Investing 82
personal finance By the time of his death he had established a Wedgwood tradition : one feels he would have showed little surprise had be been told that his business would still be flourishing indeed would have greatly expanded-in two hundred years' time.
But this was not his only legacy : he and his wife, Sarah who was also his cousin-were to have many talented descendants, including Charles Darwin FRS, and the late Ralph Vaughan Williams ом to name only two out of about six hundred! None of them had to earn their living making pots, but each generation seemed to have had a sense of responsibility about the business. It had to go on.
Josiah was succeeded as head of the business by his second son, Josiah II, who lived until 1843. He did not have his father's knack of getting on well with all and sundry but must have been an interesting man. William Blake, the poet and painter, did catalogue illustrations for him, Samuel Coleridge (to whom for many years he paid a 'pension') was a devoted friend, and it is doubtful whether Charles Darwin would ever have gone on the Beagle if his uncle Josiah had not intervened on his behalf. But Josiah's comparative lack of interest in salesmanship and promotion, combined with
the trade depression following the Napoleonic Wars, had longterm effects on the fortunes of the business. Nevertheless he stuck to his post with, one feels, considerable stoicism, and he made his mark on the production side.
While Josiah I had organized the works, Josiah II began to mechanize them. He installed a steam engine to drive the mill, the clay mixers, and possibly some of the pottery machinery. But his most important contribution was in the realms of labour relations. Just as his father anticipated the demands of his customers, so Josiah II seemed to anticipate the demands of labour. Although his friends considered him austere, he was well liked by his employees (they subscribed to his election expenses when he stood for Parliament) and treated them with more than customary consideration for his day. Indeed the industrial explosions of the nineteenth or if it comes to that, the twentieth centuries never seem to have hit the Wedgwood factory, where in its whole history there has never been a strike.
As a business, however, Wedgwood declined in the time of Josiah II. In the 1830s the London showrooms were closed and many valuable records and moulds were sold or destroyed. Shortly after his death his executors sold nearly all of the first Josiah's country estate and village, retaining only the seven acres on which the works stood. This was an error of judgement, although it may have been dictated by financial necessity. For the purchaser of the neighbouring land was a coal and iron company whose growth and operations were destined within the next sixty years to cause serious mining subsidences and deposit of iron dust and dirt that cost the business many times the sale price of the land. to buy a house