Emma Bridgewater

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This is the

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B B C

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

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My castaway this week is the designer and businesswoman Emma Bridgwater. You may know and love her eponymous, sprawling range of homeware, but whatever you do, don't call her a potter. She's not. She's a grubby industrialist, her words. And the company she founded thirty years ago, manufacturing in Stoke-on-Trent, has succeeded in condensing a well-made and gently witty version of Britishness into mugs, teapots, milk jugs, and dishes. From its beginnings, the company's designs embodied notions of quality and comfort, at once nostalgic and yet also somehow entirely of the moment. We have, in no small part, her mother to thank. The crowded dresser in the family kitchen in Oxford was a blueprint for how to fashion a harmonious whole from mismatched, dissonant pieces. So it was with her crockery, but also with her life. My castaway grew up in a liberal, slightly chaotic home, enjoying a bohemian childhood of abundant siblings, wild swimming, and colourful lodgers. She says, Instead of smooth sailing on a sunny day, it seems as if I've been frantically trying to learn to sail a boat that I built in my sleep, then in a moment of delirium boarded and set out on a round-the-world trip with no map or oilskins or even much of a picnic. A better description of being a human being I cannot find, Emma Bridgewater. Were you talking there exclusively about your business life or about the business of life in general? I was thinking about the business, but you'll write it. It probably applies to the whole project, doesn't it? Being a household name, as you are, people, I guess, and I'm sure you're asked many times about, you know, how you made it and how you build a brand. And are you telling me there wasn't a plan?

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There wasn't. No, I I really did fall into it. I was very young when I started and I really didn't know what I was getting into when I had that first idea in a china shop that I could make what was missing.

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Mercifully, a friend set me on the road to Stoke-on-Trent, and it was there that it gelved into something of a plan. And the thing that you were looking for at the time, I have heard, I have read, you were looking for a gift for your mother, and you couldn't find quite the right thing, is that true? Exactly that. I was looking for two cups and saucers, because to me that said what I longed to be able to say articulately to her. I'm sorry I'm being such a prat at the moment. But we will sit down and drink coffee together and chat. I just can't quite do it now. You are a writer too, and in one of your books, Pattern, you talk about this-you call it the secrets of lasting design.

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I'm sure actually it's probably quite a a a complicated thing, but can you distil it down for me what you think good design is?

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I think that good design speaks from one person to another. It conveys something very important and quite emotional. And I think in terms of housewares, we've become something of an anomaly. There used to be lots of studios in Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, for example, where people sat down and they thought about their holiday in Spain, or they went to the library and got some books out about Mexico. And they did designs very carefully with quite a knowledge of their audience. And all too often now, I think it's a buying team. There's much more sort of pragmatism and commerce than heart and soul going into the making. Let's go to the music now, Emma Bridgewater. Tell me about your first piece today. What is it, and why specifically have you decided that it's one of your eight discs? It's The Swimming Song by Kate and Anna McGarrigal. And I think I've listened to their songs all my life. This really reminds me of being in the car with my brother and sister, with mum and Rick, driving all the way from Oxford to Northumberland maybe. And Mum was queen of the fun. She was always very good at making every day jolly and lovely and an adventure. And so certainly she'd have been in a very good mood if we were setting off to stay with cousins in Norfolk or her parents in Northumberland. So this really feels like singing and ragging in the car and my stepfather smoking.

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absolutely continuously, and sometimes pausing the tapes to read out loud to her from private eye. Of course we didn't understand the jokes but we thought it was hilarious because they were laughing so much.

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This summer I went swimming, this summer I might have drowned. But I held my breath and I kicked my feet and I moved my arms around.

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Move my arms around this summer I swam in the ocean And swam in a swimming pool

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Salt my wounds, clearing my eyes I'm a self-destructive fool Self-destructive fool

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Swimming song performed by Kate and Anna McGarrigal. Um the company, of course, then is Emma Bridgewater, but for some years now it's been run in partnership with uh your husband, the designer Matthew Rice. Is there a clear demarcation of when r right, Matthew, it's f we've finished working now, and now we're going to go home.

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And do other things, no.

Emma Bridgewater5:33

And do other things.

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Well, we try and train ourselves to talk about other things. It doesn't work for long. We met at a trade fair. He strolled past my stand.

