Eleanor Coade

Eleanor Coade (3 or 24 June 1733 – c.18 November 1821) was a British businesswoman known for manufacturing Neoclassical statues, architectural decorations and garden ornaments made of Lithodipyra (Coade stone) for over 50 years from 1769 until her death. She should not be confused or conflated with her mother, also named Eleanor.

Lithodipyra ("stone fired twice") was a high-quality, durable moulded weather-resistant, stoneware; statues and decorative features from this still look almost new today. Coade did not invent 'artificial stone', as various inferior quality precursors had been both patented and manufactured over the previous forty years, but she probably perfected both the formulation and the firing process.

She combined high-quality manufacturing and artistic taste, together with entrepreneurial, business and marketing skills, to create the overwhelmingly successful stone products of her age. She produced stoneware for St George's Chapel, Windsor; The Royal Pavilion, Brighton; Carlton House, London and the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Shortly after her death, her company produced a large quantity of stoneware used in the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.

Born in Exeter to two families of wool merchants and weavers, she ran her business, "Coade's Artificial Stone Manufactory", "Coade and Sealy" and latterly "Coade" (by appointment to George III and the Prince Regent), for fifty years in Lambeth, London. A devout Baptist, she died unmarried in Camberwell.

In 1784 an uncle, Samuel Coade, gave her Belmont House, a holiday villa in Lyme Regis, her late father's town of origin. She decorated the house extensively with Coade stone.

Eleanor Coade was born on 3 June 1733 in Exeter, the elder daughter of the Nonconformist (devout Baptist) family of George and Eleanor Coade. George Coade (1706–1769) was a wool merchant originally from Lyme Regis, and his wife Eleanor (Elinore, née Enchmarch) (c.1708–1796) was the daughter of Thomas and Sarah Enchmarch (d.1735), merchants and textile manufacturers of Tiverton, Devon. Eleanor's younger sister Elizabeth was born 1738 in Exeter.

Eleanor's maternal grandmother Sarah Enchmarch was a successful business woman in Tiverton, running the family textile business for 25 years after her husband Thomas died in 1735. Since the Middle Ages, the town had been a centre of the woollen textile business, with thousands of workers. Mrs Enchmarch employed 200 people making cloth, and used spies to learn the latest techniques used in Norwich. She was known to travel around Tiverton in a sedan chair. In 1749, with revenues from her business, she re-built the Enchmarch mansion.

About 1760, following George Coade's bankruptcy, the Coade family moved from Exeter to London. By the mid-1760s, daughter Eleanor Coade was running her own business as a linen draper in the City of London. As was customary for unmarried women in business at the time, she used Mrs as a courtesy title.