FRIDGE MAGNET, SWALLOW

Painter: Elaine Syme 

• Diameter: 3.5cm

Iris Fox Collection

I met Iris Fox soon after the Griselda Hill Pottery Ltd started up in 1985.  Mrs Fox was keen to meet up with a Wemyss® potter who might make new pieces for her.  I clearly remember going to her house in south Edinburgh, for the first time, in around 1986. It was a large Victorian house with high walls and a big garden in which there were at least thirty baths!  Each bath was planted with individual flowers to remind her of a particular friend. In the garden there was also a pair of geese, Graham and Joy, a flock of hens and several dogs.  The inside of the house was even more extraordinary.  Every room housed a different collection, from crested ware to Meissen and Dunmore and other Scottish pottery, from cranberry glass to Clarice Cliff and old dolls. The most important room was her Wemyss® room.  There were hundreds of pieces of Wemyss Ware® lining the walls from floor to ceiling. Many were very rare pieces.   

By this time, in the late eighties, Mrs Fox was famed for her collection, and had many friends in the antiques world, including David Battie of Sothebys and the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, and the antique dealer Victoria de Rin, who bought items from and sold pieces to her.  Victoria entitled her ‘The Queen of Wemyss®’. 

By the time I met Mrs Fox her health was fragile.  She was diabetic, which affected her sight, and had had a stroke.   She was still an unforgettable and extraordinary character who loved to regale listeners with theatrical tales. She owned an antique shop in the Grassmarket but in her later years she was loath to part with any Wemyss Ware® except duplicates or poorly painted items, so buying from her could be tricky.  Would-be customers would often enter her shop, and emerge an hour later with nothing except an earful of amazing stories, delivered in her emphatic Welsh accent. 

Mrs Fox started to commission pieces from ourselves, often as collections.  The horse and rabbit pigs we have made for the current exhibition reflect this. I would drive over from Fife with pieces for her every couple of months, and she had always thought of another set by the time the latest was delivered.  We made Wemyss® animals of all sizes and types for her, but mostly small pigs.  She absolutely loved receiving the sets, and dreamed up new ideas for us to make right up to near her death in 1992.  Over time we had made over 400 pieces for her.  Sometimes she asked us to make duplicates, so she could give one piece away to a friend and keep the other.  It was always a great pleasure to visit her.   One day she told me, ‘You’ll go down in history!’   Her memory certainly lives on. 

On her death in 1992 a small part of her collection went to Newport Museum in Wales, near her birthplace, and some was sold at The Iris Fox Collection sale by Sothebys in November 1994 in the Assembly Rooms in George Street, Edinburgh.  Over one hundred pieces of Griselda Hill Wemyss Ware® were included in the sale, which raised a substantial sum for Mrs Fox’s chosen charities, the PDSA, two charities for the blind and The Diabetic Trust.  At the sale I bought a lovely tulip vase with embossed petals as a reminder of her, and this was displayed in the Pottery Visitor Centre for several years. It is the inspiration for the Embossed Tulip vase in our exhibition. 

Mrs Fox’s old shop on Victoria Street in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket came up for rent in 1995, and it occurred to me that it would be a great showcase for our ware.  It also seemed a fitting tribute to her.  I leased the shop for four years from 1995 to 1999.  We had a grand opening party in the summer, just before the start of the Edinburgh Festival, and from then on I brought the pottery for the shop over from Fife on a weekly basis.  The shop generated a lot of interest and our customer base grew.  One memorable customer was Donald Dewar, the first First Minister of the devolved Scottish Government, who bought a large thistle cat as a wedding present. 

A Collector’s Dream Exhibition 

26th October -24th December 2024 

The Griselda Hill Pottery Ltd has been making Wemyss Ware® in Ceres, Fife, for nearly forty years, and this exhibition aims to showcase the best of our craftsmanship. We have drawn inspiration from various collections of Wemyss Ware®, some now dispersed and one still in the making. The main influences come from the collections of Iris Fox, George Bellamy and John Garner. A few items, such as the Gambler pigs, are based on original Wemyss Ware® pieces in unknown collections.  

Each piece in the exhibition comes with a certificate.    

The small team creating Wemyss Ware® consists of Potter Rena Simpson, who has skilfully constructed monocles for pigs and embossed tulip flowers on baluster vases, Elaine Syme, our Head Decorator, Roseanne Hoy, painter, and myself, Griselda Hill. We love doing what we do, and hope this is reflected in the quality of the pottery. 

The collectors featured in this exhibition are Iris Fox, George Bellamy and John Garner.  They are united by a shared passion for Wemyss Ware®, and are in good company.  Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Elton John and King Charles, to name but a few, have also collected the beautiful pottery.  Its popularity remains undiminished.