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| HARRY DAVEY 1911 SUSSEX POT |
£NFS |
My Perfect pot, for those who don't know me, my training was as a Geologist, in particular evolutionary Paleontology, I later worked as an archeologist , and my love is early pottery in particular those items made for, and used by the individual , named and dated country pots are high on my list...... So why is this so perfect !…… .Inscribed for Harry Davey and dated 1911 a copy of an early letter accompanied this pot , stating that He, Harry was staying with Charles Dawson of Lewes, the well known Sussex antiquarian & collector of Sussex Iron. (He was soon to become world famous as the finder of the Piltdown Skull (Anthropos Dawsonii). ( The first fragments were found in 1908 but most in June 1912) And that a Mr *Uriah Clark had recently acquired the Dicker Potteries & he had invited Dawson to come over sometime as he thought it might interest him. So I having a car drove him over. The pottery had been working at Dicker for hundreds of years & they were producing the same articles they had always made & in the exactly the same way with Heath Robinson machinery. He asked us to accept a souvenir of our visit & suggested to me that he would be pleased to make me a harvest bottle with my name on it. (this bottle). He said he was thinking of making these reproductions for sale. Evidently they didn’t appeal to the tripper, so instead in due course some dreadful stuff called Dickerware was produced and sold like hot cakes in the bric a brac shop & Ye Olde Tea Rooms.
The cork was made by Charles Dawson.
*There is obviously confusion here on the part of Harry Davey as although the company was named Uriah Clark & Nephew, Uriah Clark died in 1903 and it was his Nephew, Abel Clark running the business at this time.
So a perfect pot made for an individual linked to an historic Archeologist and paleontologist , (who, was not outed as a career faker until 2003).The whole Piltdown Man story made into a film is now part of English Folk law ! And how fascinating that the potter probably Able Clark was openly making fake reproductions of earlier pots, it is known that they visited cemeteries to get names and dates of individuals for there wares, and that it is not unknown that later pots , unmarked !, have been ascribed to earlier periods.
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