Bill Ismay's Feat of Clay

How one man's collecting obsession assembled the extraordinary trove of pots at the heart of the Centre of Ceramic Art

W.A.Ismay: The Potters’ Friend - a ceramic created in 2015 by Peter Meanley to celebrate the launch of the Centre for Ceramic Art (COCA) at York

14 Welbeck Street, Wakefield today, is a smart little terraced house, neatly painted with white window frames and a sea green front door. It stands in an Edwardian housing development, in a loop of the River Calder which snakes through this former textile town creating a peninsular, known for reasons no one can now fathom, as Belle Isle.

No 14 is differentiated from its neighbours only by a blue plaque over the front door, honouring one William Alfred Ismay, MBE.

Bill Ismay was a rather solitary chap who spent his whole working life in branches of the local library service in the triangle of coalfields between Wakefield, Pontefract and Barnsley. His life would not have merited a blue plaque or any other memorial, save for one extraordinary achievement.

Bill was fascinated by ceramic pots. Not just to the extent of becoming a bit of an amateur expert. Pots dominated his whole life and filled every corner of 14 Welbeck St as he built up, over several decades, a collection of more than 3,600 pots which is now the basis of the leading British studio pottery museum collection in the country.

Spending virtually every spare penny he earned – and latterly the lump sum which came with his library pension – Bill Ismay gradually turned an interest into an obsession. Originally, in the early 1950s, he focussed solely on only three Yorkshire potters – Barbara Cass (whose shop and studio was in the Shambles, York) , Joan Hotchin (a former pupil of David Leach who worked in Pudsey near Leeds) and Irwin Hoyland (a ceramics lecturer from Sheffield) – and acquired just 18 pieces in 1955. But his obsession was on a roll. The following year he bought 65 pots and over time his interest widened to cover potters such as Bernard Leach, Hans Coper and Lucie Rie and eventually he was buying over 100 pots a year.

In the 50s and 60s Ismay was spending a few pounds each on a pot, yet the growth of interest in British ceramics and the quality and importance of the examples he acquired means that the collection today – the heart of the Centre of Ceramic Art in York – must surely be worth something in the low millions.

Bill Ismay made few demands on life and could easily survive on his local authority salary. He inherited his house from his parents – his father was a trouser presser and his mother a school teacher – but it was nothing like as smart as it is today when Bill lived there alone after their deaths.

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Barley Roscoe, former Director of the Craft Study Centre at the Holburne Museum in Bath, visited in the 1970s to return some pots Bill had loaned for an exhibition at the Holburne. She recalled, in a film made of Bill’s life for York Museums Trust, that at first she thought it couldn’t be the right address. With half drawn curtains and unwashed windows it looked shut up and she had to pluck up courage to knock.

Once inside she was astonished at Bill’s home, surrounded by his thousands of pots which covered every surface of furniture and shelves. On the floor boxes were piled high with pots returned from exhibitions around the globe to which Bill had loaned various items.

Ismay at home in 1999, surrounded by his pots, with just enough space left for a one-plate meal - photo Janette Haigh

She recalled the dining table was piled with pots and only “a plate sized space” where Bill would eat.

The pots were his whole life – his family, almost. Bill seems to have been content with his life-long bachelor status. In his archive of letters there is apparently a rather touching tale of a war-time dalliance with an exotic dancer and “striptease artist” he met during WW2. He subsequently joined the Royal Signals and she toured with ENSA, but, although they wrote often, she was married and there was no future for them after the War.

Neighbours were used to Bill’s eccentricities – but even they could hardly come to terms with how the collection took over his life. Chris Knowles was just a lad when he first saw inside Bill’s house, taken there by his grandfather who was a Welbeck Street neighbour. Interviewed for the catalogue of an exhibition of Bill’s in 2014, he recalled the house was jam-packed with pots covering every last space on more than one floor. “Frankly I was amazed how Bill actually managed to live in his own house! There was one occasion when Mr Ismay was out when a delivery from Japan arrived.  Naturally they asked a neighbour to sign for it and that neighbour happened to be my grandmother.  She was a woman of a nervous disposition at the best of times and was horrified about having a fragile and potentially valuable piece of art being left in her care. I think she was very relieved when Mr Ismay finally took possession of the item.”

Bill Ismay lived his life virtually anonymously outside of the world of ceramic collection. To Wakefield he was known simply as a rather eccentric librarian at Hemsworth branch library, a man apparently uninterested in a career progression and content to live on his local Government salary, with its certainty of a pension which could sustain his collecting passion for the whole of his life.

When he eventually did retire, in 1975, there was a flush of new purchases added to the collection, made possible by the lump sum element of his pension. Bill bought 177 that year, but then pulled himself up short when he examined his bank statements at the end of his first year of retirement. In his diary Bill had to admit that even he found this level of buying “ridiculous! I realise I must re-trench”  Yet he kept up a buying rate of at least one pot a week.

