Your Letters: This month’s postbag trawl includes memories of a previous royal event

Your Letters

This month’s postbag includes memories of a special royal event and more uses for a former coal scuttle

In reply to the letter from SJ Green concerning the bedside coalscuttle (Your Letters, April issue) I too have one. I bought it at an auction in Brigg, north Lincolnshire 30 years ago. It was described then as a purdonium. It is definitely for coal and is complete with a removable metal lining. As you see from the photo, I use mine as a telephone table in my hall. It was very useful for storing telephone directories in the days when they were required. I hope this will be of interest to SJ Green. Sue Fry, Gainsborough, Lincs., by email

It was lovely to read an article on Mary Watts and the Compton Pottery (Partners in Thyme, May issue). I have been researching both for many years and, for the sake of accuracy, feel I should make the following points.

Mary Watts did not work for Liberty and would have been very annoyed by this inference. She was irritated by the inclusion of her pots with those of Archibald Knox in Liberty’s Book of Garden Ornament, and wrote on her copy, ‘Libertys [sic] Advertisement of his things under my name – 19 of Libertys [sic] 14 of mine’, marking her designs with ‘MSW’ and the others ‘Liberty’. I know of no contract between Mrs Watts and Liberty.

Although the initial classes for those modelling the decoration of Compton Cemetery Chapel were held in Limnerslease, the Compton Pottery was moved to purpose-designed buildings across the road and the pots were fired in a kiln built beside the coachman’s cottage at the foot of Limnerslease garden.

Louise Boreham, Fife (co-author, with Hilary Calvert, of Mary Seton

Watts and the Compton Pottery, 2019)

Our star

letter receives a copy of British Designer Silver by John Andrew and Derek Styles worth £75. Write to us at Antique Collecting, Sandy Lane, Old Martlesham, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 4SD or email magazine@ accartbooks.com

Above right Joyce inherited a Silver Jubilee teapot

Left Sue’s purdonium was used to house telephone directories rather than coal

Below A Compton Pottery snake pot, c. 1900, image courtesy of Hill House Antiques

Star letter

I was particularly delighted to discover this month’s magazine was to be themed around the Platinum Jubilee. I have great memories of the Silver Jubilee, in 1977, when I was 12. We excitedly lined the bunting-filled streets of our East Anglian village to watch the Queen drive by. A few weeks later families got together for a garden party on the local recreation grounds (where I won a spoon in the three-legged race).

All the children were given commemorative mugs, which I soon smashed, but I later inherited the teapot (above) from my mother. I can’t imagine it is worth anything but, as they say on the Antiques Roadshow, “I would never part with it” .

Happy memories of a long-gone rural past.

Joyce Lewis, Bedfordshire

Answers to the quiz on page 46

Q1 Green. Q2 (b) His masterpiece is considered to be the 1927 Etoile du Nord in which he used perspective to emphasise the speed of the train. Q3 (c) Painted glass containers for Kraft Cheese Spreads, which was popular during the American Depression. Q4 (b) It was the earliest form of flint-lock. Q5 (c) By 1888 they were producing toy boats, carts and Ferris wheels. In 1891 they produced the first model clockwork train. Q6 (d). Q7 (a). Q8 (b). Q9 (d). Q10 (c) Due to the poor quality of post-war leather the balls burst in both matches.

The anagram corn stamen is rearranged to create monstrance, an ornamental vessel for holding consecrated wafers in church ceremonies. Avoid tingle is rearranged to create dovetailing, the technique of joining two pieces of wood. Acid tray isrearranged to form caryatid, a female figure motif used as a column and as a decoration on furniture. Turtle left baby is rearranged to create butterfly table, a popular early 18th-century American drop-leaf furniture with outward slanting legs.