Pattern No: A5561

The first image, a company information photograph, depicts pattern A8384, a design expected to come from 1947. However, the pots shown here for pattern A5561 are all clearly marked A5561, which would be a design created some eight years earlier. The reason for the two numbers (and, additionally, for a third, B109), is not known but the outbreak of war in Europe might provide an explanation: designs were created in the late 1930s but couldn’t be put into production until after the war had ended due to various restrictions, particularly in relation to the production of decorated ware. It may then have seemed appropriate to launch a full range of the pattern, with six colour variations, under a new set of numbers.
Whatever the number, the design featured in a number of publications: Pottery and Glass, May 1945; Pottery and Glass, March 1946; the Studio Year Book – Decorative Art, 1943-48.