The Willow Pattern: a childhood memory and renewed popularity

The Willow Pattern … has regained the popularity it once lost (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Patrick Comerford

Unexpected and sudden smells, sounds or sights can take us make immediately to past places, bringing back memories that we think are long-forgotten.

Twice in recent weeks, walking through the narrow aisles of shops I would never plan to visit – once in Foxford, Co Mayo, last month and then once again last week in Bray, Co Wicklow – I found myself face-to-face with displays of Willow Pattern plates and platters, mugs and cups.

And I realised I was startled … not by their sudden appearance but by the sudden recall of houses I had lived in as a child.

In quick, short bursts of recollection, I recalled my grandmother’s farmhouse in Co Waterford, and a childhood home in Dublin.

I thought the Willow Pattern had so gone out of fashion that it was no longer on sale. Perhaps it survived in a lonely, isolated surviving plate here and there. And then I realised how popular it was on ceramic and popular kitchen ware, and must have been commonplace in every family home in England and Ireland well into the 1950s, perhaps even the 1960s.

I remember Willow Pattern plates and platters on dressers in our own family homes, and then I recalled being told the story or the fable that embellished and decorated the cups and saucers. Not once but twice these memories came back in a sweet rush, and I remembered being told those stories with assurances of affection and love.

But as I looked into the story of the Willow Pattern, why was I surprised too to find that there was a thread that lead me back to Pugin, the Gothic revival and the intellectual circles in the English Midlands in the late 18th and early 19th centuries?

The Willow Pattern is an oriental pattern, most often seen in blue and white, that features common elements from manufacturer to manufacturer. These elements are a willow tree, an orange or apple tree, two birds, people on a bridge, a fence, a boat and a teahouse or pagoda.

The Willow Pattern has been made by hundreds of companies (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

The Willow Pattern has been made by hundreds of companies in dozens of countries, and in colours from the most-seen blue, to red, green, gold, yellow, purple, black, brown, multi-coloured and the list goes on with combinations.

Some accounts say the Willow Pattern was first designed by Thomas Turner of Caughley in Shropshire in 1780. Others say it was created ten years later by Josiah Spode or that it was the work of Thomas Minton around 1790.

Thomas Turner (1747-1809) was the eldest son of the Revd Richard Turner (1724-1791), vicar of Elmley Castle, Worcestershire. It has been supposed that Thomas was brought up as a silversmith. He was involved in porcelain manufacture, and was a skilful draughtsman, designer, and engraver, as well as being an accomplished musician. He was a magistrate for Shropshire and Staffordshire, and a freeman of Worcester, Much Wenlock, and Bridgnorth.

In 1772, he succeeded his father-in-law at his pottery works at Caughley, known as The Salopian China Warehouse.

After visiting France in 1780, he introduced the Willow Pattern to England. He died in 1809, and the business was finally abandoned in 1814 or 1815.

The potter Josiah Spode (1733-1797) was the founder of the Spode pottery works and is often credited with the establishment of blue underglaze transfer printing in Staffordshire in 1781-1784, and is said to have designed the Willow Pattern from a pattern called Mandarin in about 1790.

The potter Thomas Minton (1765-1836) founded Thomas Minton & Sons in Stoke-on-Trent, which grew into a major ceramic manufacturing company.

In the early 1780s, Minton was an apprentice engraver at the Caughley Pottery Works in Shropshire, working under Thomas Turner, working on copperplate engravings for the production of transfer-wares. The Caughley engraver Thomas Lucas went to work for Josiah Spode at Stoke-on-Trent in 1782, taking some elements of the fashionable chinoiserie patterns with him. At Caughley, it is claimed, Minton worked on the original design of the true willow pattern, and prepared the first copperplates of it.

After Minton left Caughley in 1785, variations of the original design were acquired by Spode, Wedgwood, Adams, Davenport and others. He worked for Josiah Spode, and it was for him that he engraved a new version of the willow pattern.

