David Leach

David Leach made three distinct contributions to the craft of studio pottery, the production by artist-craftsmen of individually hand-worked ceramics.

First, he put his business acumen, his organisational flair and his hunger for technical refinement at the disposal of his father, the great potter Bernard Leach (1887-1979), when the Leach Pottery in St Ives was going through rough times, thus enabling his father to do much of his best work. Second, although starting his own pottery somewhat late in life, he dazzled connoisseurs with his work, particularly the finely fluted designs facilitated by the light porcelain he developed, which is now widely used. Last, he was a painstaking educator of young artist-craftsmen, both in-house and in a variety of schools, colleges and other centres, putting much-needed emphasis on the importance of their learning basic techniques before they sought to evolve a style.

Throughout their careers, both father and son were heavily influenced by oriental traditions of handcrafted pottery and, significantly, David Andrew Leach was born in Japan in 1911, while his father was studying techniques there. He spent the first nine years of his life in Japan and (briefly) in China before his father, returning to England in 1920, settled his family at St Ives in Cornwall. There, with the Japanese potter Shoji Hamada as his assistant, Bernard Leach established a studio pottery that was soon at the forefront of a new British fashion for pots individually hand-made by artist-craftsmen rather than mechanically produced with moulds in factories.

David, who was his elder son, originally intended to pursue a career in medicine, but, helping out at the pottery during his school holidays, he could not help absorbing some of his father’s all-consuming passion for ceramics. Ceramic art would even be discussed at the tea table, where his father likened the trailing of black treacle over Cornish cream to the interaction of differently coloured slip decorations.

Despite Bernard Leach’s brilliance as an artist and teacher, the sales of Leach pottery were barely covering the costs of production by the time David left school, and there was no money available for his medical training. The astute 19-year-old had, however, observed that his father’s sublime skills as a craftsman were not matched by any great business sense, and so decided that it must be his first role in life to make himself an expert in the management, marketing and technical side that he could see his father was neglecting.

Gradually he became his father’s righthand man, even surmounting strongly expressed paternal displeasure in 1934 when, in his father’s eyes, he went over to “the enemy” by embarking on a three-year pottery managers’ course at Stoke-on-Trent, intended for industrial manufacturers (his father’s arch competitors), rather than for studio potteries such as the Leach. The young man went ahead regardless, and what he learnt at Stoke about subjects crucial to both factory and studio production was vital in seeing the Leach Pottery through its difficult years and into profit.

Returning to St Ives, he instituted a policy of slowing down staff turnover by encouraging local boys to become apprentices. His first local recruit, William Marshall, became his most spectacular success, joining the pottery in 1938, becoming its foreman and staying for the best part of four decades.

Another of David’s innovations was a bread-and-butter line of table, kitchen and oven stoneware, to be designed by his father and reproduced by potters repeat-throwing to a set formula. Sold as Leach standard ware, this kept the firm ticking over between sales of its more individualistic pieces. The result was bulk orders from department stores throughout the Second World War, when the national export drive diverted the industrially produced pottery, which they had hitherto bought away from the home market.

After war service with The Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, David wasted no time in introducing a mail-order catalogue, which helped to maintain this new sales momentum, publishing it before many of his father’s competitors had even resumed production.

Managerial success did not preclude a personal urge to make pots, however, and at a St Ives art gallery in 1949 he showed a hundred of his own pieces, remarkable for a sense of proportion and their combined functionality and understated beauty. He was spreading his wings in other ways, too: advising on the establishment of a pottery near Sandefjord in Norway in 1951; spending a year, 1953-54, running the pottery department at Loughborough College of Art; and starting a pottery for the Carmelite Friars at Aylesford in Kent in 1954.

The Leach Pottery was by this time on a firm financial footing. When Bernard Leach married, as his third wife, the American potter Janet Darnell, she showed both willingness and ability to take over the managerial function with the help of Marshall.

In 1955, then, both David and his younger brother Michael, who had joined the firm in the late 1940s, were free to leave to start their own potteries.

David founded the Lowerdown Pottery at Bovey Tracey in Devon, where his creation of hand-produced tableware ranges and individual pots would match the highest standards of his father.