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And then strolled back again, and then back again. So I was on to him.

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We got married very shortly after that, within a year. And we didn't start working together absolutely immediately. We waited all of 18 months. This idea of sort of breaking through to a new design, is it sort of like giving birth? Is it a difficult process if you're designing together? Giving birth is a good description of it. We have to have a colossal row usually to start it off. And there's something in that that's terribly important. And we'll scrap about something utterly stupid.

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And that the designing has sort of two arms to it. On the one hand, we're quite sophisticated, we've got a good commercial department.

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And they give us a lot of sophisticated sales feedback, and we know where the successes are. But we also have to do the thing that no sales figures can tell you and sort of dream the future. It's trying to get at that that does require a lot of galvanizing. And there are other routes to it. Walking is good.

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One of your mugs, I'm not sure if it's still in production, I think it probably isn't, had the phrase true love and high adventure sort of inscribed in it round the rim. Was there something autobiographical in that? Definitely. A friend described it as a sort of gorilla approach to business, kindly. I am aware that it's unconventional and I'm not nearly risk averse enough. I mean, I'm sort of prone to jumping. Can you give me an example of that?

Emma Bridgewater7:06

Can you give me an example of that?

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Well, when Michael, who's now 16, was only a tiny baby, the company was doing okay, but it wasn't growing. We'd had four children without calculating in any way, which I do think is the only way to go about anything. And the house needed a new roof quite badly. And it was a bit of an emergency. And I jumped in to the business, not knowing what I was about, but knowing I was going to have to prevail. And not far down the line, I had to completely mortgage the house. A lot of the time we've been right on the edge. And that's a feeling that a lot of people really can't stand.

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I'm easy with it.

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No sleepless nights, then? You don't wake up sweating?

Emma Bridgewater7:47

Don't like it.

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No, I d I don't really have sleepless nights.

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Let's have your second disc, Emma Bridgewater. Tell me about this. What are we going to hear?

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It's a track called Le Premier Bonneur du Jour.

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Sung by Francoise Arti.

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And why have you chosen this? Well, it just is the acme of glamour.

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I must have first heard it when I was a very little girl. I can picture the record player, Greek big sort of mahogany chest in the sitting room of the house in Hertfordshire where my parents lived before they split up, and putting this on and dancing around and loving it. I've come to think of it as sort of some kind of explanation for my parents' love affair. The sad thing about divorce is you don't get to hear the love story, do you? You only sort of hear the aftermath. And I know that they met in Paris and I know that they went on meeting there.

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So I love the thought of them being young and in love there.

Emma Bridgewater8:47

Comier bonaur du jaun.

Emma Bridgewater8:52

C'est rue bon de soleil.

Emma Bridgewater9:03

Mm

Emma Bridgewater9:04

Cares a mourner.

Emma Bridgewater9:07

O le C'est le souffle de la mer.

Emma Bridgewater9:15

Ha la plage quiet.

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Francoise Arlis singing Le Premier Bonneur du Jour. You've written, Emma Bridgewater, I think of my childhood as being totally happy and golden. Well, three cheers to that. Can you describe your most vivid memories of the very early parts of childhood? While my parents were still married, living in this lovely, lovely farmhouse in a village in Herefordshire, they gave certainly one, maybe more spectacularly glamorous parties with maybe one of the Beatles or night lights in the apple trees and the fact that I was going to wear my dress I'd worn as a bridesmaid and it being terribly exciting. That ended when I was seven and mum went to live in Oxford and obviously Sophie and Tom and I went with her.

Emma Bridgewater9:46

Tricky.

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But I I was never aware at all that my parents didn't get on. And they had married very young. You were the eldest of three children. You were born right at the dawning of the nineteen sixties. In nineteen sixties. In nineteen sixty.

Emma Bridgewater10:15

Let's get annoyed.

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How young were they when they they started married life together? She was barely twenty and he was a couple of years older. So children. I look at my children now and think

Emma Bridgewater10:25

Yeah, look at

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What on earth was going on? But relatively typical of their generation. Oh, absolutely, completely. They all grew up much quicker, didn't they? And they divorced when you were just seven actually. I think so, yeah. You've written very enthusiastically about how fond, indeed, how much love you had.