In 1793, Minton established his own pottery factory in Stoke-upon-Trent, where his products included the Willow Pattern, and fine ornamental chinaware.

When Minton died in 1836, he was succeeded by his son Herbert Minton (1793–1858) who developed new production techniques and took the business into new fields, including decorative encaustic tile making, through his association with leading architects and designers including the Gothic Revival architect AWN Pugin.

Pugin worked closely with Herbert Minton and John Hardman (1811-1867), the Birmingham metalwork manufacturer, in carrying out his great building and decorative schemes, from the Palace of Westminster to small country churches and houses, and Pugin’s own family home at Ramsgate.

Between 1844 and 1854, Herbert Minton presented encaustic floor tiles to a total of 46 churches and vicarages in Staffordshire, and over 150 churches in the Diocese of Lichfield were supplied with Minton pavements by 1859. They included Lichfield Cathedral. There are Minton tiles too in many of Pugin’s Irish churches and cathedrals, including Saint Aidan’s Cathedral, Enniscorthy, Saint Mary’s Cathedral, Killarney, and Saint Mary’s Church, Tagoat.

Romantic tales may have evolved in the efforts to increase sales of the Willow Pattern (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

In order to sell Minton’s Willow Pattern, stories were invented to fit the design, and despite the legends, the story is completely English in origin, and has no links to China. Nonetheless, the romantic fable is worth telling.

Once there was a wealthy Mandarin, who had a beautiful daughter called Koong-se. She had fallen in love with her father’s humble accounting assistant, Chang. But her father was angry for it was inappropriate for them to marry because the difference in their social class.

The father sacked young Chang and built a high fence around his house to keep the lovers apart. The Mandarin was planning to marry Koong-se off to a powerful Duke. The Duke arrived by boat to claim his bride, bringing a box of jewels as a gift. The wedding was to take place on the day the blossom fell from the willow tree.

On the eve of Koong-se’s wedding, Chang dressed himself up as a servant and slipped into the palace unnoticed. As the lovers escaped with the jewels, the alarm was raised. They ran over a bridge, chased by the Mandarin, with a whip in his hand.

Eventually the two lovers escaped on the Duke’s ship to safety on a secluded island, and there they lived happily for years.

However, the Duke learned one day that they had been found on the island. Seeking revenge, he sent soldiers, who captured the lovers and put them to death. But the gods were moved by their plight and turned the lovers into a pair of doves. And so, although they both perished, the gods were touched by their love and immortalised them as two doves, eternally flying together in the sky.

There is an old poem:

Two birds flying high,
A Chinese vessel, sailing by.
A bridge with three men, sometimes four,
A willow tree, hanging o’er.
A Chinese temple, there it stands,
Built upon the river sands.
An apple tree, with apples on,
A crooked fence to end my song.

Thomas Minton’s design has been followed by Royal Worcester, Spode, Adams, Wedgwood, Davenport, Clews, Leeds and Swansea. But there have been changes to the Willow Pattern over the years.

The original Chinese Willow by Minton had no bridge with people crossing over, and it is not sure whether the stories connected with it originated in China or England. The original did not have the apple-tree or the two doves. These were added later. Other differences include the treatment or the fretted border, with either a lattice work or conventional butterfly, and details of the fence in the foreground.

For a century and a half, the Willow Pattern has been the stock-pattern of nearly every British pottery manufacturer. Although its popularity has waned at times, I realised after seeing it once again in Bray and Foxford that it has returned to favour once again and is as popular as it ever was.

Through Lent with Vaughan Williams (13): On Wenlock Edge, 1, ‘On Wenlock Edge’

Wilderhope Manor, on Wenlock Edge, Shropshire … here I was first introduced to the music of Vaughan Williams (Photograph: Graham Taylor. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Patrick Comerford

For my reflections and devotions during Lent this year, each day I am reflecting on and invite you to listen to a piece of music or a hymn set to a tune by the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

For the rest of this week, I intend listening to On Wenlock Edge, a setting by Vaughan Williams of six poems from AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

I wrote over the past few days that I was first introduced to the music of Vaughan Williams when I was a 19-year-old and while I was spending some days in Shropshire.

