At Nailsea in Somerset, as you pass in the train from Bristol to Weston-super-Mare, you can still see few creeper-covered stumps of buildings on the site of the famous glassworks, which once employed several hundred men.

Nowadays “Nailsea” is a legend, and the word has come to be applied to several different kinds of fancy or coloured glass which were made at other places besides Nailsea, and often long after the factory closed.

First there are all those bottles, jugs, rolling pins, decanters, cups and mugs which are made of dark bottle glass with coloured flecks. Sometimes these flecks are white, sometimes they are in other colours like red, yellow, and pale blue. Either way the effect is charming, and in some mysterious way they go admirably with modern furnishings. They have been eagerly sought after for many years now, and in fact wares very much like them have been made in the quite recent past to satisfy the demand.

Antique Collector MagazineOriginally they are thought to have been a sort of byproduct of a bottle-glass factory at Nailsea in Somerset, at the time when there was a heavy duty on clear glass but none on the darker bottle glass. The opaque glass flecks were said to be the oddments left over from the working of the famous opaque glass made at that time in Bristol. However, very similar things to these were also made in other glassmaking centres like Sunderland, Newcastle, Stour- bridge and Wrockwardine, in Shropshire. In fact, yellow flecks are supposed to be a sign of origin at Wrockwardine, though I do not know on what authority, for the name is also given by auctioneers to pieces with white or red flecks. I have also recently seen a bottle with a seal on its holder and with the initials of somebody living in Stirling, so these bottles may even have been made in Scotland, probably Alloa, where a Nailsea man is said to have emigrated.

Then there is a variation of the bottle-glass type which has loops of opaque glass in a style which one can trace back to the ancient Egyptians. This also appeared in some flasks of clear glass. I find these very interesting, since here is the first example of the famous latticinio technique. With this the glassblower takes a “gather” of molten glass—it looks like a ball of orange toffee—and thrusts it into a mould which has been lined with canes of coloured opaque glass. These fuse into the glass as he blows it with his blow-iron, and he combs the parallel lines down to produce the festooned effect. This technique seems to have arrived in Nailsea when the proprietors imported some French workmen to make fancy glass, and it is a fair guess that the French picked up the technique from wandering Venetians. As the Venetians began glass making where the Romans left off, and the Romans followed pretty closely the styles of ancient Syria, from there it is only a step to Egypt—and in the British Museum you will find some bottles made here 3,40o years ago using precisely this technique. Here you have one of the fascinating things about collecting; you buy some quite ordinary thing, perhaps just a frippery, and suddenly find it has links running right back through all the great empires of the past.

Another whole class of “Nailsea” consists of large pipes in coloured glass, made for hanging on walls or in the windows of tobacconists’ shops, walking sticks, shepherds’ crooks, coloured bell trumpets. But these have only the slenderest connections with Nailsea. Every glassmaking centre—Stourbridge, Sunderland, Bristol, York, and the rest—had their immense professional pride in making fantastic things of this sort, often for their annual processions. It is to be noted, too, that many of these things are still being made today, especially the coloured bells. The small toys also often attributed to Nailsea are dealt with under that head.

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