Svend Bayer

Svend Bayer interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 20th October 2022

0:00:00 Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1946 to Danish parents. My father was an engineer and he went out to Africa before the Second World War to work on a Danish-owned sugar plantation and ended up working for big electrical companies running power stations. Wikipedia is wrong in stating that I am Anglo-Danish, I am totally Danish. My father's father was a chemist and he also trained as a brewer. He owned a brewery in Denmark which is still going. My father was born in a place called Assens. My mother's father was a businessman. My father's father died when my father, who was the youngest of nine children, was twelve, so I never met him. Apparently he was a pretty unpleasant man, he was a bully. My other grandfather, I could have met. We returned to Denmark as soon as possible after the War as my parents hadn't seen their parents or family since 1937, and my mother's father was still alive. I have no recollection of him in 1947. We went back to Africa and I spent my entire childhood there. I was born in Uganda but we lived in Tanganyika and also in Kenya. I lived in Africa until I was fifteen. Childhood in Africa to me was normal, to other people it seems very exotic. Going to Denmark aged 15 was a huge shock because, although I understood Danish I had never had to write or read Danish which put me at a fairly big disadvantage. Unfortunately, in their wisdom, my parents decided after six months in Denmark to send me to school in England. So I went from the best school I had ever been to to the worst, and my parents had no idea what they had done. But I think one of the reasons was that their marriage was ending and they needed the privacy.

3:53:09 I think my first memory that isn't aided by photographs is my third birthday, and being taken to Kampala to have my first proper haircut. I assume that my mother had cut my hair up to that point. I remember going into a barber's shop and everything being huge and very frightening, and a man with scissors which scared me. I was really, really frightened. Then and a treat I was taken to see the film, 'Bambi', and as you know the story, Bambi ends very badly. So the whole day was a complete disaster. My parents moved from Kampala to Dar es Salaam on the coast when I was four, and I guess my first school was a kindergarten. I was kind of brought up with the younger of my two sisters – we were like a pair, and my older two siblings were another pair. She also went to school for the first time, so she would have been six. She was at a convent, and I suspect that the kindergarten was attached to the convent. It was a beautiful building with a thatched roof and open sides – in Africa they are called banda – and the teaching happened there. My abiding memory of that is that the white ants had eaten the posts, and one afternoon the whole roof collapsed on top of us. Only one boy was hurt but it made a big impression.

6:12:04 I think I am more like my father than my mother. My father was a little bit introverted. He was very good at his work, he loved it, was very inventive, and being an engineer in Africa during the War meant that you had to be able to fix things. You couldn't import anything and these were big engines that he was using. Another thing that comes back to me is that much later my father as an old man used to come and visit us every summer at my pottery in Sheepwash in Devon where I had a very big kiln. Once when he came I was firing it and I could tell that he desperately wanted to get his hands on the kiln and I desperately didn't want him to do it. It was my living and I wasn't very kind to him. Eventually I very ungraciously said that I was going for a walk and that everything better be OK when I came back. It was a bit of a threat. When I came back, everything was going much, much better than I'd ever done before, and my father patiently explained to me that I had the kiln opening too wide so that so much air was being sucked in that any gain in temperature was being lost. He said that if you think about old men in Britain making a coal fire, they hold a newspaper in front of it. You actually only need a tiny amount of air going through, but it needs to be going through very rapidly, and that is how you get a temperature increase. He told me that during the War this power station in the middle of Africa was fired using Welsh coal. But the ships coming round the Cape carrying coal never even made it round the Cape, they were all sunk. So at a certain point he had to fire the power station with wood, and that is where his knowledge of firing wood came from. He was very inventive, also a very kind, gentle man. Very well read, spoke excellent English, and my mother was very different. She was eleven years younger, very vivacious and I think very impatient with my father. She was also quite ambitious. I found her as a child to be quite a frightening person – she wasn't nasty, and a very positive person, but if you came home from school having done something that you were proud of her reaction was that actually you could have done it better. A lot of that can be a bit damaging.

