Lund Humphries, Caroline Courtney and Richard Slee:

Claims to the 'Genesis' of the walking teaset.

To mark a touring exhibition of Richard Slee's pottery Lund Humphries in conjunction with Stoke-on-Trent Museum and the Craft's Council published a book. Authored by Garth Clark and Caroline Courtney it was stated in a section by Miss Courtney that in a pot by Richard Slee lay the genesis of the walking ware.

This is untrue, but normally this wouldn't have mattered as over the years the design has been attributed to many sources. In fact each journalist who wrote on the subject seemingly looked for a new precedent. In this case though, the book is a supposedly accurate academic account from which the reader might expect to receive a true picture. I suppose this wouldn't have mattered either, it is a trivial enough issue, but it has irritated me that these lazy assertions should stand and maybe be seen as the truth should anyone in the future be interested. I suppose also it places me (and Danka Napiorkowska) in an unfavourable position and awards to Richard an attribute to which he isn't entitled. I wrote to Lund Humphries asking them to retract the statement or to be precise to issue a correction in the form of an advertisement. They refused as Miss Courtney was happy that her remark was an accurate account of Richard's assertion. Miss Courtney is an 'oral historian' working for the British Library. Her role, I imagine, is to record this generation for future ones, which I guess she does orally. Historiography has changed, a prevailing and good idea is that each person's history is different ... one event may have two or more opposite but true accounts, one for each participant. These are described as 'relative truths', we live in a relativist world. Historians more so than most. Miss Courtney may feel that it is her duty to align herself with what she heard but it's hard to distinguish history from gossip unless the gossip is verified. If not then the story should be told as such, in this case as an account of Richard's assertions, without the veneer of academic objectivity. Essentially one must rely on individual decency to ensure these standards.

Richard I am sure believes his assertion, he might tell it with some heat of resentment. Miss Courtney may well be moved by this heat to defend him, she must, I assume, become partisan in such cases. Both owe their positions to state sponsorship nuzzled as they are deep in the soft, safe underbelly of the state project. Grant-aided they can form and distribute these trivial injustices without accountability or check.
So what did happen at the 'genesis' of the walking ware. Well, Danka Napiorkowska and Richard Slee were both students at the Central School of Art and Design in the early seventies, (as was I, but I had left by the time this tale unfolds). The Ceramics department was in a state of change, the lambent, etiolated late-modernism guttering in the wind of student revolt. The revolting students included Richard and Danka, they also included Alison Britten and others who went on to form the sludgy, new orthodoxy.
This revolt took various forms but mainly a sort of, then, symbolic or narrative statement moving strongly away from the formalist tendencies of their tutors and forerunners towards a decorative wit in Danka's case or a sort of bitter folk-surrealism in Richard's, later interpreted as postmodern irony. Both were joined, along with the majority of the cool students, in shocking the deeply developed beliefs that made up the high church of Craft Pottery preached by the followers of Bernard Leach or Lucie Rie. Richard and Danka were friends, they in turn had friends by which they were influenced, Patrick Howlett for one. They saw each other's work daily and within a larger group drank and partied together (so did I), they were close but never lovers. It seemed to me he was unhappy alot the time, life was very difficult for him. I will always have great sympathy and admiration for his character in enduring this. So it is hardly unlikely that, in this zietgiest, ideas might have occurred simultaneously. If handles and spouts become ears, noses and hands, then foot rings might become feet.

Richard and Danka started in the course in the same year but Richard took a year out after his second year to return to Carlisle to recover from the strain of life as an art student. His degree show was a year after Danka's. It was during the year Richard was away that the drawing that was the 'genesis' of the walking tea set was made in Danka's sketch book.

But this is probably where the confusion starts, it is like a Shakespearian plot. Around this time Danka and I got married, I had left for Yorkshire to leave behind my southern softness just as Richard going in the opposite direction left the north to leave behind his northern taciturn bitterness, momentarily it was proposed we should develop a joint venture which would become Lustre Pottery. Richard advisedly withdrew after a disastrous trip north in the winter in a profoundly unreliable Citroen 2CV. After one other weekend visit we more or less lost contact, but not before Richard introduced us to Christopher Stangeways who was later to become the main outlet for the walking design.

It was around this time the walking tea set was made and became surprisingly successful. Its success, in hindsight, was almost certainly due to the increasing disaffection with the prevailing authoritarian attitude to design peddled by the 'Design Centre'. People were just fed up with it. The walking tea set simply offered much needed release. Curiously the movement to which Richard now belongs and Miss Courtney disseminates has morbid echoes of the prevailing authoritarian orthodoxy of that time. The greater change, now bundled under the post-modernist umbrella, was the circumstance that stimulated the success of the walking design, it seems to me that this was essentially a street revolution, led largely by the suffering imposed by modernist architecture on the population at large of which the 'Design Centre' ideals were an extension. From my recent experiences in academia it seems, sadly, that post-modernism has been re-written as a largely theoretical event, what protection will the future have from the blinkered academics of the present, if Miss Courtney is representative then history becomes a state sponsored fiction with the academics as the heroes and heroines of the new 'genesis'?

The decision to make and the making of the tea set was mine. Danka and I were recently married so keen to have an egalitarian business that reflected a true partnership. I had been responsible for the previous designs we now looked to Danka's sketchbook to make an idea of hers, we chose the walking tea set. That Danka had already seen Richard's pot isn't in dispute, I was with her when we went to visit his degree show but neither is it in dispute as far as I am concerned that the drawings already existed in her sketch book, I was familiar with it anyway but even if I hadn't been the drawings were in a chronological position that made it impossible for them to have been inserted retrospectively, Danka didn't leave gaps like that. So how much did seeing Richard's pot stimulate the decision to make the tea set, well speaking for myself probably not at all, I barely remember seeing it and wasn't that impressed, for Danka it may have been a trigger, I know she liked Richard's pot, but then that was probably because it was like one of her ideas anyway. That would have reflected her general view. Richard undoubtedly contributed to the mood of the time.
You can see then, how Richard could wrongly form the conviction that his pot was the genesis seeing as he did only a part of the picture and how we may have failed even to consider it a possibility. It may be that it adds to the richness of the record that he continues to hold this conviction, I know that, as I made the walking tea set, it was done without any reference to Richard and it is hard for me to see in it any evidence of the values prevailing in his pots. If there is a debate then surely it must be for the historians. A debate to decide how to write relativist historical accounts without presenting absolute truths where none apply, and maybe having the moral dignity to admit fault and not the silly assertion that because 'it is what I heard it is true'. Miss Courtney take note and correct your ways before you bring shame on the profession and institutions you represent.

I very much admire Richard and certainly enjoyed and valued our friendship and I like to think that if his claims were true I would be happy to acknowledge them.
So a postscript. During the subsequent years it became clear, it was delightedly brought to my attention by many, that the idea of feet on pottery had been in the public domain since eternity, well at least the Romans, as there are pots with legs and feet made by them in both the British museum and a prominent New York museum. A large community of pottery makers in the near east for centuries made pots only with feet on, and they appear in Victorian children's illustration, twentieth century comics and cartoons, pantomime and stage design. So Miss Courtney what exactly does 'genesis' mean here?

Roger Michell Feb 2006