I was staying in Wilderhope Manor, a 16th-century Elizabethan manor house on Wenlock Edge, seven miles south-west of Much Wenlock, seven miles east of Church Stretton. Wilderhope Manor was built in 1585 for Francis Smallman. The house was in a poor state and uninhabited when it was bought in 1936 by the WA Cadbury Trust and opened as a youth hostel in 1937. Many of the original features, including the oaken stairways, oak spiral stairs and plaster ceilings have survived.

In the early 1970s, although I had little musical education and no musical background, I was interested in English folk music, and I was enjoying the way it was being interpreted by folk rock bands such as I was enjoying the music of English folk rock bands such as Steeleye Span, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Lindisfarne and Jethro Thull.

That interest drew the suggestion while I was staying in Wilderhope Manor that I should listen to the music of Vaughan Williams, and, as I was staying on Wenlock Edge in rural Shropshire, that I should listen to On Wenlock Edge and read Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

This became my first memorable introduction to the great English composers. I spent some time on Wenlock Edge and visiting the neighbouring villages before hitch-hiking back to Lichfield – a journey of about 50 miles.

Back in Lichfield, I experienced a self-defining moment in the chapel of Saint John’s Hospital, and was invited for the first time to the Folk Masses in the Dominican Retreat Centre at Spode House, near Rugeley, about six miles north of Lichfield.

Ever since, I have associated the music of Vaughan Williams, especially his setting of On Wenlock Edge, with my understanding of my own spiritual growth and development.

This morning [2 March 2015], I am listening to ‘On Wenlock Edge,’ the first of the six settings by Vaughan Williams of these poems by AE Housman (1859-1936), published in March 1896.

Alfred Edward Housman was born at Fockbury, near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, on 26 March 1859, the eldest child of Sarah and Edward Housman. His mother died on his twelfth birthday, and the anguished created by this cruel coincidence, led to strong questioning of his Christian faith, although he did not abandon the idea of a God.

Housman studied Classics at Saint John’s College, Oxford, and was Professor of Greek and Latin, University College, London (1892), Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge (1911), and a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, where Vaughan Williams had been an undergraduate from 1892 to 1895. He died on 30 April 1936.

In reacting to the Boer War, in which his brother Herbert was killed, Housman also anticipated the horror and futility of World War I, and his poems would find fresh relevance of with the outbreak of World War I.

His landscape is a mythical, idealised Shropshire, similar to the Wessex of the novels of Thomas Hardy. His dominant themes are love, and a post-industrial pastoral nostalgia, infused with expressions of disillusionment at the sacrifice of the young soldiers going to war, never to return.

A younger brother, the author and playwright Laurence Housman (1865-1959), first worked as a book illustrator, and the first authors he illustrated included the poet Christina Rossetti. Laurence Housman also wrote and published several volumes of poetry, a number of hymns and carols, and socialist and pacifist pamphlets, and he edited his brother’s poems which were published posthumously.

In 1945, Laurence Housman opened Housman’s Bookshop in Shaftesbury Avenue, London, founded in his honour by the Peace Pledge Union, of which he was a sponsor. In 1959, shortly after his death, the shop moved to 5 Caledonian Road, London. I was first introduced to Housman’s in 1976 by its co-founder and manager, Harry Mister, after meeting him with Bruce Kent at the Hayes Conference Centre in Swanwick that year. Housman’s Bookshop remains a prime source of publications on pacifism and other radical values.

Vaughan Williams composed On Wenlock Edge – a cycle of six songs for tenor, piano and string quartet – in 1909, a year after he had spent three months in Paris studying under Maurice Ravel, the French composer, who was three years younger than him. The first performance took place in the Aeolian Hall in London on 15 November 1909.

