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Excise duty on British stoneware bottles,
1817 - 1834.
Part of a the 1817 act exempting blacking bottles from taxation.
Most British stoneware bottles manufactured between 1812 and 1834 were liable for tax. The level of tax was increased in 1817, and at that time blacking bottles were exempted. Between 1817 and the final abolition of the tax in 1834, excise marks were required to be stamped into stoneware bottles during manufacture . This can be an extremely useful dating aid.
Bottles on which the tax had been paid were required to be marked with an EX, for EXcise (as in picture 1, below). The only exemptions were for bottles made to hold liquid blacking. These were required to be marked 'BLACKING BOTTLE (as in picture 2). Both of the bottles in these pictures can be dated to the period from 1817 to 1834 purely on the basis of the Excise marks.
1. A small stoneware utility bottle (about 4 fl. oz. capacity) bearing the EX mark under the potters stamp. On many bottles of this period the only marks are either an EX, or the words 'Blacking bottle'.
2. A Blacking bottle clearly stamped with the words BLACKING BOTTLE in order to be exempt from taxation.
It is often thought that bottles which DON'T have these marks must be dated either before 1817 or after 1834. This seems to be a misconception: there are bottles that were definitely made between these dates which don't bear any excise marks. There is a bottle in Jerry's collection with the stamp of Burton's Codnor Park Pottery. Burton was at this pottery only from 1821 to 1832, a period entirely covered by the excise act of 1817, but this bottle does not have any excise mark. Although most Burtons bottles have the EX stamp, bottles without it are not particularly rare.
It is possible that the enforcement of the letter of the law was not always fully carried out, and perhaps on occasion only a proportion of bottles in each firing were stamped to fulfill the inspection requirements.
There are other questions about the prevalence of the 'EX' and 'Blacking bottle' marks. For example, they are absent on most (all?) reform flasks, including those that are presumed to date to the early 1830s (1831 - 32). I have only ever seen one stoneware flask of any kind with an EX stamp: a plain saltglazed bottle with a J. Bourne stamp.
Both the 1817 act confirming the imposition of taxation on stoneware bottles but exempting blacking bottles, and the 1834 Act repealing the earlier act, can be viewed in their entirety by clicking on the links below (originals in Darrens collection):
© J. M. Kemp & D. Gray. 2007
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