T G Green
The origins of Cornish Ware are uncertain, but the making of blue-banded slipwares was a well-established feature of the pottery industry in Britain throughout the nineteenth century. Surviving T G Green catalogues from the early 1900’s include hooped and banded wares and there are regular references to ‘blue dipped’, ’solid dipped’ and ‘dipped band’ mugs, jugs and tankards.
It is not known who at T G Green first thought of the idea of turning traditional blue banded white wares into a modern range of kitchen pottery ware but it may have come from the need to find employment for turners in the 1920s. It is also hard to establish the exact date of the introduction of Cornish Ware. The earliest known reference to date is in a T G Green promotional letter of December 1925, and so it is likely that the range was introduced in that year.
The origins of the Cornish name are equally uncertain but the legend that it was named after ‘the blue of the Cornish skies and white crests of the waves’ by T G Green’s south of England representative at the time is certainly appealing. This tradition was maintained by the pottery in it’s advertising material. A Cornish Ware leaflet of about 1938, produced for the retail trade, includes the heading ‘Blue of the Atlantic - White of Cornish Clouds - Glisten of the Sea - What Woman Could Resist such Beauty in her Kitchen’.
Popular and successful, Cornish Ware expanded steadily through the 1930s and into the 1950s and was widely imitated, though never bettered.
Visit our Cornish Ware shop.