243
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
ESSEX BRICKS
BY LAURENCE S. HARLEY, B.SC, M.I.E.E.
[Delivered 25 March 1950]
EAST ANGLIA, in particular Essex, was almost certainly the
scene of the earliest brickmaking in Britain and also had the
distinction of nurturing its revival in post-Norman times.
Bricks of many kinds and sizes were made of sun-dried mud and
straw by the ancient civilisations of the East but ever since bricks
were made as kiln-fired ceramics rather than sun-baked daub,
their composition, texture, and even their size have, for the most
part, varied but little.
Nevertheless, it is these minor variations and the occasional
major departures from the normal which are valuable evidence of
date. Evidence, that is, of the kind which literary critics would call
"internal", since there are many other characteristics of a brick
structure itself which can be used to confirm and add to what the
individual bricks tell us.
You will have observed that I have entitled my Address Essex
Bricks and not Essex Brickwork, because it is primarily about the
bricks themselves, and not about what is built from them, that I
propose to talk today. But I hope I shall be excused if I am tempted
to touch upon characteristic details of brick structures or perhaps
also to stray over the county borders a few miles into Suffolk on
the north and Middlesex on the west.
Those of you whose interests lie among living things may sup-
pose that the subject, like the bricks themselves, is arid, harsh, and
perhaps hard, but I believe that a botanist searching for Wall Rue
or "Rambling Sailor", or an arachnologist watching hunting
spiders, must at some time have been enchanted by the varied
texture and colour and pattern of an ancient brick wall before
him. The very irregularities which are its charm are contained in a
regularity of arrangement which frames and enhances them by its
restraint. If, then, he should wonder how old the wall may be, the
first question may well concern the bricks composing the wall
itself.