SAGGAR

A protective box enclosing ceramic ware while it is being fired.

In large-scale pottery manufacture years ago, the furnaces (called bottle kilns from their shape) were usually heated by coal or coke furnaces. Flames, ashes and corrosive gases would have damaged the pottery if it wasn’t protected by being put into saggars, a word that seems to be a contraction of safeguard. These were hollow squat cylinders with flat tops and bottoms so they could be stacked in the kiln, often in piles 30 feet high or more. Saggars were made from a type of fireclay that was mixed with a proportion of ground-up reused saggar called grog; they only lasted for about 40 firings, so every large works had its own saggar-makers. These men had assistants whose job was to make the heavy flat bottoms of the saggars, beating the fireclay into shape inside an iron hoop using a mallet called a mawl (pronounced “maw” in Staffordshire). These assistants, lads in their teens, were the saggar-maker’s bottom knockers. These and related jobs — such as the batter-outs who beat out the strips of clay for the sides of the saggars — vanished when kilns began to be fired instead by clean gas or electricity so that protective saggars weren’t needed.

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