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Eight Inch Tiles
	The rarest Moyr Smith Shakespeare tile!
Unusual seven inch square tile

 

The Minton Tile Companies Herbert Minton began experimenting making encaustic tiles in 1828 in addition to the established Mintons pottery and china business, early results were most unpredictable 100 satisfactory tiles from a kiln load of 700 was considered a success. Work continued refining the processes and in 1835 the company was confident enough to produce their first catalogue of 62 designs and in 1836 tender for the supply of tiles for special schemes. Minton took two nephews into partnership, Michael Daintry Hollins and Colin Minton Campbell, Hollins in 1845 and Campbell in 1849. From around 1845 when Hollins joined the company was split in to two divisions, Hollins mananged the tile business and Campbell when he joined the china business. The wall tile business was barely in existence before Hollins joined so it was mostly his creation, the tile business traded as Minton & Co for floor tiles and Minton, Hollins & Co for wall tiles and the china business as Minton & Co. Another relative Robert Minton Taylor became a partner with Hollins in the tile business in 1863. Herbert Minton died in 1858 and the two divisions became more defined without his oversight, Hollins and Campbell remained partners and continued in their roles Hollins managing the tile business and Campbell the china business as before. There was a falling out and the company split in 1868 Hollins taking the lesser value tile business and Campbell retaining the much larger and well established pottery china and pottery business. Campbell however still had some tile making equipment at the china works and continued to use it and the Minton & Co name for wall tiles (he didn't make floor tiles), he clearly had the right to use Minton & Co for pottery and china as his was a continuance of the previous business but not for tiles. Campbell also used some of the same patterns on tiles as Hollins the result being that there were two companies producing tiles with the same patterns and same brand name Minton & Co which of course caused confusion in the marketplace. Hollins maintained that under the terms of the agreement all of the tile business was his and that Campbell could not use Minton & Co on tiles. The dispute reached the courts who found in favour of Hollins, the tile making equipment remaining in Campbell's factory was determined to belong to Hollins who was also awarded the exclusive right to use the name Minton & Co on tiles. Campbell however wanted to keep on making tiles and reached a settlement with Hollins for the tile making plant at the china works in the sum of £30,000 which Hollins used to build a new factory and propel his company to being the world's largest tile maker.  Robert Minton Taylor had left Minton & Co's tile making division run by Hollins just before the final Hollins/Campbell split and in the following year started trading as R Minton Taylor making floor tiles and later some wall tiles. The court found that this name was also confusing and ordered that company use the full name Robert Minton Taylor & Co to identify its wares and in advertising. Campbell continued making tiles under the Mintons China Works name and joined with Robert Minton Taylor in 1874 in the form of a buyout or partnership and the company was renamed Minton Brick and Tile Co, it appears that the merger was largely an effort by Campbell to find a loophole in the court judgment prohibiting him from using the name Minton & Co on tiles. The use of such name by Campbell was clearly against the spirit of the earlier court judgment and again the dispute reached court, Hollins again won and Campbell had to rename the company, it was renamed Campbell Brick and Tile Co 'brick and' shortly being dropped. The judge specifically admonished Campbell for actions leading to effectively a retrial of the same issue and Campbell was thenceforth prohibited from using the words Minton(s) and Tile for any company or on the same line in advertising (he still did so on his catalogues, maybe Hollins got fed up with suing him). Mintons Kensington Art Pottery Studio may also have in some ways been another attempt to get around the naming issue and as it was owned by Campbell it is odd that they used tiles from Minton Taylor and not Campbell's Mintons China Works (although Taylor's were better quality), there was clearly an arrangement between Minton Taylor and Campbell. Hollins must have been also somewhat aggrieved that Robert Minton Taylor whom he had trained in tile making had joined forces with Campbell to compete against him. The studio's wares today have a great reputation but in its day this was clearly insufficient to pay its way otherwise it would have been rebuilt after the fire in 1875 indeed many of the wares are of poor quality and the current reputation is to my mind exaggerrated. Julian Barnard [1] makes this comment, "Minton's Art Pottery Studios in Kensington Gore, London, which opened in 1871, employed many artists (and would be artists) to decorate their products." They did make and decorate some outstanding wares but there are also those that have the look and feel of novices' work. There was actually a series of court cases mostly concerned with the rights to use the name Minton on tiles and stemming from the original agreement between Hollins and Campbell, Hollins won on almost all points. Hollins in the split took the smaller part of the company in exchange for exclusive rights yet Campbell tried to deny him the entire tile business, the court found it belonged to Hollins as did the exclusive use of the name. What drove Campbell's enmity is unknown but it deflected both companies' attention from running of the businesses and the publicity that it attracted cast a shadow further afield. Perhaps it was Campbell's own settlement with Hollins that aggrieved him, how he came to agree to the reported sum of £30,000 is unfathomable, surely had he kept to the agreement, let Hollins have the equipment and avoid paying the settlement he could have built his own brand new state of the art tileworks with the £30,000. Furthermore Hollins would likely have been required to pay the costs for removal of his equipment from the China Works site. Currently the accepted wisdom is that Mintons China Works were the greater quality company but this is predicated primarily on the number of pictorial tile series that they produced, the name became popular amongst collectors and parlayed the already existing collectability of Minton china. For the most part Hollins produced the better quality wares and a greater variety of them, certainly so during the lifetime of Campbell. Mintons China Works had a marketing coup with John Moyr Smith's designs for tiles, particularly the Shakespeare series, which were very popular and being so numerous are well collected. Robert Minton Taylor's tiles, the few that we see, are similar excellent quality to Hollins'. Quite a messy business, it seems that Campbell was overly fixated with battling for the name and finding loopholes in his agreement with Hollins. Tiles were only ever a fraction of his Mintons business, mostly it was tableware etc. It appears that Colin Campbell had little to do with the running of Campbell Tile Co being mostly a financier, the company made both wall and floor tiles and was managed by Robert Minton Taylor [2], it grew to be a substantial company remaining independent until 1963.   [1] Victorian Ceramic Tiles by Julian Barnard published in 1972 by Christies is a highly recommended book. Written more in the style of a dispassionate auctioneer giving a straightforward assesment it avoids the sycophantic aggrandisement of established brand names, artists and techniques that many other publications suffer from. It is also as far as my knowledge extends the most error free, unfortunately as time goes by the number of errors in books about tiles seems to be generally on the increase. [2] Jewitt.

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