The title of this dish is a sly joke, for the viewer is the third loggerhead or fool. The convivial scene suggests that it may have been made for an inn, perhaps a forerunner of the present ‘Loggerheads’, on the road between Newcastle-under- Lyme and Market Drayton. Unlike seventeenth-century slip-trailed dishes (no. 10), which were thrown, this was made on a convex earthenware ‘hump mould’, the back of which had been incised with the design before firing. A flat ‘bat’ of clay was pressed over the mould and, when it had dried sufficiently, was removed with the design in relief on the interior. Then decoration in coloured slips and lead glaze was applied and the dish was fired.

Samuel Malkin usually signed with initials only but his identity is known from a dish with his name in full, now in the British Museum. The front is decorated with a clock face inscribed ‘Samuel Malkin/The Maker/in burslam 17’ which, as the clock hand points to 12, suggests that it was made in 1712 or 1729. The latest date on a dish initialled ‘S M’ is 1734 and he probably died in 1741. The parish register records the burial of a Samuel Malkin, described as the ‘old parish clerk of Burslem’, a vocation which seems appropriate for a potter who inscribed some of his dishes with proverbial or biblical inscriptions such as the ominous ‘Remember Lot's Wife Luke 17:32’ on a dish of 1726 also in the Fitzwilliam (c.201–1928).