COLUMBIA

Behind the Scenes at the Museum 2 Keith rice-Jones

On a recent trip to England, we stayed with
Jim and Liz Robison in Holmfirth (Jim was a
presenter at last years Kelowna Clay Festival.)
Jim took us to the York Art Gallery which
had a small show 80 Pots Around the World,
featuring work by British potters who had
either moved to the UK from other countries
or had travelled and been influenced by other
cultures. The majority of the 80 pieces were
from the Bill Ismay Collection which the
gallery has recently taken on after Bill’s death
in 2001. Currently the gallery is setting up a
permanent exhibition space for their extensive
pottery collections. The few pots in the show
were just a teaser for the staggering collection
stored across town in a secure anonymous
museum facility where we were taken by
Helen Walsh, the Museum’s Assistant Curator
of Decorative Arts.

Jim Robison had been one of those who
encouraged Bill Ismay to put plans in place
for a succession of the collection as he had no
family. Jim was part of the team that went into
the house to retrieve the collection after Bill’s
death. Bill was anxious that the collection stay
together, preferably in Yorkshire. The York Art
Gallery were fortunate enough to be able to
put it alongside their existing Milner-White
collection of early studio pottery and. their
extensive collection of medieval pots.

Bill Ismay, who had been Wakefield
Librarian, had cared for little else in his life
except for collecting pots which he began

in 1955. Though he lived alone, he wasn’t

Neolithic pots in storage—just sitting out there on open shelves!

a recluse and enjoyed having people to his
small terraced house—one of his tricks being
to hand you a pot to see if you recognised the
maker. Pots on every conceivable surface made
it almost impossible to move in the house.
If you picked up one, you could reposition
it in the dust—but Bill would be sure to
follow and reset it, just so. At exhibitions, Bill
would ask for a sheet of red stickers and later
make payments when he could. He was the
most welcome sight at anyone’s opening. Bill
would travel around Britain and sometimes
to Europe by train and sometimes even by

Work by Hans Coper. The photo on the wall is of Ismay's own "display" of pots.

bicycle. Bill admired both the Miner-White
collection of early British studio pottery and
all the medieval pots at the York Gallery.

‘There are 3,670 pots in the collection from
over 500 potters, mostly British post-war from
Bernard and the rest of the Leach dynasty,
Hans Coper, Lucie Rie, Richard Batterham,
Jim Malone, John Maltby, William Staite
Murray, Shoji Hamada, Harry and May Davis,
Geoffrey Whiting and many more, including
makers from Japan, Africa, Australia,
Netherlands Europe, South America, USA
and Canada, represented by John Reeve and
John Chalke and possibly others. The bias
of the collection is functional but there are
more sculptural pieces by people like Gordon
Baldwin, Antonia Salmon and Jim Robison,
In 1982, William Alfred Ismay was awarded a
well-deserved Member of the British Empire
(M.B.E.) for his services to studio pottery. His
legacy is inspirational.

Being in the first room at the storage facility
felt a bit like being in Bill's house. Larger pots
covered tables and shelves leaving only tight
spaces between the metal cupboards which
were dense with smaller works. Besides the
large one on the side, there was a whole shelf
of Hans Coper—this room was only the first
part of the alphabet. Lucie Rie, Bernard Leach
and Shoji Hamada and all the others had their
own shelf of pots in later rooms...

I was able to handle a number of Ian Auld

Continued on Page 5, Handling Pots

Potters Guild of BC Newsletter - September 2009

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