Early History
The pottery's origins started with an 1854 land purchase at Hobsonville, near Auckland, by Rice Owen Clark, who had arrived in New Zealand thirteen years before. He had worked as a school teacher in Wellington and as a clerk in Auckland before achieving his ambition to work the land. To drain his land, he made his own pipes by wrapping logs with clay and firing them with charcoal, which led to his making pipes for his neighbours. Clark's success with pipe making led to other small companies in the area forming an industry, merging in 1929 to become the Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company.
Tom Clark, one of Rice Owen Clark's great-grandsons, began working in the firm during the depression. He was responsible for the plant expanding in 1937 to produce items unrelated to the building trade such as electrical insulation equipment and moulds for rubber products such as gloves, baby bottle teats and condoms. Clark was an employer who always encouraged his staff to experiment with new products. As a result, an oil-fired continuous tunnel kiln was built in 1941, and tableware manufacture began the following year. The company had established a research department in 1938 to investigate the viability of producing tableware from New Zealand clays.
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