He was born above a butcher's shop in Hull but John Clappison became one of the most influential ceramics designers of the 20th century. As a new exhibition of his work is launched, he talks to Sue Mason . . .

Samples of John's work on display at Salts Mill

The Swinging Sixties were about more than just flower power and free love. Finally, the austerity of the post-war period was being kicked into touch and replaced by a free-spending consumer revolution. People wanted new things for their homes – and they certainly didn’t want the things their parents had.

Sixties style icon Twiggy was, like the mini-skirt, the creation of Mary Quant – but it wasn’t just in clothes that fashions were changing. Terence Conran was busy churning out fabrics and furniture for his Habitat stores, the Ford Cortina was launched (that other auto great, the Mini, sneaked into production in 1959 but is still considered a 60s classic) and the Beatles were changing the face of music.

In ceramics, new techniques, new shapes and new patterns were transforming the look of tableware and decorative pottery in our homes. At the forefront was John Clappison, who, as a 21-year-old, had been appointed chief designer at Hornsea Pottery in 1958.

A former student of Hull College of Arts and Crafts and The Royal College of Art in London, his designs and techniques would put Hornsea Pottery at the forefront of British design. Many examples of his work form the centrepiece of a new exhibition called “The Swinging Sixties”, at Salts Mill, the innovative art gallery, shopping and restaurant complex at Saltaire, near Bradford, which is famous, among other things, for its collection of paintings by David Hockney.

The exhibition has been put together by Pat Silver, who runs the acclaimed Home store on the second floor of the sprawling, 155-year-old mill. “Here in the UK we produced some of the best and most innovative designers in the world. We had a plethora of talent and a great art school system and it all came to fruition in the 1960s after the austerity of the war,” says Pat.

“I had an exhibition before of the 1950s, which showed how the Americans were so ahead of us then. It was here for two-and-a-half years and it caused a lot of interest. When I finally took it down, people would come in and ask where it was.

“I wanted to put a new one together with the work of several designers and the secretary of the Hornsea Pottery Society came in just the day before I took the 1950s exhibition down. I had some of John Clappison’s work in that. The secretary got in touch with John and we went to see him. I found out he is still making some of the muramics (ceramic wall hangings) he started making in the 1960s.”

Today, Hornsea Pottery – and in particular the designs of John Clappison – are sought after. As well as the thriving Hornsea Pottery Society of particularly devoted fans, many other enthusiasts collect the pottery, although it still remains affordable. A recent article in The Guardian, on designers you should collect now before their prices sky-rocket, advised readers to look out for Clappison’s Home Decor range, 60s hand-decorated Slipware, 50s tableware ranges Elegance and Coastline, and 70s Heirloom pieces.

The going rate for John’s 1970s designs was cited as being just £10, with earlier tableware going for £50-£100 and Home Decor vases between £100 and £350.

Now 71 and living in Nantwich, John tells me he doesn’t get back to Hull as often as he would like, although he did return for the opening of the Hornsea Museum extension devoted to Hornsea Pottery (see panel, right).

John is a well-respected ceramic artist

“We had a butcher’s shop on Anlaby Road and we also had a holiday bungalow in Mappleton where we used to go to avoid the bombs in the war,” recalls John. “My father had to give up the butcher’s business because he suffered from ill health. He was a lot better when we were at Mappleton but then he became ill again, and a doctor from Hornsea came to see him and told him he had to get a new interest.

“Because my father was interested in painting, the doctor put him in touch with the Rawson brothers in Hornsea, who were two self-styled artists.”

John tells me how his mother went on the bus to Hornsea and knocked on the door of the Rawson house. “Colin answered and told her to talk to Desmond, who was the elder one. They learned my father had money to invest and from that he agreed to finance them making pottery.”

At the time, they made plaster of Paris plaques, which Desmond took round the Army camps. “He would get cap badges, take a mould and go back a week later,” explains bearded John. “But they wanted to make more substantial products so my father bought them a kiln and equipment to make pots.”

