English city in Staffordshire. It was formed in 1925 by the federation of Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke-upon-Trent, Fenton and Longton. It is the centre of a region dominated by the pottery industry (hence ‘The Potteries’) and, in former times, by coalmining. The choral societies of the area, with firm roots in the Methodist movement, became justly famous.
The establishment of Sunday school choirs led to the publication of Salem’s Lyre (Burslem, 1830), a collection of hymns suitable for children. However, it was not until the introduction of Tonic Sol-fa that notable progress in choral singing was made. J.W. Powell, town clerk of Burslem, transcribed Mendelssohn’s Elijah in Sol-fa, and he proved the value of the system with the Burslem Tonic Solfa Choir, which he founded. In June 1884 the choir was awarded the first prize of £35 in a Tonic Solfa Festival held in the Crystal Palace, said to have been ‘a striking testimony to the spread of music amongst the humbler members of the community’ (Musical World). In 1891 the jubilee of the Solfa Association was celebrated with a festival in London, and the contingent from the Potteries taking part in the massed choir numbered 1000. Also active at this time were the Hanley Glee and Madrigal Society (founded 1882), conducted by James Garner, a working potter, and James Docksey’s Burslem Choir.
The North Staffordshire District Choral Society was founded in 1901 by a disabled miner, James Whewall. The members of the chorus were experienced singers drawn from the many church and chapel choirs of the neighbourhood and from such bodies as the Hanley Male Voice Choir and the Longton Glee Union. The Dream of Gerontius was given its first London performance by the society in 1903, and six years later Beecham chose the choir to give the London première of Delius’s Sea Drift. The monopoly enjoyed by the society (renamed the City of Stoke-on-Trent Choral Society after World War II) was challenged in the 1930s by Bertrand Rhead, a potter’s merchant turned impresario, who founded a Ceramic City Choir, sometimes conducted by Sargent. During the Depression the Etruscan Singers (named after Etruria where the Wedgwood works were situated) was formed from unemployed pottery workers and miners by Harry Vincent (d 1957), a shoemaker and entirely self-taught musician; he also turned a disused mission hall in Etruria into a concert hall.
The first music festival in the area was given in the parish church of St Peter ad Vincula in Stoke on 12 November 1833. The programme of the festival consisted largely of movements from Handel’s oratorios and excerpts from works by Beethoven, Haydn, Paisiello, Grétry, Boyce, Kent and Callcott. But it was not until the Victoria Hall, Hanley, was opened in 1888 that adequate accommodation for large-scale musical performances was available. The first North Staffordshire Festival was held there in that year, conducted by Charles Swinnerton Heap, a Leipzig-trained musician. Its festival choir was a coalition of nine choirs and formed the basis for subsequent festivals. In 1896 and 1899 respectively, first performances of King Olaf by Elgar, who had played in the 1888 festival orchestra, and Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘The Death of Minnehaha’ (part of the Hiawatha trilogy) were conducted by their composers at the festival; in 1908 Delius was invited to conduct the second English performance of Appalachia in Hanley. In 1975 a Stoke-on-Trent competitive festival was re-established.
During the latter part of the 19th century the pottery firm of J. & G. Meakin supported music in many ways, most notably through the Meakin Concerts in the Victoria Hall; Paderewski gave a piano recital in 1895. Meakins also provided wind instruments for its workers to form a band. On 1 November 1905 the first concert of the amateur North Staffordshire SO was given, conducted by John Cope, a local man who had studied in Munich with Rheinberger. Cope was one of the first to appreciate and to perform the instrumental works of Havergal Brian, born in the Potteries town of Dresden, whose career may be regarded as symbolic of the musical life of the region.
The Victoria Hall, Hanley, designed by a local surveyor, has fine acoustics particularly suited to the performance of large-scale works. The organ, built by Willis after the specification of S.H. Weale, the first city organist, was inaugurated on 4 May 1922.
At the end of the 19th century, when nonconformist reservations about the use of the organ had been overcome, organ builders – notably Steele and Keay, Binns, Kirkland, and Jardine – were extremely active in the district. A basic musical education was available in almost every church and chapel. However, from the second half of the century the general musical interest of the people of the Potteries was reflected in the curriculum of the elementary schools. Stoke-on-Trent was one of the first cities to appoint a superintendent of music to be responsible for musical education in all its branches. A school of music was founded after World War II by John Harvey. The music department of Keele University, near Stoke-on-Trent (the first of the postwar universities), was the first in England to have a centre for the study of American music, developed under the first professor of music, Peter Dickinson.
Stoke-upon-Trent Musical Festival 1833 (Stoke, 1833) [programme book]
R.W. Ship: History of the Hanley Glee and Madrigal Society (Hanley, 1901)
R.W. Ship: A History of the North Staffordshire District Choral Society (Hanley, 1909)
R. Nettel: Music in the Five Towns, 1840–1914 (London, 1944)
G. Thompson: ‘Music in the Five Towns: a Postscript’, MT, c (1959), 383–4
PERCY M. YOUNG