Susan Williams-Ellis
Encyclopedia
Susan Williams-Ellis a pottery designer and the eldest daughter of Clough Williams-Ellis
, was best known for co-founding Portmeirion Pottery
.
, Surrey
, England
, in the house of artist and critic Roger Fry
. Sir Clough was an eminent architect
; Williams-Ellis' mother was writer Amabel Strachey, cousin of author and Bloomsbury figure Lytton Strachey
. Her parents were friends of other members of the Bloomsbury Group
, including Augustus John
and Virginia Woolf
. Williams-Ellis' godfather was Rudyard Kipling
.
She was determined to be an artist from an early age. In the 1930s Susan studied ceramics with Bernard
and David
Leach while she was at Dartington Hall School. At Chelsea School of Art
, during the 1940s, her tutors included Graham Sutherland
for painting and Henry Moore
for sculpture, who helped to develop Susan’s innate feeling for three-dimensional shape and form.
as an ensign in the Welsh Guards
. He had joined up straight from King's College, Cambridge
. His friend at Cambridge was Euan Cooper-Willis, who subsequently married Susan. The couple had four children: daughters Anwyl, Siân and Menna, and son Robin. Anwyl and Menna are artists and pottery designers; Siân is a peace activist; Robin is a Welsh language
author. All are active in their parents' company.
Her father wrote in his autobiography Architect Errant about his feelings: His [Clough's son Christopher's] room mate in the Gibbs building there, Euan Cooper-Willis, subsequently married our elder daughter Susan. The armistice was thus a time of both pleasure and of almost unbearable pain. We soon had grandchildren to add to the pleasure. We decided that since we, Christopher's parents, were alive, we should try to be so properly, and to keep the wound to ourselves.
In 1948 Susan and Euan moved to Wales
, following their marriage in 1945, and became self-sufficient. She earned some money from book illustration and design work while Euan produced a pamphlet, Towards Equality, for the Fabian Society. However the lure of Clough’s architectural vision was strong, and in 1953 the management of the souvenir shop in the Welsh village of Portmeirion
, created by Susan’s father, fell to Susan and Euan. Despite the unique architectural status of the village, the souvenir shop was operating at a loss. By 1961 the shop had grown enormously; Susan and Euan were managers of the village; and a second Portmeirion shop had opened in one of London’s smartest shopping areas, Pont Street
. Working on Sir Clough’s principle that “good design is good business”, the couple also transformed two broken-down potteries in Stoke-on-Trent
into one of the country’s most affluent pottery companies, Portmeirion Pottery. In an era when the idea of the “working woman” was an anathema, the entrepreneurial success of Susan Williams-Ellis, as a designer and a businesswoman (as well as wife and mother) was unusual.
Portmeirion was one of the first retail companies to fully understand and exploit the “lifestyle” consumer, creating a wide range of products including casual tableware, housewares and gifts for both women and men. The 1970s saw the birth of what is considered by many to be signature range of Portmeirion, Botanic Garden. Based on illustration plates discovered by Susan in an antique natural history book she found within an antiquarian bookseller in London, Weldon & Wesley. Susan was looking for eighteenth century engravings of sea creatures to use in a pottery decoration. She bought some French encyclopaedias but as she was leaving, the bookseller showed her a brightly hand coloured 'herbal' book of 1817, illustrated with a large selection of plants and flowers. The book, by Thomas Green, was called The Universal -or -Botanical, Medical and Agricultural Dictionary.
Botanic Garden has proved to be the company’s most successful range of tableware…despite buyer’s reluctance at the beginning. Susan Williams-Ellis recounted that “I remember when we first launched Botanic Garden. At that time you might have had dessert sets which had different patterns on each plate, but for the traditional tableware setting, everything had to match. I thought “Why can’t we have different patterns all within one collection? So, I created Botanic Garden!” The department store buyers in 1972 said that no-one would stock it as there were too many designs and that no-one would want to buy it as it didn’t match. I think I proved them all wrong!”
However, even in her 80s, Williams-Ellis' desire to continue to design the best tableware and ceramics available, led her to keep closely involved with the latest generation of Portmeirion designs, introducing Portmeirion to new audiences all over the world. Until 2006 she was still travelling the world, finding inspiration both from ancient civilizations and underwater worlds for her art work.
