Collecting early Staffordshire figures is as much about collecting memories as it is about amassing objects. More than twenty years ago, my good friend Nick Burton found an early Staffordshire figure of a girl holding her doll, and he acquired her for me. I seldom look at her, below, without remembering Nick's mother, who enjoyed early doll houses and admired this small treasure as we had tea in her lovely home.
The majority of early figures were made to pair, and this little girl too had a mate: a boy with his hands in his pockets. It irks me that in all the years I have not been able to find a perfect companion for her. Potential matches were always too tall, too short, or a poor color match. The boy below left, for example, was too tall by almost an inch, and, whereas her pot is creamy, his was glaringly white. Better no marriage than a bad marriage. The boy on the right would have worked. At six inches, he was the correct height, but he had sold.
 |  Image courtesy of Andrew Dando. |
| These figures were all made without bocages. but each has a tree-like stump behind. I am not sure what purpose it served, but there it is. Andrew Dando has told me that the design source for these figures was a pair of prints. That of the girl is titled "See My Baby" and the boy "Just Breeched," a reference to his having shed the long garment that small boys usually wore for his first pair of breeches. |  |
To my mind, these figures are all charming. How did we get from these to Ken and Barbie? The pottery that made them made two versions of the girl. As you see below (currently in the stock of RTS Antiques), the girl has a different, perhaps smaller, head.
Some of the girls and boys below appear to have porcellaneous bodies, and I suspect another pottery made some, if not all, of them.
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Bigger can be better, and the figure of a girl with a doll that I covet is the whopper below. She is 11 inches tall, and I have only recorded two examples of her.
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These big figures are entirely free-standing, with no stump behind them. They differ in the placement of the doll and other small details, so perhaps they come from two different potteries, but aren't both wonderful? My inner child craves one. I have yet to record the companion boy, but I live in hope.
