Oh, thievery, oh, calamity.

Oh, thievery, oh, calamity. Is that a weird title for a discussion on early Staffordshire figures? Read on, and all will, sadly, become apparent

Recently, a collector friend emailed me a picture of the two figures above that he was interested in buying. Both are decorated under the glaze in a typical Pratt palette. The female is titled SPORTSMANS WIFE, and the male HELENDER BOY. What, my friend asked, might a Helender Boy be? My friend is usually a step ahead of me in tracking down obscure sources, and for the next few hours we both ransacked material of the period in our determination to find out who this little fella was. And then, by luck, the  penny dropped and I realized that our Helender Boy was meant to be a Highlander Boy! We well know that spelling was not the potters' strong point, and this is just another instance of that. To seal the argument, the same little figure occurs decorated in enamels, and here his Scottish garb is quite obvious.

My friend has one of the most interesting collections I know of, so I was pleased when he acquired the Helender Boy and Sportsmans Wife , along with a pair of sweet bocage figures, similarly decorated under the glaze.

As I had not recorded these figures before, I was relieved to see them go to a deserving and appreciative home. And then disaster struck. A few days later, I received an email from him The subject line, you may have guessed, was "Oh, thievery, oh calamity." The figures had been stolen on arrival at a London address.

I suspect that the thief was disappointed that his/her haul didn't contain something with quick street value, and I shudder to think that he/she may have tossed them because, small as they are, they are special. If you come across them, please let me know, and I will do the necessary to reunite them with their rightful owner.

On my watch, a handful of other items have been stolen. Notably, the two figures below, a stirrup cup and a unique equestrian figure, were stolen in transit to the US about ten years ago. Sadly, the latter too is the only one of its kind, and both have been lost forever.

And then there is the story of an armorial vase impressed with the Walton mark that was stolen. If complete, it would have looked like the beauty below, but in this instance both the lion and the unicorn had been lost. This did not stop an unscrupulous dealer selling what was left of the object to American collectors several decades ago--back in those days when images in books were few and far between, some in the trade got away with anything.  ​

When I spotted the sadly depleted spill vase in their collection, I broke the news to the collectors, who dumped it on an estate sale with a token price ticket of $100, a tiny fraction of what they had paid.  Believe it or not, it was stolen, and it landed up in the UK, where dealer after dealer declined to purchase it. It was then offered at auction, and, given its trivial value, the rightful owner decided not to take matters further. 

I never fail to look at one of these Walton vases without wondering whether they were indeed vases. The opening is small for  spills, and much too small for flowers. Did they originally have a stopper of sorts that has been lost over time? To my eye, the top seems unfinished in its present form. After all, the coat of arms of that period had a lion atop. ​

​ I have recorded one armorial vase from another pot bank that does have a little stopper...and a very cute little stopper at that.  As might be expected, it is a lion,

I don't know if I will live long enought to encounter a Walton spill vase with a stopper, but, in my mind, these "vases" were containers, and a stopper was part of the deal.