Early life, 1872–99

The Wedgwood family's fame and fortune was based on the entrepreneurial skills of the ‘first’ Josiah (1730–95), and by the time that his great-greatgrandson and fourth namesake Josiah Clement was born it had become a major, if not particularly profitable, local employer and the leading non-aristocratic family of North Staffordshire. Young Josiah's grandfather, father, elder brother and second son were all, in turn, managing directors of the family pottery business, although none of them, with the exception of the last, showed much talent for business, and it was not until the 1940s that the Wedgwood Pottery was modernised and became consistently profitable.

Not immediately evident from his own later and patriarchally influenced memoirs was that young Josiah's mother, Emily, came from a rather richer and, in the Victorian era at least, more successful family than the Wedgwoods. Emily was one of the ten children of James Meadows Rendel (1799–1856), the son of a farmer, who became one of the leading engineers in Britain, and the man who built the Holyhead and Portland Docks. Four of his sons were also highly successful engineers, amongst them Stuart, later Lord Rendel, who became the second largest shareholder in the Armstrong engineering business and a leading Liberal politician; and Hamilton, also an engineer with Armstrong’s, who was very generous to the young Josiah after his father died, and whose legacy later provided the means to allow him to afford a career in politics.

Emily was a clever and handsome woman of somewhat melancholy temperament. She was an accomplished classicist and a keen follower of politics. She was also a devoted and sentimental mother, who kept in close contact with her surviving children until her death, aged eighty, in 1921. Clement, her husband, was an altogether lighter character, both intellectually and personally. They lived at Barlaston, a few miles south of Stokeon- Trent, and it was there, on 16 March 1872, that their second son, Josiah, was born.

After a happy early childhood spent in the company of the several generations of Wedgwoods who lived in and around Barlaston, Josiah was sent away to preparatory school at the age of ten, and went three years later to Clifton College, Bristol.