9:48:10 We spoke Danish at home and my parents always spoke English to each other. Until the age of four I would have known English and Swahili, but as soon as we ventured out into the world it was entirely English. Both my sister and I liked to draw and paint. My sister became an entomologist, but even at that age she was very interested in animals and insects and I just used to follow her around. I was not making mud pies or pots, but I do have a fairly famous ancestor who was pottery related. My name Bayer in German, it's Bavarian, and my great-great-great grandfather was invited to come to Denmark when the Royal Copenhagen porcelain factory was in it's infancy. He was a porcelain painter and was actually one of their most famous painters. He painted a set for Catherine the Great which was never delivered because she died. It is called the Flora Danica set. If you imagine that this was in the 1760s, at the time of Linnaeus, and this man was fascinated by plants. He used to take his family over to Sweden and Norway to draw and paint flowers. That collection is still around. Personally I think is is awful, but..it is in Denmark.

12:27:03 All the schools that I went to in Africa were based on the English Public School system. Very, very harsh discipline, everything was in houses, and you were basically taught to compete from an early age. Sport was incredibly important. It was a primary school. I was horribly shy as a kid and remember being frightened most of the time. I was not particularly good at games. To this day I can't throw a ball in the right direction, can't kick in the right direction, so I am fairly hopeless as a grandfather. I was very good at running and swimming, but those are solitary things. At this school the art mistress could see that I has something special and that was really important. Her name was Miss Eliot. She taught painting and I could draw and paint even though I am colour blind, but she wasn't bothered that I confused red and green. It is and it isn't a disadvantage. I was married to a painter for twenty-seven years and we used to have these very one-sided arguments. She was like someone with perfect pitch, she could differentiate between very closely related colours, and she thought it was just a question of education, but it isn't. There is something missing in the eye. However, it is a very difficult conversation to have because I have no idea what you see, you have no idea what I see, and you can't really go very far with the conversation. Maybe what I see is even more interesting that what you see. There were really no other teachers at that school who influenced me. I was reasonably good at everything. I wasn't that great at mathematics but was always in the top few. I began to lose interest in music. It was a mixed school and I think that probably at the end of my time at that school at eleven, some of the boys' voices were breaking and they sounded awfully...I used to sing really well, but this very high-pitched voice seemed a bit...I guess I was really a bit ashamed of it. I then went on to the strangest school you can imagine. It was a place called Kongwa right in the middle of Tanganyika. I don't know if you have heard of the thing called the groundnut scheme in the 1950s which was a disaster. Kongwa was the epicentre of that place, and they built the whole prefabricated town, and it just lasted a few years. Then they turned it into a boarding school. It was the most extraordinary place. Again, it was mixed. I am not sure how good the teaching was. I know that quite a few of the people who went through to the sixth form went of Oxford, Cambridge, places like that, so there must have been a reasonable standard of teaching. But it was the freedom to go wherever you wanted. You couldn't run away because where would you go? It was actually quite wild, the things that we would get up to. I was right on the periphery of it. I am not a very courageous or gung-ho person but I would watch open-mouthed as people got up to all sorts of stuff.

18:28:03 Racism was there all the time. My parents were not racists. I think it is a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form of racism in that the sun never set on the Empire, and I think there was a degree of self-congratulation. I imagine that most of the people that I had to do with thought that God spoke English. It was a racism which was very close to a class thing. It just so happened that the lower classes were easily identified because they were black, and black people were talked down to. That just kind of seemed normal and used to infuriate my father. I had one black friend and that was our cook's son. He was my age, and up until the age of about eight we were chums and then it stopped.
Our cook was a real kind of father-figure for me. He laughed a lot, but you didn't mess with him. We also had a gardener and he was incredible, he was so intelligent and kind. Everyone used to have a nap after lunch and sleep for about an hour. I couldn't so used to go and irritate him, and he would read me in Kiswahili all Rudyard Kipling's stories, and he would make up things. He was wonderful.