John tells me that even before he joined Hornsea Pottery as chief designer in 1958, he created designs, including the Elegance range, for the pottery.

The exhibition includes some of his most well-known designs, with examples of the Home Decor Range, a 1963 slipware vase and turquoise-blue striped egg cups from the same year. There’s a biscuit barrel from the very familiar Heirloom range, a Springtime butter dish, a stylised dragon mug and a Geometric cruet set with a blue and green zig-zag design.

Even non-Hornsea Pottery Society people, there just to shop, are getting all nostalgic and talking about the ones they used to have.

John points to a white jardiniere decorated with dots. “It was done in a rather strange way. When I started at Hornsea Pottery, I’d been told to equip the studio with everything I needed so I went into Hull, to Hull Drawing, where I ran up quite a bill. Inadvertently I bought a ream of cartridge paper and Colin took me to task about it. He asked why I needed so much.

“Apparently I’d been very extravagant, so for the first few weeks I had to be seen to be making use of this expensive paper. One of the things I’d done at Hull College was paper sculpture, folding and embossing. I folded two cones of paper, stapled them together, flattened them, stuck one against the other and embossed them with a little punch. The range that followed had its roots in the paper-buying fiasco. After that I never bothered Colin for more paper; I didn’t want the embarrassment. I just used the old price lists and drew on the back. It’s handy because when I look at them now I can date things.”

In 1972, John resigned from Hornsea Pottery to join Ravenhead Glass (coincidentally, succeeding Britain’s most prolific glass designer, Alexander Hardie Williamson, also born in Hull) but returned to the east coast four years later, joining the board of Hornsea Pottery and designing numerous ranges of mugs in particular.

In 1984, Hornsea Pottery went into receivership; John designed for Bridlington’s Park Rose Pottery and began lecturing at Hull College of Art, although he rejoined Hornsea Pottery, under its new ownership, later that year. After being made redundant again in 1986, he joined Royal Doulton as senior designer until his retirement in 1998.

These days he is still designing and producing.

“In 1966, after the launch of the Heirloom range, it was thought they didn’t need any new designs so Desmond suggested we had a free period doing exactly what we wanted to do for a couple of months. It was wonderful and it never happened again, more’s the pity.

“I produced a girl figure and also some large wall hangings of ceramic discs interlinked and tied together with string. I call them muramics and I’m still making them now.”

He is proud that so many of his designs produced so many imitators. “In 1968 I did a lot of beakers called Hornsea Mugs. Hornsea were the first to do them and ultimately half of Stoke on Trent did them.”

Before this, in the late 1950s, he had designed a machine to apply designs to pottery by the screenprinting method. “I’d been frustrated that you couldn’t decorate apart from putting grooves in, or a bit of slip trailing. We were a small pottery and we couldn’t justify the high outlay necessary for lithographs and so we had a style of pottery that separated us from Stoke on Trent.

“It then became written into design policy that we would never use transfers.

“I spent hours wondering how to get designs. I’d done lithography and screen printing at Hull College and I saw a connection between the litho press and the screen printer and devised a Heath Robinson-style drawing in 1959. Several years later Desmond saw a machine doing exactly this for milk bottle labels, so we bought it and adapted it slightly so we could print all the way round.”

It was the use of this, combined with an accidentally-produced pattern which came out matt and gloss, which became Hornsea Pottery’s mainstay, as in the hugely successful Heirloom range.

The Swinging Sixties exhibition also includes work by designers such as Mary Quant, Susie Cooper, Jessie Tait and Kathy Winkel and factories such as Midwinter, Poole, Denby and Ridgeway as well as Hornsea Pottery. But Pat Silver has no doubt about who is the star.

“John was a very, very, innovative designer,” she says. “They were doing extremely innovative work at Hornsea and what they did sold in truckloads. I put John up there with Susie Cooper. For a designer to span so many decades is amazing.”

The Swinging Sixties exhibition of the designs of John Clappison and other British ceramic designers is at Salts Mill, 10am-6pm every day; currently no date for the end of the exhibition has been set. For further details phone: (01274) 530770.