Emma Bridgewater10:31

Oh, absolutely.

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For both stepparents. And you were also one of eight various children that had been produced by these two. Quite a sixties set up. Yes, that's what I'm thinking. Quite a sixties set up. What do you think it was about it that meant that they got it right? I mean, we get on incredibly well. And when people say, oh, is she your half-sister? Or I just, it doesn't matter, she's my sister. For me, it has definitely the feeling of one family. A real leit motif of my early childhood is going to bed, definitely not going to sleep for a long time, being put to bed in an attic bedroom with a whole lot of kids, rioting about up there, but to the glorious sound of an extended drunken dinner party going on downstairs. And knowing that.

Emma Bridgewater10:44

Sorry.

Emma Bridgewater10:50

Quite a six

Emma Bridgewater10:52

The price is sixty cents.

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If we ran around doing double dares and being a bit wild, they wouldn't know. They weren't going to come and check. Tell me about your third piece of music. What are we going to hear now? Oh, it's a lovely piece of Vaughan Williams. And I was trying to work out how to get a military band, a colliery brass band, and some lovely lyrical English. That lovely sound of summer. And this Vaughan Williams is just my favourite. So perfect.

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That was part of the first march from the English Folk Song Suite by Vaughan Williams, performed there by the Central Band of the Royal Air Force, conducted by Wing Commander Eric Banks. Emma Bridgewater, your mother then, as you've described her, Queen of the Fun. Tell me about the Queen of the Fun's kitchen dresser. She seemed to inherit every house we lived in ha she never installed one or thought about it. Magically, there was one there.

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Perhaps that was what clinched the house each time for her, I don't know. I mean, they got married in the 50s, and life was much more formal and mahogany then, so she was just transitioning out of formal. And so she had a lovely old, probably Copeland dinner service, and then some other things mixed into it. From the beginning, I can remember a sort of non-matching situation. So when you laid the table, there were no two plates the same, and there certainly were no two mugs or cups and saucers. And that seemed just right. And then all amongst it, there were sort of invitations, and I remember sort of desiccated bridesmaids' bunches and

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If I'd want a little tiny silver cup running at school or something, that would be in in there somewhere. Do you have to have one in whatever house you live in now? Yes, it's a requirement, like central heating, is it?

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More important. It does seem to be much more important than central heating like that. So, this rambling bohemian house that you then move to around about aged seven.

Emma Bridgewater14:09

We don't need that.

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In Oxford's late 60s, early 70s. Tell me about this assortment of they sound like very, well, here's the old hackneyed phrase: colourful characters, the people who came to lodge. She was way beyond her budget. Big house. We just lived on the ground floor. And the rest of this Big Edwardian house was full of lodgers. And there was Erica, who kept a parrot, which would mimic everyone's voices in the house. You could hear it laughing in everyone's different laughs. So my brother and I spent hours in there. And there were art students up in the flat upstairs. And I remember coming back from a summer holiday, and some of them had started a motorbike repair business on the landing. And there were literally old motorbikes all over the landing. There was a girl who, when we were away, she painted the room purple. The ceiling, we'd never seen anything so exciting in all our lives. Gloss. Completely marvellous. Probably, yes. Time for your fourth one. Oh, it's Love Street, the sexiest song in the world. It's The Doors.

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He lives on love streets, lingers long on love streets.

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She has a house and garden I would like to see what happened.

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She has robes and she has monkeys, Lazy diamond studded flunkeys.

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That was the Doors and Love Street. So, Emma Bridgewater, you left home at eighteen to go to university in London, and you were particularly fascinated by Anglo Saxon and Middle English, and I think that is probably not

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The classic tell-tale signs of a future entrepreneur. How did you imagine your life shaping? I thought I'd work for a publisher. He'd be tall and thin and rather bad-tempered, and I'd be good at sort of coaxing him. And we'd work in a tiny little attic in Soho. And so, when did it all go right? When did you think, yes, actually, I'm a businesswoman at heart.

Emma Bridgewater16:07

Oh, I saw it.

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I I don't think I've ever really thought that. I just found myself with this very compelling idea of making the pottery that that we needed. And then I got to Stoke and the place just absolutely

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got hold of me and making one of those potteries live again filled my thoughts. When I saw one of those factories and I just thought, it's got to have my name on it.