20:45:00 All the schools were Church of England and we had assembly every morning when something was read from the Bible. That happened throughout my education. There was Confirmation but I was not Confirmed. It was not an act of rebellion but just never interested me so I didn't put myself forward. When I was very small religion used to frighten me as I was being a bad boy all the time as far as I could tell. I know quite a bit of the Bible because it was read to us every single day and some of the stories are lovely. I think if you take the example of Christ and the things that he was meant to have done, that is a wonderful way to lead your life. But formal Christianity I loath. I think that the hierarchy that exists, the things that have been done in the name of religion which have absolutely nothing to do with what the man Christ was said to have stood for, I think it is appalling. I just think that people that accept that are just idiots. Curiously enough though I know nothing about it, I kind of like what I hear about Quakers. Buddhism, Islam, no.

23:05:24 At fifteen I went to a wonderful school in Denmark. What I liked about it was how inclusive they were. It may sound a little bit weird – again, mixed school, boys and girls – and we were taught rather than compete with each other was to co-operate with each other, so the class worked as a unit. It took me a long time to understand what was going on, and at that point, when I finally did, my parents moved me to school in England. It was a terrible school and just an entirely negative experience. The school is an embarrassment. It is called Colston School, and Edward Colston is the man whose statue was pulled down in Bristol. Colston was a slave trader, he also was a philanthropist, he also owned brothels – he was a man of his time, and I think the school was set up for the children of impoverished priests. I think at the time it was going though an extremely bad phase. I was sixteen when I went there so no one was going to bully me. I arrived on 1st February 1962. Formal teaching had stopped because everyone was now taking their mock 'O' levels, and it was just revision, revision, revision. I had had this brilliant education in Denmark but my English education had suffered. One thing that suffered terribly was my spelling. I'd been reasonably good at spelling, but when I learnt to spell in Danish it is a totally different system – to this day I can't spell. So I arrived and no-one actually helped me, no one said gosh, you are going to be taking 'O' levels in three months time, how are you going to do it? So I sat down and worked out my best possibilities and anything that was too difficult I just pushed to one side and ignored it. So I had to do maths but I didn't do any of the sciences, which I regret because although I wasn't very good at physics I was good at chemistry and very good at biology. I just had to rationalize what I could cope with in that time and I worked extremely hard and I got my 8 'O' levels – history, English, Art, and Danish, German. There were no teachers who inspired me except for the school Chaplain, who taught history. If you bothered to listen to him he was incredible. But he was a very bad disciplinarian and eventually he was kicked out. In the sixth form he taught us European history from the Italian reunification and the reunification of Germany, right up to the First World War. These were subjects where you are dealing with the enemy, Italians and Germans, and it was dealt with really well. One thing that really stuck with me was he spoke about the First World War, saying that it was almost inevitable. Every single country was armed to the hilt, and that everyone was complicit in this, and it is wrong just to blame the enemy because everyone is at fault. That was was the first time I had heard that. It was a kind of compassion. I took English, Geography and History at 'A' level and passed them all. I went back to school after the Summer term in order to do the Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams. I failed the Cambridge one – actually I was sick and tired of doing exams by that stage – but the Oxford one I passed and I went up and had an interview at Mansfield College where my housemaster had gone, and was accepted, but as I was leaving it was noticed that I did not have Latin. I said I had given it up three schools back, but when told I would have to get it I just didn't bother. I had places at Exeter among others and went there. By the way, I was Head Boy at that school.

30:52:17 I had a very good friend from my childhood who didn't pass any exams at all. He lived in Southampton where there was a college where I did about three Latin classes before losing interest. But what I did do was sort of “GCSE Life”. I wasn't going to do any exams at all and just enjoyed myself for two terms, and then went to Exeter to read Economics and Geography. Exeter was a very, very sleepy university. I had a lovely time but really did the minimum amount. To be honest, looking back, I don't think I should have gone to university. I'm actually quite good with my hands and I wish that I'd learnt something properly, like carpentry or even building. I only did all this, believe it or not even to this day, to please people, and this was to please my parents and my teachers.