In 2005, she received an honorary fellowship from the Rector of London's University of Arts
, Sir Michael Bichard
and University Registrar Susan Asser. Susan Williams-Ellis said: “I was very flattered when I found out that I was to receive an honorary fellowship from University of Arts, London, and even more so when the Rector agreed to come all the way to see me at Portmeirion in North Wales to re-create the ceremony that will be held in my absence in London later this month. I decided to pursue pottery, rather than painting, mainly because I wanted to create affordable and beautiful things. I wanted people to buy my work purely because they liked it, and that it had a function, rather than buying things just as an investment, so its ironic I suppose that my work from the 60s is now considered so “collectable”. I am frightfully lucky. When I went to Chelsea before the War, I studied under the sculptor Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland. Twice a week I would be in a class with these icons of modern British art – what a wonderful chance to have, and now I am being given an honorary fellowship from University of Arts, London of which Chelsea forms part, its all come rather full circle hasn’t it? Being in Stoke has also been a wonderful part of my life. The people of Stoke are really the nicest people one could ever meet, and their hard work has established Portmeirion and enabled us to sell our pots around the world. I have been very fortunate.”
Clough Williams-Ellis
Sir Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis, CBE, MC was an English-born Welsh architect known chiefly as creator of the Italianate village of Portmeirion in North Wales.-Origins, education and early career:...
, was best known for co-founding Portmeirion Pottery
Portmeirion Pottery
Portmeirion is a British pottery company based in Stoke-on-Trent.-History:Portmeirion Pottery came into being in 1960 when the pottery designer Susan Williams-Ellis and her husband, Euan Cooper-Willis took over a small pottery decorating company in Stoke-on-Trent called A. E. Gray Ltd.. Susan...
.
Background
Williams-Ellis was born in GuildfordGuildford
Guildford is the county town of Surrey. England, as well as the seat for the borough of Guildford and the administrative headquarters of the South East England region...
, Surrey
Surrey
Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, in the house of artist and critic Roger Fry
Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism...
. Sir Clough was an eminent architect
Architect
An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...
; Williams-Ellis' mother was writer Amabel Strachey, cousin of author and Bloomsbury figure Lytton Strachey
Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit...
. Her parents were friends of other members of the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
, including Augustus John
Augustus John
Augustus Edwin John OM, RA, was a Welsh painter, draughtsman, and etcher. For a short time around 1910, he was an important exponent of Post-Impressionism in the United Kingdom....
and Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
. Williams-Ellis' godfather was Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
.
She was determined to be an artist from an early age. In the 1930s Susan studied ceramics with Bernard
Bernard Leach
Bernard Howell Leach, CBE, CH , was a British studio potter and art teacher. He is regarded as the "Father of British studio pottery"-Biography:...
and David
David Leach (potter)
David Andrew Leach was an English studio potter and the eldest son of Bernard Leach and Muriel Hoyle Leach, Bernard's first wife....
Leach while she was at Dartington Hall School. At Chelsea School of Art
Chelsea College of Art and Design
Chelsea College of Art and Design, the erstwhile Chelsea School of Art, is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London, and is a leading British art and design institution with an international reputation...
, during the 1940s, her tutors included Graham Sutherland
Graham Sutherland
Graham Vivien Sutherland OM was an English artist.-Early life:He was born in Streatham, attending Homefield Preparatory School, Sutton. He was then educated at Epsom College, Surrey before going up to Goldsmiths, University of London...
for painting and Henry Moore
Henry Moore
Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....
for sculpture, who helped to develop Susan’s innate feeling for three-dimensional shape and form.
Career
Williams-Ellis studied Fine Art at Chelsea Polytechnic, where her tutors included Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. Her brother, Christopher (1923–1944), fell in action before Monte CassinoMonte Cassino
Monte Cassino is a rocky hill about southeast of Rome, Italy, c. to the west of the town of Cassino and altitude. St. Benedict of Nursia established his first monastery, the source of the Benedictine Order, here around 529. It was the site of Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944...
as an ensign in the Welsh Guards
Welsh Guards
The Welsh Guards is an infantry regiment of the British Army, part of the Guards Division.-Creation :The Welsh Guards came into existence on 26 February 1915 by Royal Warrant of His Majesty King George V in order to include Wales in the national component to the Foot Guards, "..though the order...
. He had joined up straight from King's College, Cambridge
King's College, Cambridge
King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college's full name is "The King's College of our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge", but it is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the University....
. His friend at Cambridge was Euan Cooper-Willis, who subsequently married Susan. The couple had four children: daughters Anwyl, Siân and Menna, and son Robin. Anwyl and Menna are artists and pottery designers; Siân is a peace activist; Robin is a Welsh language
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
author. All are active in their parents' company.
Her father wrote in his autobiography Architect Errant about his feelings: His [Clough's son Christopher's] room mate in the Gibbs building there, Euan Cooper-Willis, subsequently married our elder daughter Susan. The armistice was thus a time of both pleasure and of almost unbearable pain. We soon had grandchildren to add to the pleasure. We decided that since we, Christopher's parents, were alive, we should try to be so properly, and to keep the wound to ourselves.
