Wheel of good fortune

Fiona Russell begins an occasional series on craftsmen and women with John Hudson, potter.

It was the BBC's Interlude which John Hudson credits with sparking a life-time's obsession with the potter's wheel. Growing-up in Ravensthorpe, near Dewsbury, he and his family would gather around his nana's TV in Savile Town to watch the Sunday evening play. But live broadcasts in the 1950s didn't always run to time, and so "interludes" were inserted between programmes to keep the audience entertained.

Some were more successful than others: "There was one of the sea breaking against the rocks," says John. "If that was on, you'd go and make the tea. But the one of a potter's wheel was fascinating. I reckon it set a lot of people off."

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John was sufficiently inspired at 15 to try and make his own wheel using bicycle parts, a vice and a bit of old board. "I got some clay out of the field, started it spinning and then I tried to make a pot. Of course I made a mess. But it had fired my imagination and I kept going."

John and his father built his first (wood-fired) kiln while he was a student of fine art and ceramics at Cheltenham, and he bought an electric wheel when he returned to live in Mirfield. "It cost me 98. That was a lot of pots."

John taught in Dewsbury for five years, but in 1973 he decided to leave, "to concentrate on the pots". He was working in a deep litter house (for chickens) and selling his work mostly to friends. "It was arty-farty stuff, real rubbish. Most of it went wrong in the kiln". The turning point came in 1977 when he borrowed 1,500 from the Crafts Advisory Committee of the Arts Council and bought the electric kiln which he still uses. He also moved into a new pottery built for him by his brother. But crucially, by this time he had also found what he wanted to make. "I had been getting better, but I was making this pseudo-Japanese stone-ware. And then I thought, why not revive the West Riding pottery tradition? People have made pots in Yorkshire for 5,000 years."

Archaeologists frequently discover 2,000 year-old pots at Castleford and other northern strongholds of the Roman Empire. But Yorkshire was also renowned for its pottery in the Middle Ages. "Cistercian Ware", the most famous medieval pottery tradition in Britain, is so-called because of its connection with Yorkshire's Cistercian monasteries.

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It's the sixteenth and seventeenth-century pottery associated with the coal measures of south-west Yorkshire which has always interested John. The key is the clay, known locally as "Toff" or "Tough Tom", which accumulated beneath the coal seams 350m years ago. When fired, water is driven off from the yellow iron oxide in the clay and it turns a characteristic red colour.

The special properties of Toff Tom, its colour and its sturdiness, helped turn Wrenthorpe, near Wakefield, into one of the biggest pottery centres in England. The present village, in medieval times known as "Potovens", is built on top of potters' houses, workshops, kilns, and dumps.

But recovering evidence of the industry is painstaking work. For one thing, potters were poor people and they didn't leave much in the way of buildings and belongings. Place and surnames – such as Potter, Pothouses or Potter Street – survive (Wrenthorpe still has a Potovens Lane and a New Pot Oil pub). Potters sometimes appear in manorial records, leasing land and cutting wood for their kilns, and sometimes committing specific potting-related offences, such as digging clay without permission or failing to fill-in clay pits.

Evidence, however, is harder to come by. Dumps of discarded pottery and ruined kilns are the usual signs (and are easily scattered by a mechanical digger). But evidence of the potters' existence is even more difficult to find.

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In Wrenthorpe, it's confined to a few oyster shells, some shattered clay pipes and an animal bone or two.

Which is where John comes in useful to the archaeologists. He is a long-time member of the Medieval Pottery Research Group, but he has also been working with Toff Tom since the 1970s. At first he imported clay from Stoke. "Then one day, my dad was digging a drainage trench down in the field and he brought in a spade-full of clay and said 'Is this any good?' Thirty-seven years after starting to work with Toff Tom, I can look at a medieval pot and see how it was made."

As a result, he is frequently brought in to excavations such as a recent dig which uncovered a tenth century kiln at Pontefract. Here his skills and understanding of the techniques are vital in piecing together this once major, but now elusive Yorkshire industry.

Eighty per cent of John's work is now making reproductions, which he still finds fascinating. "It's the challenge of it – rediscovering old techniques, finding out what it felt like to make something."

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His work is in museums and large houses nationwide, and in many regional museums, such as Oakwell Hall, Shibden Hall and Clarke Hall. John recently made most of the wares for the newly rejuvenated Dover Castle and for the kitchens at Hampton Court Palace. His favourite job to date has been making the wares, floor and ridge tiles for Barley Hall, a medieval house which has been reconstructed off Stonegate in the centre of York.

"Barley Hall was the most challenging of all, really difficult to do," he says. And in the end parts of the project defeated even John and the team of archaeologists and people from a local community programme working with him. "We just couldn't order the weather." To be fair, the summer they were working on the roof tiles was (until then) the worst on record. They were to be fired in a purpose-built kiln in a field at New Earswick, but in the end the weather won. "It was too bad. It all went wrong. The tiles had to be bought from somewhere else and I thought I would be persona non grata with Yorkshire Archaeology." It's a fear that, fortunately, proved to be unfounded.

"It's been a great process of learning," says John. And after 37 years he knows for certain at least one thing: "The man who was throwing that pot on the Interlude, he knew what he was doing. He'd obviously been told to keep throwing for about six minutes, and now I realise he was using lots of different techniques to keep the thing going. At first when I watched it again, I thought, what is he doing? And then I realised. He was as good as I thought he was all those years ago."

www.hudsonclaypotter.co.uk

YP MAG 30/10/10

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