32:35:00 Very soon after I went to Exeter, probably in the Fresher Week, I met a lovely girl called Linda and her previous boyfriend had been a potter, so she initially bored the pants off me talking about this potter. But actually, the more she talked about it, the more she took me to look at potteries in different places, the more interested I became. Then she bought me Leach's Potter's book. Leach is the sort of father-figure of modern ceramics in Britain of a particular kind, and in that book I saw work by Michael Cardew. Of all the people who's work was in that book, his pots were the ones that to me were outstanding. Exeter isn't far from Bodmin which is where he was, so we hitched out and stayed nearby. Michael wasn't there as he was away in Australia or somewhere, but I just fell in love with the place. At Exeter I don't think I had much respect for the subjects or myself for what I was doing. Honestly, I was on a declining momentum of education. I got by. You had to be pretty damn bad not to get by, so I passed. The day I passed my finals I went to a second-hand shop and I handed in my suit, my ties, white shirts, the works, and that was the last time I wore anything like that. My girlfriend and I went back to her home near Twyford, Reading, and just got odd jobs and lived together. Finally it dawned on me that I had to get real. So I wrote to Michael Cardew and he invited me down for an interview. I hitch-hiked down, then I walked the last few miles – it is very romantic, hilly, on the edge of Bodmin Moor, and it was snowy. My girlfriend came with me and stayed in a B&B and I went on by myself. When you come down into the valley it is wooded, with lovely bare oak and ash, and beech trees, then the smell of wood-smoke. In those days that was really unusual in England. It was coal, & coal has a particularly nasty sulphurous smell. Smell is one of those things that take you straight back to where you came from, because Africa smells of wood-smoke. So I met this man, he was kind of rangy and sounded like an academic. There was a woman there who was much younger than him, and a baby, and I remember being horrified that the baby was actually crawling in the fireplace. I was on the edge of my seat and I thought this was Michael Cardew's mistress but it turned out that this was his daughter-in-law, and the baby turned into a lovely person. The interview went really well and he took me on. The deal was that I could stay for six months but I had to pay my keep. So then I went back to Denmark and I had three jobs at the same time – I basically didn't sleep. I did sleep, but had a job as a night porter at an hotel, and that's when I slept. I also worked in a dairy early in the morning, stacking crates, and then I worked at a shipyard. I went there early January and worked through until the end of April, and I saved enough.

37:23:00 I worked at Michael Cardew's pottery for three and a half years. First year I paid my keep. Next year I wasn't paid anything but my keep, and the third year I was paid 10% of the sale of my pots. But that all seemed absolutely fair to me. I would say that in the time there I gained the momentum which has kept me going for the rest of my life. It wasn't really an apprenticeship because Michael didn't actually sit down and teach me, you start with this and move onto that and so on, it was actually....he also was a man with a very quick temper and if I hadn't been to those sorts of schools that I had been to it would have frightened me. But I understood about cranky old masters and just keeping a low profile round them. If you watched him too closely while he was throwing he would just turn on you so you had to watch out of the corner of your eye. But actually, once I got into clay I knew that I was at home. So no formal teaching, just observation. Then mealtimes were like the best tutorials I have ever been to because he just talked – he held court – and he talked about everything, so I learnt a lot there. He would talk about pottery, philosophy, politics – I had done economics so an awful lot of his politics wasn't that clever, but he was a good talker. Leach was influenced by Japanese pottery, but Cardew hated anything Japanese, not as a xenophobe but because he had had it rammed down his throat at the Leach pottery. Also, Michael's real interest was English country pottery, earthenware and slip decoration. It was interesting for me...I met Leach quite a few times and compared to Michael Cardew he wasn't in the same league at all. He struck me as being rather a stuffy Englishman. He looked more like a bank manager than a potter, and he behaved like a bank manager. I didn't think that his pottery was near as good as Michael's. Michael's, if you'll excuse the expression, had balls.

