Antique Mayer & Sherratt Melba China Cake Plates- Set of 6

Antique Mayer & Sherratt (Trade Name Melba
China) set of six cake/salad plates in the Imari pattern.
Mayer & Sherratt manufactured china at the Clifton works in Stafford street, Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, they were in operation between 1906 – 1941, these used the trade name Melba China.

The city now named Stoke-on-Trent was officially born on the 31st March 1910, with the Federation of the Six Towns of the North Staffordshire Potteries

Federation brought together the boroughs of Hanley, Burslem, Longton and Stoke-upon-Trent, together with the districts of Tunstall and Fenton into a County Borough of Stoke-on-Trent. It became a city (by Roayl Charter) in 1925.

Stoke-upon-Trent was chosen as the seat of civic power (it was the ecclesiastical centre – having had a church from the Norman times), despite the fact that the towns of Hanley, and indeed Burslem, had been far better established since Edwardian times. The legacy of this union lives on undiminished, as locals will refer to ‘the Potteries’, meaning the various towns, rather than the official title of ‘Stoke-on-Trent’.

‘The large and commercially important, as well as thickly populated, district known as the ‘Staffordshire Potteries’, or simply ‘the Potteries’, comprises a number of towns, and places adjoining them. The main towns or districts are: Burslem, Cobridge, Etruria, Fenton, Hanley, Lane End, Longton, Stoke and Tunstall.

It is very likely that Mayer & Sherratt (who used the trade name MELBA) was closed in 1941 under the Wartime Concentration Scheme and reopened as Melba China Co. Ltd.

The backstamp was in use from 1921.