It was not the response she’d hoped for. When Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie wrote to the British potter Bernard Leach in 1923 asking to become a paying pupil at his studio in Cornwall, he replied: “It is hard work of any woman not to say man, and she would have to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth. We do everything with our hands from the wood splitting and mixing of clays to throwing and packing. . . . We get dirty and tired, hot and cold, and unusual enthusiasm is the sole panacea.”
Luckily, Pleydell-Bouverie had lots of the latter. Leach was the leader of the British studio pottery movement of independent ceramicists who made their work by hand and whose pots were intended to be useful, rather than purely aesthetic, yet had an ascetic beauty. She arrived at his studio for a trial in her lifelong uniform of boyishly cropped hair, jodhpurs, shirt, and cravat, accompanied by her lover and fellow potter, Ada Mason. Pleydell-Bouverie executed Leach’s instructions with such discipline and gusto that he invited her to stay, and she swiftly forged firm friendships with him, his protégé Michael Cardew, and their workmates, who nicknamed her “Beano.”
Not that Leach (known as “Rickety” or “Mr. Rickety Buzz” to her) was the only powerful male potter to question whether a young woman could cope in the physically demanding, male-dominated craft of ceramics. Pleydell-Bouverie faced misogyny throughout her career as well as the challenge of being openly gay. Yet she succeeded in becoming one of the most influential ceramicists in mid-20th century Britain, thanks to her passion, skill, knowledge, and commitment to researching new ways of throwing clay and developing organic glazes. As the craft historian Simon Olding noted, her seemingly simple yet immaculately made and technically sophisticated pots were “a synthesis of nature, art, and science.”
Pleydell-Bouverie was born in 1895 on a grand estate at Coleshill in Oxfordshire where her family had lived since the early 17th century. As the daughter of a knight and granddaughter of an earl, she must have felt destined—or doomed—to lead the decorous life of a debutante. Instead, she worked as a Red Cross nurse in France during World War I in her early twenties, then lived in London, where she wrote poetry under an alias and enrolled for evening classes. First, she studied painting and then pottery, where she explored an eclectic range of industrial and artisanal techniques.
In 1923, Pleydell-Bouverie discovered the type of pots she wanted to make at an exhibition of Leach’s work. She remained at his studio until 1925 when she set up a wood-fired kiln at Coleshill. She planned to run it with Mason, but in 1928, she was joined by Norah Braden, another of Leach’s students, who became her lover and stayed at Coleshill for eight years.
Describing herself as “a simple potter,” Pleydell-Bouverie said: “I like a pot to be a pot, a vessel with a hole in it, made for a purpose.” She continued to research historic ceramics, notably Bronze Age English pots, while formulating different combinations of local clays and developing glazes from the holly, honeysuckle, nettles, beeches, and other trees and plants growing at Coleshill. These experiments were described in long letters to Leach, Cardew, and other friends with whom she constantly exchanged ideas, advice, studio visits, and invitations to contribute to one another’s exhibitions and books.
When her family sold Coleshill in 1946, Pleydell-Bouverie bought a 17th-century manor house in the Wiltshire village of Kilmington, where she installed oil-fired and electric kilns. She worked there until her death in 1985, remaining a purist studio potter to the end. Dismissing decorative pottery with a withering “competently commercial,” she strove to ensure that her own pots would, as she explained in a letter to Leach, “make people think . . . of things like pebbles and shells and birds’ eggs and the stones over which moss grows.”
Alice Rawsthorn is a London-based writer on design. Her books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life published by Hamish Hamilton, Design as an Attitude published by JRP|Ringier, and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli and published by Phaidon. She and Antonelli are co-founders of the Design Emergency podcast.
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