After a performance of the cycle in May 1920, Ivor Gurney wrote: “The French mannerisms must be forgotten in the strong Englishness of the prevailing mood – in the unmistakable spirit of the time of creation. England is the spring of emotion, the centre of power, and the pictures of her, the breath of her earth and growing things are continually felt through the lovely sound.”

Housman, who only heard the first two songs, wrote to his publisher in December 1920: “I am told that composers in some cases have mutilated my poems – that Vaughan Williams cut two verses out of ‘Is my team ploughing?’ I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music.”

When he was asked about this after Housman’s death in 1936, Vaughan Williams showed no remorse, claiming “the composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided he does not actually alter the sense … I also feel that a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as ‘The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal’.”

In the 1920s, Vaughan Williams made an arrangement of On Wenlock Edge for full orchestra that was first performed on 24 January 1924 by John Booth, with the composer conducting. Vaughan Williams preferred this version to his original.

In the accompaniment of the first song, ‘On Wenlock Edge,’ the strings are flaring and quivering in powerful simulation of the gales that trouble Wenlock’s woods, and the emotional gales that have troubled the life of humanity since time began.

Vaughan Williams’ approach to the text works on two levels – that of word-painting, and that of bringing out the meanings inherent in phrases or in an entire text. In this first song, for example, he paints words like “high” and “gale,” and depicts the sense of foreboding in phrases like “the wood’s in trouble” and “His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves” in the accompaniment.



1, On Wenlock Edge

On Wenlock Edge the world’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it piles the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

’Twould blow like this through hot and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it piles the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

Tomorrow: 2, From far, from eve and morning

Why Much Wenlock wants a flame that may be coming to Ireland

Much Wenlock ... the tiny market town wants the Olympic Torch next year. But why?

Patrick Comerford

In all the excitement about Queen Elizabeth and President Barack Obama visiting Ireland in recent weeks, many commentators have overlooked the fact that Dublin may be on the list to give a warm welcome to another distinguished visitor next year.

Dublin could be added to the venues for the Olympic torch relay in the build-up to the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The London organisers have already announced 74 locations for the relay, and it seems Dublin is being considered as another venue.

The Olympic Flame arrives from Greece in May and the relay starts in Land’s End and continues on an 8,000-mile, 70-day journey as far as the Outer Hebrides and Belfast, arriving in London for the opening ceremony on 27 July 2012.

A decision is expected soon on whether to include Dublin. The Olympic Council of Ireland says that if the torch comes to Dublin, it plans is to have 50 to 75 people carrying it.

But why should the flame come to Dublin?

In the early games, Irish athletes won several medals for Britain at the Olympic Games, in the decathlon, long jump, high jump, triple jump, tennis, hockey and polo. Since 1924, Ireland has been represented separately at the games and has won 23 Olympic medals, including eight gold, seven silver and eight bronze in swimming, boxing, athletics and sailing.

However, should the flame comes to Dublin next year, the people of Shropshire are going to feel very snubbed indeed. For Shropshire is one of only six counties in England to miss out on an overnight stop, although the British Olympic committee wants the torch to pass through Much Wenlock and officials in Shropshire have entered their case for the relay to stop overnight at either Much Wenlock or the Ironbridge Gorge.

So, you may ask, why Shropshire? And why Much Wenlock?

An English market town

Wenlock Edge and Wilderhope Manor ... the paths and woodlands are excellent for walks, cycling and riding

It’s now 40 years since I spent some time hitch-hiking and youth hostelling in the area around Much Wenlock and Wenlock Edge, a 15-mile limestone escarpment formed 400 million years ago.

Wilderhope Manor ... an introduction to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams 40 years ago

Wenlock Edge and its woodlands are excellent places for walks, cycling and riding, with long-distance routes like the Jack Mytton Way and Shropshire Way. During those days, I stayed seven miles outside Much Wenlock at Wilderhope Manor, which was built by the Smallman family in the16th century. There I was introduced to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who captured the dramatic landscape of Wenlock Edge in 1909 in his setting of six poems by AE Housman. On Wenlock Edge was written for a tenor, piano and string quartet, combining English pastoral and lyric music with Housman’s pastoral images of the English landscape – the glowing of a gale, church bells, or a cemetery.