40:17:04 This experience set me up for life. For the first time I was doing something for myself because I wanted to do it. My father sensed what was happening and he was pleased on my behalf. My mother not so much. I think she had hoped that I would do more with my life. Eventually, many years later when she was a old woman and living in Bath - she had remarried, and married a Welshman. Outside her house there was a park and there was a craft-fare there, and a friend of mine had a stand. So my mother went up to him and got talking to him, and eventually she had to say that she had a son who was a potter. The guy asked his name. She said Svend Bayer, and he said Svend was his hero, and at that point my mother finally accepted that maybe I was doing the right thing. After I left Cardew I went to work at the last remaining traditional pottery in North Devon. North Devon has an incredible history of earthenware pottery which goes way back and at one time it was more important than Stoke on Trent. They exported stuff all over the South-West into Wales. The factory where I worked, even when it began in the 1870s didn't have the same earthiness that the other places which had probably gone out of business by then. So I learnt how to throw. Whereas at Wenford if I made 20 pots a day that was considered too much, the same sort of pots I would have to make at least 120 to break even and I found that I could do it. I got really good feedback, and even the boss, the owner of the pottery, Mr Brannam, he looked like a crane, very long-legged and sort of elegant, very smartly dressed, and he would come through the pottery intimidating people. But then because he found that I had been to university he would come and have man to man conversations with me. At one point he offered me the job of works manager. He said that the works manager was actually quite ill and he's not going to be with us much longer, and was I interested? I didn't say no, and I knew that I wasn't interested, but it meant that I got really good treatment. He encouraged the man who made all the big pots – he was 64 when I was there – and after work he would stay on an hour extra, I think paid by Mr Brannam, to teach me how to make big pots. Unfortunately, while I was there my best friend from when I was at Wenford, a man called Todd Piker, an American who had rather wealthy parents who lived in New York, and I was approached by his father to invite me over. - he would pay for the tickets and everything – to look at two properties they had bought which was actually to set up a pottery. Furthermore, would I be interested in setting the pottery up with his son. At that stage I knew an awful lot more than his son but we got on really well. So I had to ask permission to go and I spun some story about having to go home because of a family problem. Mr Brannam was very kind and said of course I should go home and hoped that everything would be sorted out, and he really looked forward to having me back. Anyway, I came back two weeks later and didn't tell anyone where I had been. Unfortunately Mr Piker, Todd's father, sent me a letter and he didn't remember my address and sent it care of Brannams. I guess Mr Brannam just opened it as it landed on his desk. It was a letter thanking me for my time and for the help in choosing a pottery, and talking about a future where I would be working there. Anyway, Mr Brannam came in with a face like thunder & put the letter in front of me – life wasn't very good for me at Brannams from then on