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This is the crucial part of your story, is that it runs in tandem with a particular time in British manufacturing, in British life generally, heading into the mid-80s, when British manufacturing was decimated. And it takes a certain sort of optimism to look at one of those dank and derelict factories with the boards on the windows and doors and think, I'm going to breathe life into it again. I think I probably am very optimistic.

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And in some sense, completely bonkers. I mean, but somehow I could feel that I could do something here. And you went to a bloca-potter on Chemical Lane and said to him, Here's my drawings. Could you make your own a bowl and a jug and a dish? And why did they have to be like that and not like something else? Why was it? Because I didn't know any other way. If I'd gone to art school, I think I'd have been shown a route that I should concentrate on my surface design.

Emma Bridgewater17:22

Here's my daughter.

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ideas and that I would go to one of the potteries that conventionally sold blanks for other people to decorate. And I'd have been absolutely scuppered from the start because I'd have been using someone else's horrible shapes. You know, it was a bad moment, the mid eighteen is. The fact that I did my own things was very

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Significant, though I didn't know it. Tell me about the first day that it's up and running, and you walk along the factory floor and you see this imagining in reality. There isn't ever a first day like that. We did take a picture of us all, tiny little group of us outside the factory compared to the nearly 300 people there now. And yes, we put a special backstamp on the first week's production in Eastwood Works when we moved into that big factory. But there's this very bad habit in entrepreneurial sort of mindset, which is you're always looking forward. You want more. You never think, wow, look at this. In fact, the first time I think Matthew and I have ever felt, gosh, look at this, was.

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After the Literary Festival. Which you've begun instead of. Yes, we've we've done it for three years. And this June, we're very, very, very tired at the end of it. But Matthew said, we've made something really lovely. Look.

Emma Bridgewater18:38

Yeah.

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what the factory can be. And the extraordinary thing of having had some big literary names was one thing, but watching children sitting around the courtyard reading books, you just think

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Of course, not bad, is it? It just felt like something good was happening. Let's have some more music, Emma Bridgewater. Tell me about this. This is your fifth.

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Terribly difficult to choose an Emmy Lou Harris track. I mean like impossible. And this is Gulf Coast Highway, which she's duetting with Willie Nelson. It reminds me hugely of My Oldest Daughter has an amazing voice and she sings this very beautifully.

Emma Bridgewater19:23

And when he dies he says he'll get s

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Some blackbirds wing

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We'll try away to heaven.

Emma Bridgewater19:32

Heaven come some

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Sweet loop

Emma Bridgewater19:34

Ah

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Uh

Emma Bridgewater19:35

Great.

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She walked through springtime.

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When I was home.

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The days were sweet.

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Our knights were warm.

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The seasons change, the jobs will come.

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That was Emily Lou Harris and Willie Nelson and Gulf Coast Highway. As we know, Emma Bridgewater, you've been married for a long time. Soon it'll be 30 years, your partnership with Matthew. He'd known you for, what, about 10 weeks when he proposed? What was your initial response? I had an uncharacteristic moment, perhaps, of complete.

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Indecision. And when I said to some of my best friends, I think, um, I think we might be going to get married, and they went, Yeah, he's fantastic.

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I just knew when I met him I was never going to have so much fun with anyone else. And once you were married then, as you were living then in Norfolk, your manufacturing base for this relatively small operation at the time was in Stoke-on-Trent, so about four hours away. Your customers were in London, three hours away in the opposite direction, maybe four hours, bad traffic. You were manning and running trade stalls maybe up to six times a year in London, in Paris, sometimes in America.

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You were leaning in before anybody had even thought of the phrase. Uh how were you faring with that? How was it working out for you? My sisters and I talk about it. Why have we got these crazy busy lives? But I think that underlying it there is some strange dynamic to do with mum's accident, some kind of fury that was quite a good useful driver turned the terrible thing that happened to her when she had a riding accident.

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which disabled her and made her

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It was as if she'd got acute dementia.

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When she came out of her coma.

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It really propelled.

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me and my sisters to work very, very hard. Your mother's very serious accident was she was out riding and and the horse slipped and she and she fell, so suddenly the woman who had been this vigorous centre of family life was no longer that woman anymore.

