White salt-glazed stoneware was produced by combining calcined flints with white ball clay imported from Devonshire and Dorset. The chronology of its early development is uncertain, but it was in use in Staffordshire shortly before 1720. By the mid-1740s potters were making extensive use of press-moulding and had begun to slip-cast in plaster of Paris moulds. These processes enabled them to make a greater range of shapes and to decorate both flat and hollow-ware with relief patterns formed at the same time as the body. They also made it possible to satisfy the demand for naturalistic and fanciful tableware which was an aspect of rococo taste.

Block cutters, who made the blocks from which the plaster of Paris moulds were taken, displayed great ingenuity in their teapot designs. Traditional globular or pear-shaped pots were decorated in relief with quaint figures, plants and geometrical patterns. Others were moulded in the shape of houses, shells, fruit and animals. This exotic camel teapot with chinoiserie decoration on the sides of the tower on its back must have had great selling appeal in an era when people were fascinated by the Ottoman Empire and the Far East. The idea for the monkey or squirrel probably came from Meissen, where in 1735 Johann Joachim Kaendler (1706–75) had modelled two amusing teapots in the shape of a squirrel and a mother monkey with two babies.