Reclamation Yard Discovers 19th Century P45 Staffordshire Blue Roof Tile

A 200-year-old reclaimed Staffordshire Blue clay roof tile has been discovered with a special message inscribed on its back.

The roof tile was found by a worker sorting through old stock at specialist reclamation yard Cawarden Reclaim based in Rugeley, Staffordshire.

The handmade Staffordshire Blue roof tile had been installed for centuries on a roof and shows signs of weathering. Nevertheless, clearly written in an ornate nineteenth century copperplate hand is an inscription, which reads:

“I do hereby discharge you, John Lewis, from my employment, Thomas Austin.”

Because the roof tile clay is fired hard in the kiln, the message must have been inscribed into soft, wet clay before its manufacturing process was finished, suggesting the message was written at the tile manufacturing factory.

Cawarden Reclaim employees did some research and found there was a tile and brick maker called Thomas Austin Brick & Tile Makers operating at Clay Hills in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent, in 1820.

A 19^th Century P45

It is possible that Thomas Austin employed John Lewis as a roofer directly, guaranteeing a market for his roof tiles. The inscribed tile might have been formally given to John Lewis as the last roof tile installed – and simultaneously ending his employment contract.

Cawarden Reclaim chairperson Richard Parrott, 63, said: “We’ve been going for 40 years and I’ve never come across anything like this before – a 19^th Century P45!”

Alternatively, Thomas Austin Brick & Tile Makers may have been going out of business itself. In the early nineteenth century, the clay manufacturing market was a tumultuous one, with land ownership and the rights to dig clay on it rapidly changing hands in an emerging British clay products market threatened by the growing popularity of Chinese-made porcelain products. Thomas Austin Brick & Tile Makers is not listed in Pigot & Co.s 1828/9 Directory of Staffordshire Potteries.

As the condition of the tile is so good and the writing etched on the back remains so legible, it is thought that after installation the roof tile is unlikely to have been disturbed until it found its way to Cawarden Reclaim.

Staff at the company think the tile was reclaimed from what had been a farmhouse, now the site of a new house building development.

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