William Staite Murray, M mark

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Via http://www.interpretingceramics.com/issue016/articles/01.htm

Dora Billington and William Staite Murray at the RCA -

In 1919, [Billington] began to teach at the Central as well as the RCA. Her RCA contract ended in 1925 when William Staite Murray was appointed pottery instructor. The circumstances of Staite Murray’s appointment, and the ill-feeling that arose between him and Bernard Leach as a consequence, are well-known.32 However, the circumstances of Billington’s departure from the RCA are less familiar. Her explanation, which she gave to Farleigh twenty-five years later, was that,

When Professor Rothenstein became Principal of the College, he felt that the junior staff should not stay beyond a certain number of years, and we were all informed that we should not be kept on.33

That is not entirely convincing. William Rothenstein had been appointed in 1920 and Billington did not leave for another five years. In 1925, she was thirty-five and had been teaching at the RCA for ten years, so she was hardly ‘junior’. The explanation is more likely to be found in the new policies that Rothenstein had introduced to the College. He had been hired to improve the reputation of the RCA, which was poor. He thought that what it needed was not full-time, professional teachers but practicing artists of distinction who should have studios in the College and who would teach by example.34

He supported Billington’s expansion of the pottery class and her acquisition of throwing wheels35 and a high-temperature kiln.36 As a result of her efforts, the course was awarded Grand Prix in Technical Instruction at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels.37 Why, then, despite his initial support and Billington’s undoubted achievements, did Rothenstein appoint Staite Murray in her place? He was unimpressed by much of the work being done in the design department, including that in her class:

Much of the work in the Schools of Pottery, of Painting and Decorating and of Metalwork is too unexperimental and derivative. No consistent attempt appears to have been made to deal with the interpretation of the contemporary world in design and execution. A wrong understanding of the spirit which made mediaeval art so vital persists at Kensington, and the research work towards the discovery of new subject matter and new treatment, so noticeable on the Continent, seem to have been wanting.38

At first, he thought that she might be assisted by visits from Alfred and Louise Powell, the ‘ablest and most scholarly pottery painters’ he knew.39 But that was in 1920. By 1924, Staite Murray had emerged as the leading exponent of the new studio pottery, and although Billington had exhibited and won international prizes, she lacked Murray’s reputation. She was primarily a teacher, she did not have her own studio and she was still working in the Arts and Crafts manner. The explanation that she was given, that junior staff 'should not stay beyond a certain number of years', was probably Rothenstein’s diplomatic gloss on sacking her.

Billington was arguably a better teacher than Staite Murray, who said 'A Zen master teaches by not-teaching'.40 Some of his students said they received no instruction from him at all, and when Robert Baker took over ceramics after the Second World War he found a locked room full of equipment that had been put there to stop students using it.41 Staite Murray was a charismatic presence and influenced many potters (including Sam Haile, Henry Hammond, Heber Mathews, Robert Washington and Ursula Mommens) but some had to take evening classes at the Central with Billington to learn how to actually make pots and glaze them. Despite this, she wrote admiringly of Staite Murray, 'whose magnificent big pots with their interesting mysterious surface-treatments reach out to possibilities as yet unexplored,'42 and invited him to teach at the Central.43