Pauline Thompson

Admin - wrote:Pauline Thompson's obituary in the Oxford Mail, 2013:

FRIENDS have paid tribute to a “remarkable and unique” potter, painter and teacher who has died aged 89.
For most of the last 50 years Pauline Thompson taught pottery from the watermill on the Eyston estate in East Hendred which she converted into a home. As a teacher she passed on her love of pottery to everyone she could find, but could also give short shrift to those who didn’t seem to understand her methods.
Friend Jane Bevan said: “Pauline Thompson was a remarkable and unique woman. “Besides being a prolific potter and sensitive watercolour painter, she was widely read, intelligent, opinionated and often sharp-tongued, especially when critiquing the work of her students where she felt they had not understood principles that came naturally to her. “But she was always encouraging and above all kind-hearted.”
She was born in Finchley, North London on May 9, 1924. Her father, George Thompson, was an artist and cartoonist for The Times, Punch and the New Yorker. Pauline was brought up by her paternal aunts Mabel and Hilda in Peterborough and had little contact with her father save for childhood holidays in Eastbourne, where he worked as a teacher and artist. At Peterborough County School for Girls, she shone in swimming and art, receiving several awards from the Royal Drawing Society. On leaving school during the Second World War she helped design Mosquito fighter-bombers for the de Havilland Aircraft Company in St Albans. After the war she worked as an au pair in Switzerland and then studied at Burslem School of Art, Lancashire, from 1949 to 1952. She moved to Kingston in Surrey to be close to London where she began to sell her pots in the local market, as well as in Covent Garden and later at Liberty’s and Harrods. As a tutor at Southfields Pottery in South London she gathered a loyal following of young mothers as students, many of whom became lifelong friends, including Mary Tyfield. Together they took a six-month sabbatical, converting an old ambulance and driving it across Europe from pottery to pottery visiting Crete, Turkey and Israel. She moved to East Hendred in 1963 and established the Ginge Brook Pottery from where she was to run classes and, for 34 years, an annual arts and craft exhibition.

For most of the last 50 years Pauline Thompson taught pottery from the watermill on the Eyston estate in East Hendred which she converted into a home....
during the Second World War she helped design Mosquito fighter-bombers for the de Havilland Aircraft Company in St Albans....
She studied at Burslem School of Art, Lancashire, from 1949 to 1952 before moving to Kingston in Surrey to be close to London where she began to sell her pots in the local market, as well as in Covent Garden and later at Liberty’s and Harrods, and was a tutor at Southfields Pottery in South London.
She moved to East Hendred in 1963 and established the Ginge Brook Pottery from where she was to run classes and, for 34 years, an annual arts and craft exhibition.