45:38:15 My making of big pots started at Wenford. Michael used to make big pots too and his method of coiling was the one that I adapted. At Brannams it was just throwing one piece of clay so the biggest I would have thrown there was 40lb of clay, which is quite a lot. I had this offer to set up the pottery in America but I wanted to go to the Far East. I had to see how the potteries worked there, had to see the kilns. It was a completely romantic idea. Once when I was at Wenford there was a young potter, and he had been through Thailand on his way through Europe and he described some of the kilns, the old kilns some dating from the Song dynasty. The description of them was so entrancing, they were beautiful objects in themselves, and I knew that I had to see them before I died. Also in pottery books there would be tantalizing glimpses of Japanese and Korean kilns and the pots. I was married then and my wife and I saved our money and we went on the Trans-Siberian Railway across to Japan. We were totally naïve. We hadn't realized that in Japan you are nothing without an introduction so we were continually pushed away. But finally we made it as far as Mashiko, and Michael Cardew had been at the Leach pottery and had overlapped with Hamada for a bit, and I think they both respected each other. They both had pots of each other's. When we arrived in Mashiko, from books I could recognise his compound right down at the end of the main street and beyond some rice fields on a hillside. Anyway, we walked there with our rucksacks, went through the kind of entrance, and then is was if we were made of glass, we were invisible, people just looked straight through us. Anyway, I walked around and looked at kilns and I was absolutely enthralled. Then as I was walking back from a kiln a little boy was standing on a wall and he peed on me. I thought, OK I think we have done something wrong here, so we left. We walked round the corner and there was a European who was apparently living in a small hut and was hanging out his washing. We went up to him as asked if he spoke English. He said he was English and we explained our predicament. We said we wanted to put a tent up. He laughed at us saying this is Japan. You don't just put a tent up. No one does that. There aren't even any camp sites. But he said we could stay with him. So we stayed with him for several weeks. We told him what had happened and he said he had lived outside Hamada's compound for three years and that he didn't ever expect to talk with him. Around here he is like God and you don't speak to God. I said I had come a long way and there had to be a way, what about the Cardew connection? He didn't seem to think that would work but he came up with a brilliant solution. Hamada had a son called Atsuya who had been at the Leach pottery at the same time as Richard Batterham. Richard Batterham was not exactly a mentor but he approved of me. There is ten years difference in age so there was no possibility of a friendship, but he liked what I did. So we concocted this story that I would go in and ask for Atsuya and would say that I was a friend of Richard Batterham who had asked me to pass on his kind regards. Atsuya stood up, washed his hands, took us and we met Hamada and we spent the rest of the day with Hamada who invited me to a firing, not to participate but just to watch. That was incredible. He also gave us an introduction to Shimaoka who is another famous potter in Mashiko, then also to a potter in Tamba. Then that is how we really got into them. Hamada was lovely. He was rotund and friendly, very friendly, but there was something that I found quite disturbing. He was really lovely to us. He was an Anglophile. He dressed like an Englishman, and he also loved marmalade so we had to taste twenty different marmalades. Lunch was brought, tea later on, but anyway I noticed he lived in a traditional house so that at one corner there was a big room, and I'm not sure where people slept. But there was one room that was lower than the others and that was the kitchen. I noticed that there was a woman waiting in the kitchen, and she waited patiently for a long long time. Finally Hamada turned to her and she was a journalist. Anyway, lots of bowing, and he spoke a few words to her and then she backed out almost on her knees, bowing. And I thought, that can't be good for you to be treated like that. But that was the only cloud.

51:56:10 From Japan we went to Korea and Korea is a really important place if you like pottery. Unfortunately the only tradition that remains is the high-fired earthenware they call Onggi pots. I say unfortunately, I mean that all the stoneware that's made now is kind of made by people like me. They are not made by traditional potters and you sense there is something missing. But the Onggi potters, the people who make them are like the bottom of the social heap and their work is entirely utilitarian. Some of it is just stunningly beautiful. It is all coiled, a mixture of coiling and throwing and fired in huge kilns. The people were far more approachable than the Japanese, almost too much. With Japanese we never knew where we stood. We weren't sure if we were acceptable or if we were just weird strangers – smelly, long noses, blue eyes. In Korea, one thing they hate the Japanese, but they are also really easy-going, so much so that I experienced racism for the first time. Standing in the queue with my then wife at a bus stop, an old man, traditionally dressed, came over and spoke to me. When he realised that I couldn't speak Korean a little crowd gathered and he was entertaining them. Then he knelt down tweaked the hairs on my leg and made a baboon gesture, and I thought, OK that's how it feels. We did not go to China. This was 1973 and China was not really open and it would have been very difficult to go. We did see lots of climbing kilns in both Japan and Korea. I saw kilns there that were just huge, and they were fired so regularly. That just changed my perception of what pottery was about, and it seemed that everything that Leach stood for was tiny and safe. It made me look at everything I had done up to that point just the beginning of something. We were away for about ten or eleven months, maybe two months in Japan, two months in Korea, and then we took an American coaster to the Philippines rather than fly. We had been there for a month and had to wait another month for the ship, and then we went back to all the places that we'd really liked. There was one place in particular which is in the very south of South Korea, and the man who made the big pots there – it seemed to be like extended families that ran these potteries, very specialized so there would be one person making big pots, another person making small bowls and so on. Then the man making the big pots had an apprentice whose basic job was keeping him supplied with clay because he used to get through a lot of clay. Just watching him work it was so unhurried and yet at the end of the day there would just be these enormous pots, maybe 20, 30 , 40 of them. It was like watching something natural growing. I love good manners but I hate good manner that are designed to show you your place. He had the good manners of somebody who was actually inclusive. He invited us to have a meal with him and it was like being entertained by royalty. We had no language in common but just the way that he approached the meal and his generosity and kindness to us was astounding. Then we went on to the Philippines. That was interesting. They don't make stoneware there. The Philippines was like and entrepôt for Chinese commerce and it is just crawling with Chinese pottery. The first evening we arrived – we travelled with a Frenchmen who was going back to New Caledonia and I think he was a bit puzzled by us – anyway, the first night we found a place to stay and then we went for a walk. We past one of many antique shops and pots were just stacked 4-5 feet high, plates, and I was like a little boy in a chocolate factory. There was so much stuff I couldn't make up my mind what to have. In fact I learnt a very important lesson then. It isn't important to have, it is actually important to see. The Frenchman turned to my wife and commented that it had already turned me on. Then from there we went to Singapore and up through Malaya looking, and the Chinese kilns are very much like the Korean kilns but much much bigger. They are called Dragon kilns and some of those kilns are 220ft long, and two grown men could run a race inside them they are so big. Again, that just blew my mind.

