Collectables 2: Carr's Ink Stoneware bottles

Daniel and I bought these two stoneware ink bottles in Risby at one of the monthly fairs held in the Village Hall. It is rare to find ink bottles like this with their labels intact, and even rarer to find two the same.

As the label proclaims, Carr's were based in New Southgate in London. So I thought I would do some digging and see if I could find anything out about them - and, sure enough, there they are, listed in the Post Office London Directory of 1914 as a blacking and leather polish manufacturer, still in business thirty years after they began production of our ink bottles.

Blacking was essentially shoe polish which came in either liquid or paste form and was first manufactured for exclusive use by the British army. It soon caught on amongst the general populace and blacking manufacturers proliferated, making products for use on saddles as well as shoes.

Charles Dickens, at the age of 12, worked in a blacking factory owned by two brothers, Thomas and Jonathan Warren, which they'd founded at the end of the eighteenth century. The factory was based in "a crazy, tumbledown house with rotten floors and a staircase” near Hungerford Stairs, close by the stinking Thames. For ten hours a day, six days a week, Dickens pasted labels onto the individual pots of blacking. In return for his efforts he received six shillings per week, about £12.50 in modern currency. This is how miserable he was:

“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into the companionship of common men and boys..The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in…was passing away from me, never to be brought back, cannot be written.”

The Warren company's biggest competitor was Day and Martin of High Holborn and sometime in the 1830s they were taken over by them. (Dickens had left by now, escaping his drudgery soon after it began in 1824). Day and Martin was in turn bought out by Carr's, the makers of our bottles, in 1923.

So, in effect, Charles Dickens worked for the company that made our ink bottles! If only he'd continued hanging out with those 'common men and boys' instead of becoming a celebrated novelist it could have been him slapping on our labels...

It turns out that Carr Day and Martin are still active - as manufacturers of leather care products including saddle soap, polishes and oils. Or, more poetically, Canter Mane & Tail Conditioner, Gallop Shampoo and Vanner & Prest Hoof Oil. Here is their website:

http://www.carrdaymartin.co.uk/

It seems they no longer make ink now that they are catering to an important and, no doubt, lucrative equestrian niche - considering the downturn they must have experienced with the advent of the motor car in the early twentieth century it is rather encouraging that they have re-invented themselves in this way.

In the twenty-first century it is ink that has become redundant, along with the cart horse. Here am I, tapping away at my keyboard as opposed to scratching away with my quill or my Parker pen...

Carr's have another interesting link to Dickens. The protracted law case at the heart of Dickens's Bleak House was directly inspired by the blacking company he used to work for. Charles Day (of Day and Martin, now Carr Day and Martin) died in 1836 and the court examination of his will went on until 1854 - for nearly TWENTY years. Dickens refers to the case directly in his preface to the novel:

At the present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. 

There must have been some money in that blacking business...

The labels on Carr's ink bottles tell us that the ink initially appears bright blue but quickly darkens to a deep and permanent black. This seems quaintly exciting but also rather pointless.

As there are entire books written solely about Ink Bottles - which were often made of glass rather than stoneware - I won''t pretend to any great knowledge here except to say that these, I have learnt, are called master bottles. In other words, they are large rather than small. They date from around 1885.