I don't think uranium oxide was 'ready to go ' down the road though.
That's my point. I think Gill pointed out it was there, but that info/some of that info came from a previous article/book written by a man called Phillips, but I don't think it was mined from there.
I think it was readily available though very, very nearby in Bohemia (Joachimsthal if I recall correctly -open to correction as I've not time to look it up in th books at the mo). And Klaproth was known, and they were massively experimenting with and producing amazing colours already by the 1820s certainly. So instinct says it's in Bohemia it would originate at it's earliest.
I also think the v&A would, if they had hard evidence, have identified it as from James Powell & sons. Why wouldn't they if they'd acquired it from the MOL and had that evidence to hand? As would CH in his book, but he hasn't either.
The publications being 'history' doesn't stand as an argument from what I've seen, because I've looked at various publications over the whole of the 19th century and they repeatedly reprint and repeat information from previous publications going back many tens of years, over and over again, the same information is repeated. Sometimes a bit more recent information is added to it but often it's the exact same info from various publications. And that's why I thought Gill might have just repeated what he'd read about those colour 'names' from a previous document discussing Klaproth's discovery, and I'm sure he had. I don't think he had any idea about the production of uranium glass anywhere.
And the use of the word Whitefriars may well have come from a 'I'm sure I've seen something somewhere/remember reading that this was produced by Whitefriars' type conversation. That happens.
There was information in The Art Journal of 1849 writing about the exhibition in Birmingham, that Bacchus and Rice,Harris produced some uranium glass items. But that was 1849.
That said, of course, this could all be conjecture and doesn't mean it's fact. It could well be that James Powell & Sons produced these.
I just think at the moment there isn't any hard evidence anywhere that they did.
And I also think that had they produced gold ruby glass and uranium topaz glass at that time, any glassmaker might be 'crowing' about it, making it known.
They weren't reticent in coming forward. Richardson's were keen to ensure it was known that the glass they made, despite being distributed by a 'shop' or middle man, was made by them. And I've just read (I think in the Art Journal actually) that some silver smiths who were using glass in their products were told they had to ensure the glassmaker was included on the large card labels they displayed on their stands, and there was a huge outcry because one of them had their own name writ large and the glassmakers name writ so small as to be almost illegible to the naked eye.
So not much different behaviour to how it would be now really.
Apsley Pellatt writes of how gold topaz glass was keenly sought after in his book of 1849. Yet no mention of any of it in the Art Journal of that year really or of any from James Powell in the 1851 Great Exhibition. Odd.