glass and metalwork. The Gazette was Victorian to the core. As I flicked through its back copies I realised that here was a journal of real significance to the last gasp of the industrial revolution and that it should not be allowed to die, even though changing times dictated that it must have a new look and name. It came into being by amalgamation with the magazine Pottery and Glass in 1879, just as Mr Gladstone was about to embark on the second of his four terms. For the next 15 years it was the outspoken supporter of the Grand Old Man's free trade policies, and the voice of the most visually entrancing and traditional of manufacturing industries. It mixed politics, industry and art unashamedly. If The Times was 'the Thunderer' of the daily press, the voice of the PG was just as confident in its specialist role as the monthly guardian of industrial aesthetics. For the PM, it was a guide to another world for which he had an instinctive understanding. The Lambeth Pottery, heir to the earlier glories of Fulham, just across the river from the Houses of Parliament, was at the hub of the Arts and Crafts movement. Sir Henry Doulton, son of the founder, had made the great Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876 his world showcase, and George Tinworth's terracotta reproduction of the famous marble 'America',

designed by John Bell for the Albert Memorial, was the pièce de resistance. It was the largest terracotta ever to be fired to that date and it embodied not just the spirit of the age but the essence of the journal that would represent it. Tinworth, described by Ruskin as 'full of fire and zealous faculty', may have been the gladiator of that industrious scene. But it was the entire group of artist potters who came from the next-door Lambeth Art School led by the indomitable Mr Sparkes, working on more modest compositions and often with salt glazes designed for the stone pipes of the first drains and sewers, who captivated the great man - the Barlow sisters, Hannah and Florence, Mary Butterton, Mary Capes, Mark V.Marshall, Emily J.Edwards, Elise Simmance, but none more important than Frank Butler, the deaf-mute artist whose stoneware was, and remains to the present day, the most masterly of Lambeth wares. Listening to today's political debates, it is instructive to think of Gladstone taking a nightly walk to the other bank of the Thames to visit the potters at their work, to the firm regard and respect that he acquired for the young Frank Butler's work, and to ponder that he could go on to hold an open-air audience of a hundred thousand or more spellbound with stories of the brilliant