Henry Clay

In November 1772 a Birmingham japanner asked the Crown for a monopoly on something that sounds like a joke. Henry Clay wanted the sole right to make roofs for coaches and sedan chairs, panels for rooms, doors and cabins of ships, bookcases, screens, chimney pieces, tables, tea trays and tea chests, all of them “in paper”.

It was not a joke. It made him one of the richest men in Birmingham.

Baskerville’s workshop

Clay learned his trade in one of the most inventive workshops in the town. W. C. Aitken, who wrote the history of the industry in 1866, says Clay was “in early life an apprentice to the celebrated John Baskerville”, who was then in the japanning business. The Victoria County History is a little more cautious: both Clay and his later partner, Gibbins or Gibbons, “worked for Baskerville for several years”. No indenture or date has been found.

Japanning was Europe’s answer to the lacquerware arriving from Asia. Craftsmen laid coat after coat of hard varnish on a surface, baked each one in a stove, painted and gilded it, and polished it to a deep, glassy black. Baskerville made his first fortune this way, before he ever printed a book, and the money paid for his type. When Lady Shelburne visited his estate at Easy Hill in May 1766, she found that Mrs Baskerville had “chiefly the management” of the japanning business, and she bought some. The next morning she went to see “the making of buckles, papier mâché boxes” elsewhere in the town.

So papier mâché was nothing new in Birmingham. William Hutton credited John Taylor’s works with the painted paper snuff box. But that was papier mâché in its literal sense, “chewed paper”: pulp pressed into a mould. It made good small boxes. It did not make anything large or strong.

Paper as strong as wood

Clay’s idea was to stop pulping. Instead, as Aitken describes it, he pasted whole sheets of soft, absorbent paper one on top of another over a metal “core” of the shape he wanted, building up a laminate. Dried in a hot stove, soaked in oil, planed smooth, varnished and stoved again and again, the result was hard and rigid. Clay said it could be sawn, planed or turned like wood, and that once japanned it could be brought to “the highest polish by friction with the human hand”.

His patent, number 1027, was granted on 20 November 1772. Its list of uses shows his ambition: not trinkets, but coach roofs, furniture and fittings for houses and ships. In 1778 he added a patent for japanned paper buttons, “with or without shanks of metal or catgut”, and he took out more for buttons in 1786 and 1790 and for carriage and furniture panels in 1792.

The works in Newhall Street

Clay’s factory stood at 19 Newhall Street, in the new streets on the north-west side of the town. At its height, Aitken says, 300 people worked there, a big workforce for Georgian Birmingham. The process he describes needed many hands, because pasting, stoving, planing, varnishing, painting, gilding and polishing were all separate stages.

The goods were luxuries. Trays and “waiters” in black and gold, tea caddies, card and dressing tables, screens and cabinet panels were made for fashionable houses, and coach panels for carriage builders. “His profits were enormous,” Aitken wrote, and he “amassed a princely fortune”.

Covent Garden and the court

To sell to the rich, Clay needed to be in London. By about 1785 he had a house in King Street, Covent Garden, which the Victoria County History says served “commercial as well as personal purposes”: home, showroom and warehouse in one. A tray now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is stamped “CLAY KING ST COVT GARDEN”.

Royal favour followed. According to Aitken, Clay won it with “a judicious present” of a papier-mâché sedan chair for the queen, along with a set of pier tables painted with copies of Guido Reni. By the 1790s Clay was calling himself “Japanner to His Majesty”, and later to the Prince of Wales as well.

In 1790 he was High Sheriff of Warwickshire, an honour usually given to landed gentlemen. John Taylor, the button and japanning magnate, had held it before him. A man who made his money from varnished paper now led the county’s ceremonial and legal business for a year.

An inventive mind

Clay did not stop at trays. In 1796, now styled “esquire”, he patented a cart for carrying and tipping coal, lime, manure and rubble. In 1798 he patented a way of saving the water lost when boats passed through canal locks, a pressing problem for Birmingham’s new canals. Aitken says the lock was meant to save half the water.

His factory, though, was past its peak. By 1802, Aitken says, the workforce had fallen to fewer than a hundred. Rivals had moved into the trade once his first patent ran out: Small and Son, Guest, Chopping and Bill, who also began making plain “blanks” for other japanners to decorate.

Henry Clay died in 1812. His will was proved in London on 9 July that year. He was reputedly worth £80,000.

The trade he made

The industry outlived him by a century. In 1816 Jennens and Bettridge began business, and for decades they were the most celebrated papier-mâché makers in Britain. Their decorators added pearl-shell inlay, patented by George Souter in 1825; later makers pressed pulp into metal moulds and steamed their blanks for strength. Jennens and Bettridge trained decorative painters, several of whom went on to work in stained glass at Hardman’s. Papier-mâché armchairs were among Birmingham’s exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Aitken, writing in 1866, called papier mâché “a speciality of industry for which Birmingham has been long and deservedly famous”. Nowhere else, he claimed, had made such good material. It all went back to sheets of paper pasted over an iron core in Newhall Street.