His undimmed enthusiasm, his continuing quest for technical and artistic improvement and the blessing (shared with his father) of an unusually long productive life meant that, in this second career, too, he was able to exert a considerable influence on contemporary ceramics.

For the first few years, while a large stoneware kiln was being built, he concentrated solely on the production of earthenware — either slipware in the Leach Pottery style or with a mushroom-coloured tin-glaze similar to work being made by Marianne de Trey at Dartington. Much of this work is good, but fairly unremarkable when compared with his later pots. In 1961, production of stoneware and porcelain began. This was much more successful, and his gifts as an individual potter began to emerge.

Continuing experiments he had begun in his final years at St Ives, he made a breakthrough in 1967 in producing a light, translucent, hard-paste porcelain body, capable of being thrown very thinly without distortion. This helped to make a name for him at Lowerdown as a potter of the greatest precision, capable of crafting the most delicate, narrow fluting decorations. “Fluting calls for a steady hand and a calm inner spirit, particularly when a large bowl may involve about one hundred flutes and all must form part of a rhythm that echoes and flows into a whole. David Leach became highly skilled in the technique,” wrote Emmanuel Cooper in the combined biography/catalogue, David Leach (Richard Dennis Publications, 2003), which accompanied Leach’s travelling exhibition of 2003-04. In the estimation of the critic Bill Ismay: “His cut flutings on pots of essentially 20th-century feel are among the most sensitive done by anyone since the technique was classically developed by oriental potters.”

“What I aim for,” Leach told Crafts magazine in 1979, “is integration between the deeply cut, sharp-edged foot and the flutes, which I vary in sharpness and width and complement with different glazes, some shiny, some gently breaking the surface, some muted, as in recent experiments with gun-metal glaze.” These different glazes included celadons with a wide range of colour — from jade green to ying-ching blue — as well as tenmoku, gun-metal and reds and yellows. The fluted celadon porcelain bowl by David Leach became an icon of British studio ceramics.

Many of David’s stoneware pots are also incredibly beautiful. He was an outstanding thrower and was one of the few potters able to make really successful large work. His technical skill was excellent, and many of his tenmoku and celadon pots show a remarkable degree of control. He also developed a number of signature glaze effects including one with dolomite over tenmoku using wax-resist decoration and another with an oatmeal glaze over an iron slip. While his pots can be superficially similar to his father’s, they are never copies and always have a very different character. David’s pots rely on strong shapes often modified with carved surfaces but his brush decoration — while very competent and decorative — lacks the spontaneous grace of that of his father or Hamada. The willow tree, a wave pattern, the foxglove and a distinctive floral pattern were among his favourite motifs. To the normal iron brushwork he would often add cobalt blue and vivid red dots.

Leach continued teaching part-time at Loughborough until the mid-1960s. He advised Harrow School of Art on the establishment, in 1963, of a two-year vocational diploma in studio pottery, with an emphasis on repetition throwing, and in 1976 he played a pivotal role in setting up the Dartington Pottery Training Workshop. He was chairman of the Craftsmen Potters Association of Great Britain in 1967 and of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen, 1986-87, a council member of the Crafts Council in 1977 and a member of the grants commitee of the Crafts Advisory Commission. His first of many one-man shows was with the Craftsmen Potters Association in 1966, and in 1967 he won the gold medal of the International Academy of Ceramics. He also exhibited in New York, Washington, Tokyo, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Düsseldorf, Heidelberg and Munich (as well as nearly every major craft outlet in Britain) — all before 1980.

In the 1980s, his success, if anything, was even greater. There have been few potters whose work is as universally popular as that of David Leach. He is represented in more than 40 public collections in Britain alone. Even in his nineties, he was still creating pots, mainly for exhibition or commission, and experimenting with shapes, glazes and decoration.

He is survived by his wife Elizabeth, whom he married in 1938, and by their three sons, all of whom have worked with him at Lowerdown.

David Leach, OBE, potter and teacher, was born on May 7, 1911. He died on February 15, 2005, aged 93.