59:06:00 After this I went to America and I set up the pottery with Todd in Connecticut. We were there for eleven months and in that time I designed the kiln based on what I'd seen. It was a fairly big kiln. I think Matthew's kiln would fit thirteen times into that, and we made all the kiln furniture ourselves. We found all the materials, and that was an incredible experience. Unfortunately it didn't look like we were going to get a green card. My wife got pregnant and lost the first baby. Fortunately for us the local doctor just came and saw her and made sure that she was OK, and didn't charge us. But he said there were going to be complications next time and so that was one of the reasons that we moved back to England. That is when I set up Duckpool Cottage, the pottery. We were there for about 45 years.

1:00:25:12 When I came across pottery and began to make pots it came really easily. It is a form of self-expression. I don't know about anyone else because I can't get in anyone else's head, but I have a very weak understanding of who I am and what my purpose is. One of the things...I am the youngest of four children and really what I had to say as a child didn't count for anything at all. The others made all the decisions. I'm a bit passive and went along with what other people wanted for me. When I began to make pots I got a lot of encouragement from Michael Cardew and he could see something. It didn't come easily but I felt I had been here before, I know this. So it was the first time that I got an inkling of who I am, so it's self-expression. It may seem like a strange thing to say but I think that is as close as I can get to it. I hesitate to call myself an artist but I think that a painter or a writer when they are creating, all the other stuff is just peripheral. Hamada is supposed to have said something like having spent the first half of his life learning how to, and the second half, forgetting. I found the learning bit really interesting and very fulfilling. It wasn't arduous. It came naturally. But what I would say is that technique – and we all have to learn technique – is there simply to help you to create. But if you are concerned about technique you are never going to create anything. The technique will get in the way and I think that with a lot of people, that is where they stop. They get this technique but they don't get beyond that. I don't know how one does get beyond that. When I went to Wenford it seemed to me that having been starved all my life finally I was being fed banquet after banquet after banquet. It was extraordinary. I don't know. Learning to pot – I think they call it muscle memory when you reach a point where you no longer have to think about it. I didn't serve a proper apprenticeship or anything like that. On the whole the feedback that I got was that I was doing something right. But I didn't even need the feedback, I knew it. Pottery is very complicated. You can't just do it in five minutes. There are processes, and sometimes the processes are separated by quite a long period of time. Sometimes the end of the process doesn't work, but the in between bit does. I talked about this one man that we went back to in Korea. I talked about his manners. That was just part of it. His pots – there is no such thing as perfection and that is not what anyone should be looking for because that is a dead end. You can't get there anyway, and why would you want to. But his pots – their form was right - and throughout Korea these Onggi potters were essentially making the same pots for the same purpose. Some of them, you could see for them it was a job and what they did worked, but it wasn't beautiful. With others it was like poetry. There is something about a good form increases it's – not monetary value, but value a hundredfold. It just stands out. My favourite pot of all time is one which I first saw in a catalogue from a museum in Holland. It is a pot exported through a place called Martaban in Burma – these pots are called Martaban pots and they are exported all over the subcontinent of India and South East Asia. These are big storage jars. When I saw the picture of it I knew that I had to go and see the pot. On a trip back to Denmark we stopped in this place, and sure enough it is a big pot three feet high, three foot at the shoulders and you would think that it was very manly. But it isn't at all. It's very very feminine. It gives solace, it wants to protect you. I had to write about it once and I said …