In 1948 Susan and Euan moved to Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
, following their marriage in 1945, and became self-sufficient. She earned some money from book illustration and design work while Euan produced a pamphlet, Towards Equality, for the Fabian Society. However the lure of Clough’s architectural vision was strong, and in 1953 the management of the souvenir shop in the Welsh village of Portmeirion
Portmeirion
Portmeirion is a popular tourist village in Gwynedd, North Wales. It was designed and built by Sir Clough Williams-Ellis between 1925 and 1975 in the style of an Italian village and is now owned by a charitable trust....
, created by Susan’s father, fell to Susan and Euan. Despite the unique architectural status of the village, the souvenir shop was operating at a loss. By 1961 the shop had grown enormously; Susan and Euan were managers of the village; and a second Portmeirion shop had opened in one of London’s smartest shopping areas, Pont Street
Pont Street
Pont Street is a fashionable street in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, central London, England, not far from the Knightsbridge department store Harrods to the north-west. The street crosses Sloane Street in the middle, with Beauchamp Place to the west and Cadogan Place, and Chesham Place, to the east,...
. Working on Sir Clough’s principle that “good design is good business”, the couple also transformed two broken-down potteries in Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent , also called The Potteries is a city in Staffordshire, England, which forms a linear conurbation almost 12 miles long, with an area of . Together with the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme Stoke forms The Potteries Urban Area...
into one of the country’s most affluent pottery companies, Portmeirion Pottery. In an era when the idea of the “working woman” was an anathema, the entrepreneurial success of Susan Williams-Ellis, as a designer and a businesswoman (as well as wife and mother) was unusual.
Portmeirion was one of the first retail companies to fully understand and exploit the “lifestyle” consumer, creating a wide range of products including casual tableware, housewares and gifts for both women and men. The 1970s saw the birth of what is considered by many to be signature range of Portmeirion, Botanic Garden. Based on illustration plates discovered by Susan in an antique natural history book she found within an antiquarian bookseller in London, Weldon & Wesley. Susan was looking for eighteenth century engravings of sea creatures to use in a pottery decoration. She bought some French encyclopaedias but as she was leaving, the bookseller showed her a brightly hand coloured 'herbal' book of 1817, illustrated with a large selection of plants and flowers. The book, by Thomas Green, was called The Universal -or -Botanical, Medical and Agricultural Dictionary.
Botanic Garden has proved to be the company’s most successful range of tableware…despite buyer’s reluctance at the beginning. Susan Williams-Ellis recounted that “I remember when we first launched Botanic Garden. At that time you might have had dessert sets which had different patterns on each plate, but for the traditional tableware setting, everything had to match. I thought “Why can’t we have different patterns all within one collection? So, I created Botanic Garden!” The department store buyers in 1972 said that no-one would stock it as there were too many designs and that no-one would want to buy it as it didn’t match. I think I proved them all wrong!”
However, even in her 80s, Williams-Ellis' desire to continue to design the best tableware and ceramics available, led her to keep closely involved with the latest generation of Portmeirion designs, introducing Portmeirion to new audiences all over the world. Until 2006 she was still travelling the world, finding inspiration both from ancient civilizations and underwater worlds for her art work.
In 2005, she received an honorary fellowship from the Rector of London's University of Arts
University of the Arts London
The University of the Arts London, formerly known as the London Institute, is a collegiate university comprising six internationally recognised art, design, fashion and media colleges in London, England...
, Sir Michael Bichard
Michael Bichard
Michael George Bichard, Baron Bichard, KCB, is a former public servant in the United Kingdom, first in local and then as a civil servant in central government. He currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Government and as Chair of the Design Council...
and University Registrar Susan Asser. Susan Williams-Ellis said: “I was very flattered when I found out that I was to receive an honorary fellowship from University of Arts, London, and even more so when the Rector agreed to come all the way to see me at Portmeirion in North Wales to re-create the ceremony that will be held in my absence in London later this month. I decided to pursue pottery, rather than painting, mainly because I wanted to create affordable and beautiful things. I wanted people to buy my work purely because they liked it, and that it had a function, rather than buying things just as an investment, so its ironic I suppose that my work from the 60s is now considered so “collectable”. I am frightfully lucky. When I went to Chelsea before the War, I studied under the sculptor Henry Moore and the painter Graham Sutherland. Twice a week I would be in a class with these icons of modern British art – what a wonderful chance to have, and now I am being given an honorary fellowship from University of Arts, London of which Chelsea forms part, its all come rather full circle hasn’t it? Being in Stoke has also been a wonderful part of my life. The people of Stoke are really the nicest people one could ever meet, and their hard work has established Portmeirion and enabled us to sell our pots around the world. I have been very fortunate.”