Biography
In 1925 the aristocratic Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie (1895-1985) started her first pottery with the French potter Ada Mason, nick-named 'Peter'. A wood-fired kiln was built by the Japanese Tsuronosuke Matsubayashi (known as Matsu), whom they had met in St Ives, in the grounds of her family estate at Coleshill, near Faringdon, now Oxfordshire. He built a two chambered wood-fired kiln there but it could only be used a few times a year as it used two tonnes of timber to fire it for the 36 hours required. After Mason emigrated to the USA, Pleydell-Bouverie was joined for eight years by fellow potter Norah Braden (1901-2001).
Pleydell-Bouverie had visited Roger Fry at his Omega Workshops in London in the early 1920s; attended evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Dora Billington (1890-1968); and was an early student of Bernard Leach (1887-1979) in St Ives between 1924-25, learning alongside Michael Cardew (1901-1983), Shoji Hamada (1894-1978) and Matsu, where she was nick-named 'Beano'. Coleshill Pottery used ash glazes, prepared from wood and vegetables grown on the estate. The family sold Coleshill House in 1946 and Pleydell-Bouverie moved to Kilmington in Wiltshire where she stayed for the rest of her life.
