IN THE BRIGHT MIDWINTER

From near obscurity to mid-century style icon, Midwinter pottery wowed the post-war generation with its cutting-edge designs, which remain highly collectable today

- CAROLINE REES

A collection of Midwinter tureens in different 1950s Fashion patterns, from Theresa Manship of clutterfingers.com.

A Midwinter Festival pot designed by Jessie Tait, from the collection of Steven Jenkins.

Nothing on the dinner table shouts 1950s' louder than the patterns designed for Midwinter by Jessie Tait and Terence Conran. Motifs featuring modernist circles, squares, stripes, and spiky sketchy drawings have become icons of the era and their desirability to collectors shows no sign of waning.

Putting these designs on TVshaped plates and curvaceous coffee pots was a huge departure for a traditional Staffordshire. pottery during the first half of the 1950s, when tableware was still dominated by floral themes. They were the result of a highly creative collaboration between Roy Midwinter, son of the firm's founder, and Jessie Tait, a local art-school graduate, who became his head designer. She could interpret his ideas and make them workable,' says Steven Jenkins, collector and author of Midwinter Pottery: A Revolution in British Tableware. She loved the job and turned out design after design.

The firm of WR Midwinter was founded in Burslem, Stoke-on Trent, in 1910. It jogged along, producing sanitaryware and tea services in run-of-the-mill style for 40 years before its pioneering heyday. They were very middle of the range; not terribly original, just a working factory,' says Steven.

That changed when Roy went on a tour of North America in 1952. One buyer reportedly told him: ‘I will shoot the next man who comes all the way over from Stoke to show me English roses.' Roy realised a new strategy was required. He'd seen the organic shapes developed for tableware by west-coast American designers such as Russel Wright and Eva Zeisel and opted for a British version. Tait and Conran, still in their twenties, were brought in to provide the decoration.