Under this magnificent charter and spirited government the little colony progressed rapidly, and numbers of houses, or rather huts, sprang up on all sides. Such things as drainage and fresh water were considered superfluous; and the accumulation of the filth of years rendered it certain, by the simple law of self-preservation, that nothing would be meddled with.
In addition to the above-mentioned trades, about thirty years ago a considerable plot of land was bought for brick-making, the soil being almost entirely composed of stiff clay, peculiarly adapted for that purpose. This introduced another fresh element into the newly formed colony. The labourers employed at this work are not usually of a very high class, and the oldest inhabitants of the Potteries speak of their introduction as an evil. An old woman, who has lived forty years in the place, and her husband’s parents were amongst the first inhabitants, remarked, “Now pig-keepers _is_ respectable; but them brick people, they bean’t, some of them, no wiser than the clay they works on.” I asked this old woman what kind of life they had lived there by themselves so many years. She said, “Oh, ma’am, you’d think ’twas an awful life! The only difference in Sundays and work-days was, that on Sundays we had cock-fighting and bull-baiting, and lots of dogs were kept on purpose to amuse the people by fighting and rat-killing. People all round were afraid of these dogs, and nobody ever cared to come nigh the place. We didn’t ourselves venture out after it was dark; if we hadn’t got in all we wanted before night, why we jist went without it: for besides the dogs, d’ye see, ma’am, there was the roads; leastwise, we called ’em roads, but they wornt for all that,—it was jist a lot of ups and downs, and when you had put one foot down, you didn’t know how to pull the other one up. Once, I mind, I happened to be out late in the evening, and had to go through Cut-throat Lane jist as it was gitting dark, (they calls that Pottery Lane now, you know, ma’am); I heard some people coming along, fighting and swearing, and I was so frightened I got down into the bottom of one of the ruts, and there I stopped till they had gone; so I got a service out of them that time, d’ye see, ma’am.