Chinaware From U.K.

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31832, 9 November 1968, Page 12

Chinaware From U.K.

The strange assignment ef Min Ruth Kent. Mies director ef an English pottery firm, is to sell miniature reproductions of Victorian ewers and basins to the world.

She said that the water jugs sitting in basins were once familiar items in every hotel. Now, in the days of hot and eold running water, the miniature reproductions had become big dollar earners in the United States. The Americans snapped them up for flower arranging and for use as ornaments. In Christchurch this week Miss Kent recalled that on a previous visit to the city, in

1951, she stayed in a Sumner hotel. “My friend had a room with a mirror,” she said. “I was the lucky one, with a ewer and basin in my room.” Miss Kent is sales director of James Kent, Ltd, the firm founded by her father about 1890. She says that her firm has revived an old engraving of a rural English scene and reproduced it in Old Staffordshire blue and white. The design is called Old Foley. For moderns there is the Darling Daisy pattern in gold. In New Zealand, she says, she has found great interest

in cookie jars of the daisy design (illustrated). “We are doing them in these new hot colours, such as turquoise blue,” she says. “It is also done as an embossment in golden amber and emerald with white flowers.” Miss Kent said that her firm had also revived English scenic prints this year. The products in these designs include fancy dishes and tableware. Miss Kent spends about four months a year travelling around the world with nine suitcases of English chinaware samples.