Mason's Collectors Club
The Founding of the Club
We founded the club in 1972 with just a handful, about ten of us, with Reginald Haggar as our leader, so to speak!
We were lucky enough to have such an eminent personage in our group, for we were very amateurish and he was already very well known, not only as an artist but as a ceramic historian who lived and worked in the Potteries. It was Reginald who encouraged us and showed us how to understand our collections and how to help in discovering more about the Mason's family and their products.
It was a factory about which very little was known at that time and even less had been written about it, so you could not just look anything up. Very few factory records were known and there appeared to be nothing relating to the early Miles Mason period.
Reginald had found out a little but we started to help where we could. The first thing seemed to be to start re-creating a pattern book for the Miles period, which would not only help with patterns and numbers but would gradually introduce the various shapes to us; and when you begin to understand a little about that you find you progress in leaps and bounds.
We finally, in 1992, had found enough patterns and shapes to hold an exhibition in the (then new) Hanley Museum (now the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery).
All this was very exciting, we had grown in numbers by then and were a very flourishing group with members in many countries, working hard on discovering more about all the products in the Ironstone period and even later.
Velma Young.