Radio 4′s touching tribute to Enid Seeney, designer of iconic pottery at Ridgway Pottery.

The below is taken FROM Radio 4′s touching tribute to Enid Seeney, designer of iconic pottery at Ridgway Pottery which can be heard at here.

“Enid Seeney came up with one of the iconic pottery designs of the 1950s and 60s. Thousands of items of her ‘Homemaker’ range were sold in Woolworths stores across the UK, and now they’ve become very collectable. Enid was working at the Ridgway Pottery company in Stoke on Trent when she came up with the design. But, because the company didn’t credit its designers, her role was unknown until she was tracked down by a collector in the 1990s.

Last Word hears from the author Simon Moss who wrote the story of the Homemaker and to Miranda Goodby of the Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent.

Enid Seeney was born 2 June 1931 and died 8 April 2011.”

The Guardian also has a detailed obituary of the work and life of Enid Seeney, which can be read at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/08/enid-seeney-obituary

In the 18th century a fortuitous supply of clay, coal and canals coupled with the ambitions of great innovators such as Josiah Wedgwood propelled the ceramics industry of the Potteries – the group of six Staffordshire towns that would become the city of Stoke-on Trent – to the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. At its peak in the late 19th century the region was the epicentre of the world’s ceramic production, home to more than 2,000 kilns firing millions of products a year.

But within 100 years a sharp decline in British manufacturing, which led to the closure of mines, steelworks and factories, brought Stoke, and the industry that was integral to its identity, to its knees. As recently as the 1970s there were 200 factories still operating in the area; today there are about 30. Between 1998 and 2008 the Potteries lost more than 20,000 jobs. When Wedgwood – the sacred cow of Staffordshire ceramic production – called in the administrators and shut down its factory in 2009, it seemed to sound the death knell for the beleaguered industry.

The widespread hand-wringing about the state of Stoke-on-Trent is understandable, but thanks to a number of manufacturers who are staging a strong fightback we must avoid the urge to write the Potteries’ epitaph just yet. One of these is the formidable Emma Bridgewater, who came to the area in 1985 in search of a pottery to produce her designs. What she found was an industry in disarray, crippled by ‘bad 1970s-style management’. It was never her intention to be a manufacturer, but when the maker she had been using went bust in 1992 she stepped in and bought the factory, keeping its 35 staff on. Within five years her friendly, sponge-painted tableware designs (particularly her Polka Dot pattern) were in such demand that the company outgrew the premises and bought the much larger former Johnson Brothers factory on the Caldon Canal.

Today Bridgewater is the most high-profile member of Stoke-on-Trent’s new guard, and has championed British manufacture on television (Newsnight) and radio (Woman’s Hour), while the success of her company is a recurrent theme of newspaper business pages. What motivates Bridgewater is the unrealised potential that she sees in the region. ‘What we need to do is roll our sleeves up and get to work,’ she says. ‘And if we are going to make it here in Stoke-on-Trent, then we need to make it well. I’m not interested in making the cheapest mug.’

Her tactics are clearly working. At the end of the recession Emma Bridgewater’s profits were up by 40 per cent, and over the past 18 months she has increased her staff from 220 to 265. The company produces more than 5,000 mugs, bowls and plates every day. ‘I’m aware we are a global economy, but there is a lot to be said for jobs closer to home,’ she says. ‘Our success proves that companies really can still be successful at manufacturing in this country.’

Ask Britain’s leading ceramics designer, Emma Bridgewater, why she came to Stoke-on-Trent to build her world-renowned business, and she will tell you it’s all about the history and culture of the city. The craftmanship, design and ingenuity that turned six towns in north Staffordshire into the famous Potteries remains apparent some 250 years on.

And that story is told in no better place than the Wedgwood Museum. Situated on the Barlaston site of the Wedgwood pottery firm, this is no mausoleum to a lost industry but a prize-winning celebration of manufacture and design. Dedicated to “The People Who Have Made Objects of Great Beauty from the Soils of Staffordshire”, the museum houses 8,000 pieces of exquisite elegance, stretching back to the earliest days of Josiah Wedgwood’s works.

But all this could go under the auctioneer’s hammer. Thanks to a legal wrangle, the museum could face liquidation. The Pension Protection Fund – designed to secure savings lost through company collapse – is heading to the High Court this month to see if the museum’s collection should be sold off to cover a £134 million debt to former Wedgwood employees (none of whom is out of pocket from the case). This fire sale cannot be allowed to happen. For if we lose the museum, we lose the thread to a culture stretching back half a millennium.

Pottery was being thrown around Stoke-on-Trent from the late 1500s. Out of the brown and yellow Staffordshire clay came butterpots and flowerpots. In the sun kilns of Bagnall and Penkhull, local artisans started to glaze their earthenware and develop a reputation for craftsmanship. In the late 17th century came high-heat salt-glazing, then biscuitware and finally creamware.

On the continent, at Dresden and Delft, the Saxons and the Dutch were doing the same. But Europe’s ceramicists long remained in the shadow of China, which had mastered the magic of porcelain, the famous blue-and-white ceramic formed by kaolin in clay. “China” (Britain’s new word for pottery and porcelain) became the 18th-century rage.

It was Josiah Wedgwood who realised Stoke was missing a trick. From his Etruria factory, Wedgwood innovated with the firing of iron and manganese. He dumped the familiar tortoiseshell and agate designs and tried out a new process of copper-plate transfers.

It allowed him to unleash a volley of new designs – flowers, birds, and love scenes – that caught the attention of even Queen Charlotte. His trademark Jasper and basalt production followed. Soon, Chinese porcelain imports were edged out of the market as Wedgwood’s factories drove prices down.

Here was where the English Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were born. Mass production accelerated with the likes of Mintons, Spode, and Johnson Brothers seizing the market. Meanwhile, the cityscape was transformed into a brick Manhattan of towering oven-kilns.

“It is not beautiful in detail, but the smoke transforms its ugliness into a beauty transcending the work of architects and of time,” Arnold Bennett wrote of Burslem.

The world took note. Catherine the Great admired Wedgwood’s enamel “Frog” service. In Boston, the gentry drank their tea from Staffordshire cups and saucers. Meanwhile, Minton’s tiles could be found on the floor of the Capitol Building in Washington, churches in Tasmania, and clock towers in Bombay. The British Empire was serviced from Staffordshire.

The story is told with sophistication and scholarship at the Wedgwood Museum. It is testament to one man’s inspiration and an urban civilisation’s achievement. If this was a museum displaying the artefacts of ancient Greece or the indigenous art of the Maya, there would be an international outcry at its potential loss. But this is Britain, and we remain uncomfortable with championing manufacturing.

Over the past 30 years, just as County Durham has erased its pit-heads, Manchester its cotton mills and Birmingham its workshops, so the Potteries has cleared its pot-banks and bottle-kilns. But this disdain must end: if we want to re-balance the British economy and wean ourselves off financial services, we should begin with some pride in our industrial history. Not least because the ceramics sector is booming again. After years of job losses and out-sourcing, new companies and young creatives are back at work in north Staffs inspired by the city’s great heritage.

For Stoke, the dispersal of the Wedgwood collection would be an act of cultural vandalism. Its demise would be to strike at the very meaning of the Potteries – the ethos that still attracts, in Emma Bridgewater and others, our modern Wedgwoods.