teapot
- Museum number
- 2006,0901.1
- Description
-
Earthenware teapot and lid with transfer printed decoration; on one side: the flags of Britain and France, behind a panel inscribed: 'WAR AGAINST HITLERISM. This Souvenir Teapot was made for Dyson & Horsfall of Preston to replace ALUMINIUM STOCKS taken over for ALLIED ARMAMENT, 1939'. Below is a scroll with: 'THAT RIGHT SHALL PREVAIL'. On the other side the same two flags and below, a scroll with: 'LIBERTY AND FREEDOM'. The rest of the teapot decorated with the flags of the colonies, each with a label above: 'France (Eastern colonies)', 'France (Western Colonies)', 'New Zealand', 'Australia', 'Union of South Africa', 'Canada', 'New Foundland', and 'India'.
- Production date
- 1940
- Dimensions
-
Height: 15 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Dyson & Horsfall was a mail-order company in Aqueduct Street, Preston specialising in Christmas catalogues. Local organisers would deliver the catalogues and forward the customers' orders. The company had a popular line in aluminium teapots, but form 1939 the war effort required people to surrender metal items such as domestic cookware and tableware needed for armaments. So when in 1940 the company wished to give its annual Christmas gift to its local agents, usually a chrome-plated teapot, they commisioned the firm of A.G. Richardson, in Tunstall, to produce this ceramic teapot instead. Although the inscription on the teapot refers to aluminium stocks being taken over in 1939, the reference to 'France Western Colonies' and 'France Eastern Colonies' but not to mainland France, which had fallen to the Germans in June 1940, indicates that the teapot was made for the Christmas 1940 gift.
Identical teapots are held by the Harris Museum, Preston (see https://www.theharris.org.uk/collections/ceramics/, accessed 28 October 2020), by the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (C.32 & A-2006), and by the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent.
For the best account of this teapot and its context in the production of other wartime ceramics, see the 'Wartime Pottery' blog on the The Potteries Museum website, writen in 2020 by the curator, Miranda Goodby: https://www.stokemuseums.org.uk/pmag/wartime-pottery/ (accessed 20 January 2023).
See also the BBC website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/16/a2615816.shtml
for the following extract from 'My Wife Irene’s Wartime Story' By LEONARD J.SMITH, Birmingham: 'every one was called upon to give up their railings and anything else made of metal such as saucepans etc. so they could melt them down to make war weapons. We have in our possession a teapot specially commissioned by Dyson & Horsfall Ltd. to commemorate the handing over of such items'.
- Location
- Not on display
- Associated events
- Associated Event: Second World War 1939
- Acquisition date
- 2006
- Acquisition notes
- Purchased at Alexandra Palace Antiques Fair, September 2006.
- Department
- Britain, Europe and Prehistory
- Registration number
- 2006,0901.1