My older brother became very ill during the Second World War before I was born with an illness called bilharzia, which nowadays can be cured quite easily but then the cure was almost worse than the disease.....So he stayed for four years from seven till he was eleven with relatives. My father had three sisters who came to England from Denmark and they all married into the Plymouth Brethren religion. One of the sisters married a GP in Blackburn, close enough to Liverpool which had the only hospital treating tropical diseases in those days, and my brother very nearly died of this disease....I have two sisters, but what a really wanted was my brother who is seven years older than me. When he finally turned up he was like a grown-up as far as I was concerned. He was like God. But I remember building him a hut of palm leaves where he and I could chill out, and I remember falling asleep in it, in the shade..

And this pot gave the same feeling of a safe place to fall asleep where you would be shaded from the sun, and not many pots have that sort of effect on me. Pots are made in Burma of that sort of shape, but this is very definitely stoneware whereas those pots are mainly very high-fired earthenware, and some people think it came from either China or Japan. There are pots from certain periods in China that I like. Everyone goes on about the Song Dynasty. Actually, for me an awful lot of it so ornate and over-the-top. Technically it is perfection but, as I've said. I am not looking for perfection....I have not been to Jingdezhen but we're talking about Song pots and the pots that come from these kilns. There are also famous celadon pots – I am afraid I have forgotten the name of where they come from but it refers to the names of the kilns they came from. These kilns were huge and I don't think that the people who fired them had white-knuckle control over what they were doing. So you would get the full range of pots, over-fired, under-fired, oxidised, reduced, but all of them had something to offer. So like the very best which is what we see nowadays, if you dropped one of those you would probably have had your head chopped off because they actually belong to the local Baron, or if not him, to the Emperor. Whereas the other rubbish stuff, that went to the peasants and that stuff got broken. So I have favourite pots but not periods.

1:15:22:05 If a young person asked me whether they should be a potter, they probably shouldn't be a potter. If asked how to set about it I would show them the door and say they should go and look. No one told me where to go. I don't really have advice to give. We can get on to something which will take a little time, it is important but may not be included. Six years ago I was invited by someone to set up a kiln near where I used to live in Devon. My understanding was that I would be setting up a kiln for three people who had helped me – I used to fire for six days at a time. You can't do that by yourself, you need people to help you. I was quite happy to have anyone off the street to help me provided they did what I said. But there are three people who have helped me consistently over the years and I wanted to pay something back. Well this person asked me what I wanted to do in the future with my life. I told her that I did not want to make as many pots but to be a bit more thoughtful about what I made, but also I would like to give these three people an opportunity to get into wood-firing because it is becoming increasingly difficult, and this would be a way of paying my debt. The impression I got from this woman was I could do it all.....the reason why I didn't want to do it at Duckpool Cottage where I used to live and was coming to the end of my time there, would mean that if they became dependent on the kiln I couldn't really sell it. The kiln would be there and these people would be using it. That was my dilemma. Anyway this woman said I could do it all here. I took her at her word, I pulled my kilns down, sold my house and I moved there, and suddenly everything changed. What she really had wanted and hadn't been honest with me was a place for teaching firing to anyone who was interested. Well, suddenly everything changes because actually if people come....I'm not denigrating people taking courses, not at all, but it is kind of making a mockery of what I have done. If you really want to do that you have got to be driven to do it because in terms of disappointment and heartache the stuff that you will lose.... I would say in my life if you balance things up I have done things marginally, just marginally more correct than wrong. If that doesn't seem like a good deal then my way of doing things is not your way.