Much Wenlock is a 700-year-old mediaeval market town that feels more like a village

Much Wenlock is off the beaten track on north-east end of Wenlock Edge, a rustic, 700-year-old, mediaeval market town on the way to Ironbridge from Bridgnorth. With a population of about 3,000, it feels like a village. This is a quintessentially English town, with streets lined with black-and-white, timber-framed buildings, limestone cottages, speciality shops, cosy inns and much-feted bookshops. The 16th century Guildhall, with its overhanging first floor held up by stout oak pillars, was pre-fabricated and raised in two days in 1577.

The ruins of a 12th century priory, dedicated to its first abbess, Saint Milburga, provide a backdrop for many events and performances in Much Wenlock, including “Tales from the Edge,” an international festival that keeps alive the ancient art of story-telling. Holy Trinity Church is a Norman parish church and has a battlemented tower and a Jacobean pulpit with carved panels depicting some two-tailed mermen.

And there lies another tale. For Dr William Penny Brooks is buried in Holy Trinity churchyard.

The High Street in Much Wenlock is lined with black-and-white, timber-framed buildings, and limestone cottages

Two years ago, while the world was marking the bicentenary of the birth in Shrewsbury of Shropshire’s most famous son, Charles Darwin, Much Wenlock was celebrating the fact that Dr Brookes was born there 200 years ago in 1809. And it is all because of that good doctor that Much Wenlock challenges Athens for recognition as the birthplace of the modern Olympic movement, and wants to rank alongside other famous British sporting venues, such as Twickenham, Wimbledon, Wembley, Old Trafford and St Andrews.

Dr William Penny Brookes created the Much Wenlock Olympics that inspired the creation of the modern Olympic Games

The little market town holds its very own Olympics every July, recalling how Dr Brookes created the Much Wenlock Olympics that inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin (1863-1937) to create the modern Olympics.

‘Every grade of man’

Much Wenlock has many speciality shops and cosy inns

Dr William Penny Brookes (1809-1895), a surgeon, magistrate, botanist and educationalist, was the son of a local doctor in Much Wenlock, and he lived, worked and died in the Shropshire market town apart from the time he spent as a medical student in Guy’s Hospital and Saint Thomas’s Hospital, London, and in Italy and France.

Padua was known for its 16th century mediaeval herb gardens, and there he developed an interest in herbal medicines and botany. At the Sorbonne, he learned of his father’s death from typhoid. Returning to Much Wenlock in 1831, he inherited the family home and his father’s practice.

As a botanist, he provided information on plants around Much Wenlock for Charles Hulbert’s The History and Description of the County of Salop (1837), and William Leighton’s Flora of Shropshire (1841), and his herbarium survives at the Much Wenlock Museum.

As a GP, Brookes actively campaigned to have physical education on the school curriculum. As a social reformer, he sought opportunities for what he called “every grade of man” to expand his knowledge and to become mentally and physically fit.

One of the many and much-feted bookshops in Much Wenlock

In 1841, he established the Wenlock Agricultural Reading Society, an early lending library that developed into lecture classes including art, music and botany. In 1850, he established the Olympian Class to help local people to keep fit and “for the promotion of the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood of Wenlock and especially of the working classes...”

As a Philhellene, Brookes admired the ideals of ancient Athens, where all were expected to vote, to take an active part in politics, and to compete in sport. He resisted requests to limit the games to public schoolboys and the sons of professionals, and his Olympian Class opened the door to the working class to enter competitive sport, until then a privilege only for the elite.

When the class was renamed the Wenlock Olympian Games in 1859, Brookes was criticised for insisting the games must be open to “every grade of man.” His critics claimed this would cause rioting and lewd behaviour, and that men would leave their wives.

