A history of wheels

It's been a long journey

An old kick wheel, made at Seaboard Joinery in Auckland, from a plan by Bernard Leach.

It’s been an interesting day.

I see from my workshop notebook that I haven’t ventured into the pottery for exactly a month.

Things hadn’t been going well before Christmas. My wheel was misbehaving- not reacting to the pedal, so either going too fast, or stopping completely.

Not only that, but our kiln had suddenly slumped from firing in about 11 hours and was taking 17-18. Not only that, but the temperature was uneven. Not only that, but I was getting grumpy and starting to repeat myself.

That’s the background to my discontent with the pottery business, but I was intending to tell a different story.

Back in 1970, as a recent science graduate, I went off to train as a teacher at Auckland Teachers College.

We science types were encouraged to spend an hour or two a week doing something enlightening, so I chose pottery.

Patricia Perrin was a well-known potter who taught a section with the fine art students. She wasn’t interested in us dilettantes from the science world, so gave us the rudiments of hand building and then left us alone.

In 1971 I took up a job teaching maths at Glenfield College, which had a fine pottery department. My fellow science teacher Chester Nealie was a pretty handy potter and I somehow picked up the rudiments of the trade.

I took a drive one day to a company called Seaboard Joinery, over in Ellerslie. The manager, Leon Cohen, was keen on pottery and they produced a good kick wheel to a design by Bernard Leach.

I told him I was saving up to be able to afford one and he replied that a finished wheel was no good in the factory. Why didn’t I take it home and pay when I could?

The following year, 1972, I bought my first house, a small cottage in the suburb of Murrays Bay, for the handsome sum of $10,500 and in the fullness of time built an oil-fired kiln in the back garden.

In 1975, I moved to Golden Bay and worked as a fulltime potter, still with the same wheel, although by then I’d added another two Leach wheels to my collection.

It was sometime on the early 1980s before I succumbed to the lure of an electric wheel,

It was a second-hand Cowley wheel and it looked a lot like this. I can’t remember where it came from, although our neighbour, Mike Rogers, who ran South St Gallery, probably had something to do with it.

It did good service for a few years, until one day an old friend, John Fijn, wandered in.

Never one to do things by halves, John owned an immensely strong American Brent wheel.

John was an irrepressible entrepreneur. He’d got mixed up in a lot of property speculation, including building a large building in the middle of Nelson using huge timber from an old bridge on the West Coast.

I suspect he feared he was about to be bankrupted, so he was hiding his assets, as he asked if I’d like to store (and use) his wheel for a few months.

Of course I was delighted and I retained the wheel for several years, until John claimed it back and I went back to my old Cowley.

In 1993, I quit pottery and gave my Cowley and my one remaining Leach wheel to Darryl Frost, who gave the Leach wheel away a little later. The Cowley remains, broken and sad in his workshop.

Thirty years passed, and my good friend Ralph Hetzel decided I needed to renew my acquaintance with clay, so gave me his old Talisman wheel.

Cathie was keen to enter the brave new world of pottery, so when I saw something described as the Rolls Royce of pottery wheels advertised online, I couldn’t resist;

This Podmore Alsager wheel wasn’t cheap, nor was it new, but it was strong and comfortable and for the last year it’s served me well. I bought it from Nina Davis, daughter of Harry and May Davis - it had a fine British tradition as a workhorse and Nina had many years of good service from it.

Sadly, the old girl has started to misbehave.

Although somebody handy with machines and motors might patiently nurse it back to life, I am not that someone.

Tomorrow, my 14-year-old grandson Sid arrives from Christchurch. A budding potter, he and I are going to spend more than a week making, glazing and firing.

I went out to the workshop this morning, got cleaned up, weighed out some clay and proceeded to become wildly exasperated with my old Podmore, which flipped the overload switch three times in the course of trying to throw two mugs. How would we cope with just one functioning wheel?

Soon after noon, we were standing with Stephen Robertson in his shop - Nelson Pottery Supplies.

Ten minutes later, we had precious cargo in the boot and we were driving home.

This wasn’t in the budget, but it’s lovely (and expensive).

An hour or two later, we had mugs.

My new wheel is the most fabulous luxury. Apart from a couple of Leach kick wheels 40 years ago, it’s the only new wheel I’ve ever owned.

It has a three-year guarantee - I think it’ll see me out.

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