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It made life sharper suddenly? It made it very, very, very difficult. She

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As you say, big family, big life.

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And uh my sisters were very young. It was very testing indeed, but none of that mattered as much, I think, for f speaking for myself, as what had happened to her.

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Her loss. So perhaps it's living life for her slightly.

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and feeling terribly, terribly sad for her.

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I think you understand after.

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A disaster that life hangs on a thread. So you might as well get on with it.

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Let's take a break for some music. Tell me what we're going to hear. It's it's your sixth. Ooh, it's a sad one. It's Dido's Lament.

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Sung by Janet Baker.

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M

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I went to a day school and I know that my relationship with my mum was hugely about the texture of everyday life, the endless hanging out the washing, doing the washing up and that kind of thing. And I missed that when my children went to boarding school.

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But I have completely to acknowledge that what they gained from going to Beatles has been enormous. And the most incredible gang of friends. And this song

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Is one of a repertoire that there's an informal choir, and this is one of the songs they sing.

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Dame Janet Baker singing When I am Laid in Earth from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas with the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted there by Sir Anthony Lewis. Emma Bridgwater, you have written that after your mother's life changing accident life moved on with a jagged hole in the middle of it for all of us.

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Emotionally.

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How did you accommodate that jagged hole?

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Well, you don't know what you're in to begin with. You're very hopeful.

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Crazily optimistic that it's all going to be all right, and you're moving towards recovery. You really believe this, and it only dawns on you very gradually. Your mind can't really take it in. So, for two years, we looked after her at home. That's when she was in a coma for three months. And she recovered, and she was quickly sent home, which was very, very testing. And my little sisters, young teenagers, were looking after her most of the time. And then my stepfather very sensibly said, Whatever good might come of this for her, we're all going to pay too high a price. She's got to go, we've got to find somewhere nice for her to be looked after and move on. And I suppose then you start the process of darning that jagged hole.

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When we we lived in Norfolk, she was in a very nice home there, where they encouraged us to come in with the dogs whenever we wanted to. They were very, very so you can make it all fine and try and use I've tried to use, you know, what she taught me to make life

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Fun.

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Your mother, Charlotte, she lived for twenty two years after her fall. How much has it made an impact on the big questions, you know, of God and why would He let this happen, of end of life care, of those huge things that surely you've had to confront at a very uh real level?

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I have no truck with the idea that God can't exist because He lets bad things happen. Bad things happen, and we have to deal with them, and that's the test. And I did imagine myself sort of having to hitch up my skirts and wade through difficult stuff. What I got was a much more difficult challenge. You don't get the challenge you choose, do you? But I.

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You've got to deal with it, haven't you? And mum's faith was huge. Her father was a clergyman. Church was always part of our childhood life. And her view was it's childish to look for explanations, leave room for the miraculous, believe the impossible.

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And don't always search for sort of

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Proper answers to things. Just accept. When she died in 2013, aside from, I imagine, the inevitable deep sorrow.

Emma Bridgewater27:04

Over

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What were your feelings, given that there had been so many years of such incredibly difficult circumstances? She died in December and Advents always a sort of big highly charged time. It had been before well her accident happened in November and we spent that Advent in intensive care with her. My grandparents both died in December.

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This was

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This was a marvellous release, I felt so

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So glad for her that it was over.

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And um she died in the early morning.

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Clover got there and was with her when she died, and we arrived just after.

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And they'd sweetly they'd opened the windows and there was a blackbird singing in the apple tree outside, and I just thought she's free now.

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Let's take a moment.

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We're gonna have some music now. Just tell me what we're going to hear. This is your seventh.

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Oh, it's a lovely Advent hymn, Lo He Comes with Clouds Descending. Church has always been part of my life and I

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I find the Advent hymns all very, very moving. We got married in December. My birthday's in December. It's certainly not all bad, but it's a very, very big month. And one of the greatest well surprises really is that Matthew and I managed to be choir parents. We thought we were probably too flaky to manage it. But Michael, our youngest, is he's a very elderly chap, and he was a chorister.

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As one of the other choir mums said.

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Well, we've sat through a lifetime of even songs together.

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And um I love the the voices of the boy.