Much Wenlock’s 16th century Guildhall was built in two days in 1577

The events were a mixture of athletics and traditional sports, including quoits, cricket and football, as well as occasional fun events to entertain the crowds, such as the “blindfolded wheelbarrow race” and the “old woman’s race for pound of tea.” The most popular event was one known as “Tilting at the Ring,” requiring expert horsemanship to unhook a small ring hanging from a cross bar using the tip of a lance.

Developing links with Athens

The ruins of Saint Milburga’s Priory provide a backdrop for many events in Much Wenlock, including ‘Tales from the Edge’

The games were a huge success and none of the threatened disturbances occurred. News of the games spread and competitors came from as far afield as London and Liverpool. Meanwhile in 1859, Brookes also established contact with Evangelis Zappas (1800-1865), a wealthy Greek living in exile in Romania, who organised a Greek-based revival of the Olympic Games in Athens in 1865.

On behalf of the Wenlock Olympian Committee, Brookes sent £10 to the Athens games organised by Zappas. The Wenlock Prize went to Petros Velissariou, a Greek soldier from Smyrna (present-day Izmir in modern Turkey), who won the “Long” or “Seven-fold” Race. His name was the first foreign name added to the honour roll of the Wenlock Olympian Society, and events from the games in Athens were adopted in future programmes at Much Wenlock.

Brookes also helped establish the National Olympian Association in 1865. Their first Olympic Games, a national event, were attended by over 10,000 spectators in Crystal Palace in London in 1866. The cricketer WG Grace, then 18, came first in the 440-yards hurdles.

In 1877, Brookes asked King George I of Greece for a prize to honour Queen Victoria’s jubilee. The king sent an inscribed silver cup that was presented at the National Olympian Games in Shrewsbury. Brookes become close friends with John Gennadius (1844-1932), the Greek Chargé d’Affairs in London, and tried to persuade the Greek government to revive the Olympics at an international level. However, his attempts to organise an international Olympian Festival in Athens in 1881 failed because of an internal political crisis in Greece.

Brookes invited Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the organiser of an International Congress on Physical Education, to visit Much Wenlock. The two met at the Raven Hotel, the venue for the gala dinner at each year’s Olympian Games, and in 1890 the Olympian Society staged mock games for the baron in Much Wenlock.

The Raven Hotel ... the English doctor and the French baron met here regularly to discuss their Olympian ideals

Inspiring influence

Back in France, Coubertin gave a glowing account of his stay in Much Wenlock. Later, he wrote: “If the Olympic Games that Modern Greece has not yet been able to revive still survives today, it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr William Penny Brookes.” He is said to have been so inspired by his visit that he began the process that resulted in setting up the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1894. Two years later, the first Olympic Games were held in Athens under the auspices of the IOC in 1896.

Although Coubertin later down-played Brookes’s influence, he kept in touch with the doctor for several years and sent him a gold medal for the Much Wenlock games.

Brookes died on 10 December 1895 aged 87, just four months before the first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens in April 1896. He never knew his dream had been achieved. But shortly before his death, the Board of Education finally agreed to include physical education as a compulsory subject in British and Irish schools.

He is buried beside Holy Trinity Churchy, a few feet from his own front door. Juan Antonio Samaranch, then president of the IOC, visited Much Wenlock in 1994 and laid a wreath at Brookes’s grave. “I came to pay homage and tribute to Dr Brookes, who really was the founder of the modern Olympic Games,” he said.

The Wenlock Olympian Society maintains his ideals and continues to organise annual games. The 125th Wenlock Olympian Games take place this year on 3 and 8 to 11 July.

Dr Brookes is buried beside Holy Trinity Church, a few feet from his own front door and from the Guildhall

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. This essay was first published in the July 2011 editions of the Diocesan Magazine (Dublin and Glendalough) and the Church Review (Cashel and Ossory).