“I’ll meet you in an hour in the Wedgwood Room in Howells.”
My trips to the centre of Cardiff with my mother with myself either as companion and baggage handler or forced driver and baggage handler were always sweetened by a period of liberty when I could wander from book shop to book shop losing myself in the printed word until nagging guilt brought me back to reality and the rendezvous point.
In those distant days the Wedgwood Room in Howells occupied the ground floor next to the entrance from the Hayes: a prime position whose location, I have been told by a store manager is determined by how much a department makes. Sometimes I would be early and I would wander around picking up plates and cut glass and being deeply shocked by the prices. But I think it was part of my mother’s master plan for my development that I should constantly have the image of decent glass and china in my mind when I made my own purchases in the future.
God knows that training has worked. It is only by a stern effort of will that I am able to ignore the blandishments of a well set out display of crockery in a shop and it takes an equal unnatural concentration not to turn over the plates and look at the makers mark when I go to someone else’s house. I have to content myself by looking at their books on display instead to work out just what they are like!
So my childhood was dominated by Wedgwood – not that we ate off it at home, but it remained a clear pointer for domestic rectitude if funds allowed. I bought my mother Jasper Ware for some of her birthdays and Christmas including, I remember, a tea cup. Drinking tea from that item was a most unpleasant experience and it remained as decoration rather than use. I varied the Jasper Ware with cut glass. My mother developed a taste for Seagers’ Australian sherry (which was, as I remember 7/6d a bottle – a price I have no intention of translating into modern money as it is far too depressing) and she used to drink her tipple from one of my cut glasses. Not that I think of it the cost of the glass could have bought a couple of gallons of the ‘sherry’!
I can see some of the survivors of that era glittering in the afternoon sun adding distinction to a shelf not far from where I am writing.
And now this essential piece of my childhood memory and adulthood snobbery has reached crisis point. Wedgwood and Waterford have called in the receivers!
The company that employed William Blake to produce engravings of pottery outlines for their catalogues; the company which considered the workers as people and whose founders were always motivated by a strong streak of philanthropy; the name that made Etruria famous; a Wedgwood marrying Darwin; the key name in the Potteries; history, culture, ideas and an iconic mark – and now in the hands of the receivers!
I can see now why we were forced to learn Tennyson:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
(from Morte D’Arthur)
Another strut is knocked away supporting the tunnel into the past!
They will be saying next that The Profumo Affair didn’t happen and it was all as innocent as a game of tennis!
But I have a feeling that scandal will remain in my memory as one of the most interesting, confusing, mystifying, exciting and intriguing public displays of mendacity, prurience, unwholesome glee, hypocrisy and good old sex that a twelve year old boy could have wished for in his adolescent development!
Beats crockery anyway!
My trips to the centre of Cardiff with my mother with myself either as companion and baggage handler or forced driver and baggage handler were always sweetened by a period of liberty when I could wander from book shop to book shop losing myself in the printed word until nagging guilt brought me back to reality and the rendezvous point.
In those distant days the Wedgwood Room in Howells occupied the ground floor next to the entrance from the Hayes: a prime position whose location, I have been told by a store manager is determined by how much a department makes. Sometimes I would be early and I would wander around picking up plates and cut glass and being deeply shocked by the prices. But I think it was part of my mother’s master plan for my development that I should constantly have the image of decent glass and china in my mind when I made my own purchases in the future.
God knows that training has worked. It is only by a stern effort of will that I am able to ignore the blandishments of a well set out display of crockery in a shop and it takes an equal unnatural concentration not to turn over the plates and look at the makers mark when I go to someone else’s house. I have to content myself by looking at their books on display instead to work out just what they are like!
So my childhood was dominated by Wedgwood – not that we ate off it at home, but it remained a clear pointer for domestic rectitude if funds allowed. I bought my mother Jasper Ware for some of her birthdays and Christmas including, I remember, a tea cup. Drinking tea from that item was a most unpleasant experience and it remained as decoration rather than use. I varied the Jasper Ware with cut glass. My mother developed a taste for Seagers’ Australian sherry (which was, as I remember 7/6d a bottle – a price I have no intention of translating into modern money as it is far too depressing) and she used to drink her tipple from one of my cut glasses. Not that I think of it the cost of the glass could have bought a couple of gallons of the ‘sherry’!
I can see some of the survivors of that era glittering in the afternoon sun adding distinction to a shelf not far from where I am writing.
And now this essential piece of my childhood memory and adulthood snobbery has reached crisis point. Wedgwood and Waterford have called in the receivers!
The company that employed William Blake to produce engravings of pottery outlines for their catalogues; the company which considered the workers as people and whose founders were always motivated by a strong streak of philanthropy; the name that made Etruria famous; a Wedgwood marrying Darwin; the key name in the Potteries; history, culture, ideas and an iconic mark – and now in the hands of the receivers!
I can see now why we were forced to learn Tennyson:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
(from Morte D’Arthur)
Another strut is knocked away supporting the tunnel into the past!
They will be saying next that The Profumo Affair didn’t happen and it was all as innocent as a game of tennis!
But I have a feeling that scandal will remain in my memory as one of the most interesting, confusing, mystifying, exciting and intriguing public displays of mendacity, prurience, unwholesome glee, hypocrisy and good old sex that a twelve year old boy could have wished for in his adolescent development!
Beats crockery anyway!
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