very clever,” Bill says fondly, gesturing to the paintings. “That church there was done by memory.” Joan eventually left Wade after falling out with management, but by then, she and Bill had already connected. They would marry and have a son and two granddaughters.
Life at Wade
Wade selection of Collectors novelty ware, estimate £20 – £40
The factory fostered a family atmosphere. The newspaper article mentions Christmas stoppages when “everyone had a singsong on the way back” and company-sponsored bus trips, including one memorable journey to Brighton that “went on until Monday.”
Bill also recalls Kenneth Lowes, a managing director who surprised him. “When I was very young, 15 or 16, he was coming around the factory and he saw me smoking,” Bill says with a grin. “I put my cigarette up my sleeve so he couldn’t see. He talked and talked until it burned me. He says, ‘that serves you right.’ Then he opened up a 20-pack of Players, took a fag out, give it to me and said, ‘smoke it on your own time.'”
Bill’s dedication earned him recognition. Over his career, he had thirteen company cars, starting with an Anglia in 1969. “They bought me a car nearly every two years,” he remembers.
Retirement and Reflection
In the 1980s, Joan insisted Bill retire at 60, five years earlier than required. “I said, ‘I can’t afford to retire.’ She said, ‘we can. You’ve got to retire,'” Bill recalls. He devoted his retirement to music and gardening.
Looking back at his photograph in the 1985 Evening Sentinel – showing him with Managing Director Jack Johnston examining Wade products – Bill reflects on a lifetime in the Potteries. “I was at Wade all the time and I never moved,” he says. “Eventually, at the end, I ended up in charge of everything.”
Having just turned 100 on December 1st, Bill recently decided to part with his collection of Wade and consign it to Potteries Auctions, to be auctioned Thursday 11th December.
This auction will begin 10am and will accept in-person and online bidding.
View the catalogue here