Paws Around the Potteries - An Engine called "Princess"

 Ay up, everyone!  It's me, Hanley Bear, with a Paws Around the Potteries post for Sonning's blog.  This one is about our trip at the weekend to the Etruria Industrial Museum, which includes what is left of Jesse Shirley's Bone and Flint Mill.

The museum is right next to the canal basin at Etruria, with the visitor centre up by the Caldon Canal, and the old mill and machinery below the locks on the Trent and Mersey Canal.  

We found out from the volunteers at the museum that it is open every Friday and, on normal days, it costs £5 for a grown-up human to visit, but any human cubs who come with them are allowed in free of charge.

Sonning and Huddlesford came with me, as they had some leaflets and posters to share about the big canal festival happening at Burton-upon-Trent at the end of this month.  We all loved this very nice model narrowboat.

And there were some nice examples of painted ware, including "Buckby cans" used for storing drinking water.  Polar likes looking at how the lining and decorating around the patterns is done, as that is something she says she still needs to learn to do better.

Then we went to see what there was for human cubs to do.  We found a puzzle, where you have to fit pieces back into a big broken jug, and an area for drawing, with a picture of one of the cans to copy.

Best of all, there is a play area shaped like a narrowboat for them to play in, which was also brilliant for us small bears.  I don't think anyone really minded us climbing on the roof!

By the time we had finished playing on the boat, it was almost time to go to see the engine "Princess" in steam, and all the machinery it works.  I had a good look at the model of the engine first, so I would know what to look out for on the real one.

Then it was time to see the actual mill.  Polar carried us in our Bear Bag over a bridge across a little arm of the canal where there are two old working boats moored, Lynsey and Kepple.  They are also looked after by volunteers, but more volunteers are needed to help and they were not open to visitors when we were there.

The first part of the mill you reach is a kiln where the biggest flints were heated up to make them easier to grind up.  Lots of people don't know that vintage fine china wasn't made out of pure clay but had bone and flint mixed in too, so it is light and strong.

But grinding these things into powder was very dangerous work for humans, as the dust is very, very bad for their lungs.  Clever people made machines to help and put water in them, to cut down the amount of dust in the air - there are some photos later in this blog.

All the machinery used to be driven by "Princess", a beam engine driven by a steam boiler.  There are not many steaming days during the year, as it uses a lot of coal to get it going, but this weekend was a working one.  We watched the engine's boiler being fired and then the engine starting up, staying well away from all the moving parts.

Soon the big beam was moving up and down and the wheel that drives the cogs that run all the other machines was spinning around.  We bears watched from the safety of our Bear Bag as there were lots of parts moving very quickly that could squish a careless small bear!

The engine originally turned paddles in huge pans where the bone and flint used to be ground up, in water to stop lots of nasty sharp dust getting into the atmosphere and into the workers' lungs.

After we had watched the pan paddles going round for a little while, Polar carried us all down the steps to the room underneath, where we could see how all the machinery linked in to the engine.  It was really interesting but noisy too.  I thought it was marvellous!

Industrial archaeology is great but it makes a small bear hungry, so we were glad there was a cafe at the museum where we could get cheesy oatcakes and cake, and our human guardians could get nice cups of tea too.  

We hope lots of people will support the other steam days* and visit on Fridays too, as it's a brilliant little museum.  If I was a human, I would volunteer there; maybe someone reading this post will?  

*There are more steam days this year on 10th and 11th September, when there is a stationary engine rally on Saturday and vintage car rally on Sunday, and again on the last weekend of October.