Possibly the most expensive chipped vase in the world?

(A boy’s antiques adventures in Brum)

The “Big Brum” antiques fair, seven hundred stands inside and out, free to enter and only ever lasting a few hours on selected Wednesday mornings throughout the year is gone now, long gone. Many still remember it, though they may forget it also had a much smaller weekly offering on a Monday morning, before the proper business of the Rag market (where it was held) resumed for the week ahead. This was very much smaller, a mere minnow in comparison to the bi-monthly leviathan. Only twenty or thirty dealers, surly, leather jacketed and roughly spoken, took casual stands. Effing and blinding with fags hanging out of their mouths, tipping out a weeks worth of oddments without any ceremony or design, heaped up on the bare wooden tables.

It was as brief as it was small, it’s mercantile brevity measured in the beats of a hummingbird’s wings. You would get there at six (if you could) and by nine most of the serious dealers had left, just in case the police arrived. I’m joking of course, they left by half past eight.

Being a local boy, and with the buses running into town from 6.30 just outside the front door I got there whenever I could. When there was a half term holiday or an unexpected day off, either through riots or a teacher’s strike (it was the eighties). My attendance in those days was hit and miss, not that anyone would have noticed, children were invisible at these gatherings. I’d noted that by the number of times I’d either been pushed into or my feet trodden upon, at the larger fair no prisoners were taken, especially not young small ones. I would dart and weave around, almost unnoticed with only ever twenty or thirty pounds, at most, lining my stitched leather wallet. It was months saved dinner and pocket money, all combined and changed at the local Post Office. Bags of ten, twenty and fifty pence pieces rendered into two or three big, crisp portable notes. Blue Five pound notes with the Duke of Wellington, brown Tenners with Florence Nightingale peering serenely back at you and rarely, rarely a purple and green Twenty with Shakespeare nonchalantly leaning on a carved stone pedestal. Back then money felt like money and those few notes were a fortune.

My reading at that time had started to branch out, not just silver, but odd books on all sorts of things Antique. Furniture, metalwork, glass, jewellery but my particular favourite at that moment was a well written pocket guide to early English porcelain. The numerous factories, marks (not unlike silver), forms and decoration hit a chord and I had taken to it. An added bonus was that slightly damaged pieces were well within a school boy’s budget, so it was with that intent very much to the forefront of my mind that I leapt onto the bus bound for Birmingham City Centre on a cold wet Monday morning.

It wasn’t busy when I got there, just before seven. The stands were spread out across the large vacant indoor market in groups of twos or threes, like a chain of atolls in a vast ocean of empty waiting stalls. A few people were milling around and I started scanning up and down the tables for anything of interest, all the time clutching tightly my wallet with the precious thirty pounds within. Dad never failed to warn me of pick pockets lying in wait down the market. It wasn’t that he was unduly overprotective, it was that he knew all of them.

I had nearly finished the sparse number of stands and was walking back towards the exit in time for the next bus home when I passed a small stand with a fair bit of broken china and glass on it. I trawled through it and a couple of pieces caught my eye, one in particular.

In reading up on English porcelain I had become beguiled by the name William Billingsley. An extraordinary painter of flowers and a pioneer in trying to perfect porcelain bodies which would rival the wares of the finest French factories, he ultimately went bankrupt several times and moved from place to place. Particularly prized though were  wares made at the short lived Nantgarw China works. I’d never seen or handled a piece of it but the guide I was reading was quite clear that even though quite thickly potted, the porcelain body was a highly translucent soft paste, which would, under a strong light, give the appearance of sun through wet snow.

A little spill vase stood before me on the table, chipped AND cracked, but beautifully decorated with finely painted sprays of flowers beneath a Sevres style blue and gold rim. I picked it up. It was very thickly potted but under the glow of the strobing market strip lighting above me, I could clearly see the outline of my fingers through this thick soft white porcelain. Could this be it, Nantgarw? Could these flowers actually be painted by Billingsley? I didn’t know but I did know it was £35 from the dealers stickered label on the base, despite all the damage.

Next to it was a nice little bowl that had also taken my eye from all the odds and ends piled up on the stand. It wasn’t old, just art pottery with a pinkish glaze and drips around the rim. It was thinly potted, perfect and I liked it almost as much as the broken spill vase, but not quite. Besides my head was buzzing with romantic thoughts of struggling Welsh porcelain production and a bankrupt genius, not anonymous studio pottery, which could quite easily have been the product of some evening class only a few weeks earlier.

Try as I might, even though the modern pink bowl was twelve pounds and the other vase was in an awful state I simply couldn’t persuade the dealer to take thirty (all I had) for the two. He would do the spill vase for thirty on its own or just the bowl for ten. I stood there for a good five minutes picking them both up, putting them both down, staring intently at the dealer to see if the pain on the face of an indecisive young boy could melt his frozen dealer’s heart. It couldn’t. I left the market, as you can probably guess, penniless and clutching a badly damaged porcelain spill vase.

When I got home I immediately ran to the books, the few books I had, “is it Nantgarw?” I queried again and again, flipping page over page, peering at exactly how the flowers were painted, but no, I didn’t really have a clue (I still don’t). Though, whilst looking I did see a couple of bowls like the pink one I’d just seen, the one I’d left on the market table for want of a brown Florence Nightingale ten pound note. I went downstairs and asked Mum if she could lend me a tenner against my pocket money and drive me quickly down to the market to get the bowl (taking another bus would take too long). At the time she looked after us, my widowed Uncle, his children and her parents, every day. Three full bustling households on her shoulders, so it was an entirely unjustified and unreasonable request on my part. She couldn’t do it, she simply didn’t have the time though would have scraped together the tenner in a heartbeat. I apologised and said it wasn’t important and it wasn’t. I’d had a choice and I’d made it, been happy with it and today, as I type, I almost still am.

I kept the chipped and cracked vase, a sound investment over all those years because it’s still as pretty (at least to me) as the day I bought it, though I really still have no idea where it was made. A few people have said Spode or Coalport, or Worcester but rather than actually find out I’d rather not know and still have a  hope that it might be a lost bit of Nantgarw. In all other respects (the financial side) it has not, alas, performed well. Thirty pounds in my youth was a very good night out, but the spill vase now might not make a tenner, certainly not enough for a bag of fish chips. Why then do I call it “possibly the most expensive chipped vase in the world”? Well because I bought it instead of the funny pink bowl which I would have otherwise now owned. Unlike my broken spill vase I do know who made that pink bowl, who it’s now famous maker was, that bowl I could have bought for a tenner. Does the name Dame Lucie Rie ring any bells? Well, I haven’t the heart to tell you here but go and Google it, Google the prices too for chromatic glazed conical bowls with metallic drip glazed rims. Still, you can’t make the right choice every time, can you?