John Philip Elers

Early life

Elers was born in Utrecht, the son of Martin Elers, a German living in Amsterdam, who married in 1650 a daughter of Daniel van Mildert; he had a sister married to Sir William Phipps, and a brother David. There was an uncle selling ceramics in London, and Martin Elers was involved in that business from the mid-1670s. John Philip Elers and his brother had some technical training in Cologne, and then are thought to have moved to England in the 1680s. They were in business in Fulham by about 1690, making stoneware.

Potter

The Elers discovered a fine red clay at Bradwell in Staffordshire - suitable for producing red ware in imitation of the oriental red pottery which the East India companies imported into England. Around 1690, Elers settled in Bradwell Wood, near Burslem, a secluded spot, where he established a factory. The products were stored in Dimsdale, about a mile away, and the buildings were said to be connected by a speaking tube; the pottery was sold by David Elers in London, at his shop in the Poultry. Their speciality was a red unglazed pottery, chiefly teapots, with slight raised ornamentations of an oriental character executed with stamps.

Simeon Shaw, in his work History of the Staffordshire Potteries (1829), made much of the commercial secrecy employed by the Elers brothers in their Burslem pottery; Shaw relied on local oral tradition. He wrote that they employed the stupidest workmen they could obtain; and an idiot to turn the wheel. At last Josiah Twyford and John Astbury discovered the secret, the latter by feigning idiocy. More prosaically, the Elers brothers became the targets of legal action by John Dwight, also of Fulham, who had a monopoly of stoneware. They set up in Staffordshire in the period 1691 to 1693, but also kept a London outlet, and a works in Vauxhall. They settled with Dwight by taking out a license that ran to 1698.

Elers left Bradwell, and became connected with the glass manufactory at Chelsea, where he assisted in the manufacture of soft-paste porcelain. Subsequently he moved to Dublin, where he set up a glass and china shop.

Death and family

Elers married Miss Banks, by whom he was father of Paul Elers, who was educated for the law, and married Mary, the daughter and heiress of Edward Hungerford of Blackbourton Court, Oxford. He died in 1781, aged 82, leaving by her, among other children, Maria, the wife of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and mother of Maria Edgeworth, the novelist. There is a medallion portrait of John Philip Elers done by Wedgwood, from a painting in the possession of the family, and there are two small mezzotint portraits of Paul Elers and his wife, engraved from the life by Butler Clowes.