The legacy

I had not heard of Bill Ismay until after his death, when I became a Trustee of York Museums Trust, which manages York Art Gallery plus a marvellous portfolio of other heritage assets in the City of York. I had always been interested in art and as a small-time collector of original artwork from books and magazine of the Victorian period, the opportunity to join the YMT Board was a bit of a thrill. My Board activity until then had been entirely commercial and becoming a charity Trustee was an eye-opener for me.

Even more of an eye-opener was a walk round York Art Gallery in the company of the redoubtable Janet Barnes, then the CEO of the Trust and – in my view – the creator and prime-mover of the project under which the Gallery, the Castle Museum and the Yorkshire Museum were released from the dead-hand of municipal ownership and transferred into the York Museums Trust of today. (On her retirement Janet was rightly made a CBE for her vision and effort in creating the foundation of today’s YMT.)

York Art Gallery - the remarkable roof revealed after decades of being boarded up.

The Gallery interior then was uninspiring and rather municipal. I recall that first experience of the Gallery as a sharp contrast to the brilliance visitors see today. On the first floor Janet, armed with a torch, opened a small, hidden door about halfway up a corridor wall and we peered inside. By torchlight we saw what looked to me like a miniature version of the vaulted cast-iron roof of a Victorian railway station. In fact it was the once glazed roof of a exhibition hall, which was the original purpose of the building which is now the Gallery. (Its postal address of Exhibition Square should have been a clue!). Previous curatorial generations had put in a false ceiling and boarded up the now-spectacular roof space and it became a dumping ground for decades for bits and pieces which nobody knew what to do with but didn’t dare throw away.

I urge you today to visit the Gallery and see for yourself the transformation brought about through Janet’s vision for a centre for British ceramics, which she later outlined to the Trustees. On moving from Yorkshire, I left the Trust before the vision was complete but the excitement of that vision and satisfaction of having a tiny role in supporting the project through its earliest years is a fond memory.

Of course, though he never knew it, the project was actually Bill Ismay’s. Had he not spent those solitary years of the 1950s, 60s and 70s accumulating his astonishing collection there would have been no Centre for Ceramic Art at York. Certainly his choice of what should happen to the collection after his death – about which he ruminated for years in the 1990s – was the trigger for the conception of COCA. He turned down many other suggestions as to what he do with the 3,600 pots and accompanying archive, but we should be forever grateful that his wonderful accumulation came into York’s trusteeship in 2001. Bill was a Yorkshireman to his core and York now seems such an obvious choice, although I suspect it wasn’t back then.

In 2014, while the York Art Gallery underwent substantial re-development, including the creation of the gallery which is now their Centre of Ceramic Art, around 700 examples of Ismay’s collection were curated into a major exhibition - W.A. Ismay Collection By Matthew Darbyshire - so the public could still have access to the collections while its permanent home was built. In the exhibition some of Ismay’s rooms - stuffed with ceramics - were recreated to fascinating effect.

Some of Ismay’s collection at the Hepworth in 2014

Perhaps ironically, but certainly suitably, the exhibition was held in Yorkshire’s newest major gallery, the Hepworth in Wakefield. This acclaimed £35m complex has been a tremendous crowd-puller since the day it opened in 2012, with around half a million visitors in its first year. Although its brutalist, concrete exterior made it a controversial project among locals, the Hepworth is a past winner of the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award and is now a significant national art museum. It stages major exhibitions as well as honouring Barbara Hepworth, born in the City and schooled at Wakefield Girls High although, frankly, her links with her birthplace fade away quite quickly after she left for Leeds Art College and then London. She is probably better known for her time in Paris and, of course, St Ives.

By the way, do visit the Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St Ives, if you haven’t already - experiencing so many of her major works in the garden there is well worth the trip. Of course you also have the attraction of the Bernard Leach Pottery, the products of which form one of the key themes of the Ismay collection…and that brings us back to those cluttered rooms at 14 Welbeck St.

For Bill’s collection, the 2014 exhibition was a bit of a home-coming – the Hepworth occupies the tip of the Belle Isle peninsular just a few hundred yards from the birthplace of both Ismay and his remarkable collection.

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• Visit the Centre of Ceramic Art for yourself - it’s worth a trip to York on its own, but York Museums Trust also manages the Yorkshire Museum and the iconic Castle Museum so make at least a day of it. https://www.yorkartgallery.org.uk/exhibition/centre-of-ceramic-art-coca/

• Janet Barnes is now a working potter, producing some dramatic pieces.

  http://barnesandbarnesstudio.com/

• Read the full story of Bill Ismay and his heritage in The Yorkshire Tea Ceremony, written by Helen Walsh, who catalogued his collection. Hard to find, but available on Amazon.