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Troubles in this.

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Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending by Charles Wesley, sung by the choir of St Paul's Cathedral, there, directed by John Scott, with Christopher Durnley on organ and the English brass ensemble. Emma Bridgewater, you took something of a step back from your business in 2006, was it? For what reason? I just got completely exhausted and I have rheumatoid arthritis. It was time for me to stop doing the huge mileage and carrying the sort of management of the company. I had a marvellous solution. Matthew could do it. Your husband did, yes. The children said.

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Think why it took you so long, mum. And what did Matthew say?

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To be fair, he didn't think he could.

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Do the job.

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Which turned out to be spectacularly wrong. He's been absolutely brilliant at it. Your children are young yet, but do they show any signs of wanting to come into the parents' business? We've always said to them, no, darlings, you must get on with your own lives and don't for heaven's sake worry about the business. And they roll their eyes and say, it's not like we haven't heard a lot about it. Because of course, every car drive and most meals, there's far too much chat about it. But indeed, they have gone off and done their own thing. And just now, when I wish we'd been a little bit more Germanic about it and said, you'll be an accountant, you'll be a lawyer, could you train for the business? Lizzie and Kitty, the oldest, are out very much on their own projects, which is, of course, I do believe as it should be. But after the literary festival this summer, we did an about turn and said, you know, we've always said, do your own thing. Now we're saying, just come and have a think about the business. And it's a hell of a thing to build up a business. And I really hope that at least one of them does fall for it. And I think there's a good chance, don't you, with four of them? Statistically, there must surely be a chance. Do you ever fantasise that in a couple of hundred years' time, when surely Antiques Roadshow will still be on?

Presenter31:37

Somebody will bring a lovely little personalized mug and say, Uh I think it says Bridgewater or something in the bottom. Do you think your stuff will last? Is that what's important to you about making what you make? I'd be lying if I said that that hadn't crossed my mind.

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Tell me about your eighth disc in a Bridgewater. What are we going to hear? It's a really lovely song called The Lakes of Pontretrain, and it's a band called The Big Good Tanyas. And this is Matthews and My Kitchen and Our Kids. It particularly makes me think of

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Cooking on a Saturday morning in the kitchen in Norfolk, probably macaroni cheese. Bizarrely better with boiled potatoes and a green salad. Strange combo. You wouldn't have thought you needed it, but you do. And the children are all around, and that that's very, very likely to be a track I'd put on.

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It was on one fine March morning

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One I bid New Orleans do

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And I was on the

Emma Bridgewater32:40

I wrote to Jackson down my fortune still renewed

Emma Bridgewater32:48

Akers far far from money.

Emma Bridgewater32:52

No credit could I

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Which filled my heart with long

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The Be Good Tanyas and the Lakes of Ponchatrain. So, um, Emma, it's time for me to give you those books. You get the Bible.

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You get the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take another book along. What's it going to be? Oh, have I deliberated about this?

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But I don't think I'll be very good at being on my own, and I know I'll be homesick, but I think

Presenter33:20

Patrick O'Brien, please. I don't know if you could do the whole set. It's about 20 titles. Right, I can't give you 20 books. It's one story. It's a slippery slope, as you well know. If there is one book with some collected works of his, and surely there must be, I'm going to give you that big book, but I'm not going to give you all 20 books. A luxury item. What will your luxury item be? Okay, I thought about asking you for my luxury to sweep the island so it didn't have snakes. But that's a bit babyish, isn't it, Ricky? I think I'm going to have to learn to grapple with the snakes. Could I have

Emma Bridgewater33:38

And soon?

Emma Bridgewater33:47

Really? I think I'm gonna have

Presenter33:51

As big a bottle as you're prepared to give me of Stephanotis bath oil. Oh, yes. Oh, thank you. I'll be fine then. Would you even like a bath to go with it?

Emma Bridgewater33:55

Oh yeah.

Presenter33:59

Yes, please. And um finally, if you had to run to save one of these discs from the waves, which one would it be? It's probably that last one, because that's so much about me, Matthew, and our family. That's our kitchen, totally.

Presenter34:15

Emma Bridgewater, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert islandists. It's been lovely, thank you.

Presenter35:00

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Speaker 435:34

This is the B B C.