: Japan was inspiration for British studio pottery movement.

BERNARD Leach was the father of the British studio pottery movement. He was born in Hong Kong in 1887, where his father was a colonial judge, and spent the first 10 years of his life there in Singapore and Japan before being sent to Britain to go to school.

He studied Western art at the Slade School of Art at the age of 16 and also studied etching under Frank Brangwyn at the London School of Art. He married his first wife, Edith Muriel Evans Hoyle, the daughter of the director of the National Museumof Wales, in 1909, the same year that he left to teach drawing in Japan. (Leach married his second wife, Laurie Cooke, in 1936).

However, while he was in Japan, he loved the work of oriental potters and became one himself. He met Shoji Hamada, who experimented with glazes, and when Leach returned to England in 1920, Hamada came too.

Between them, they established the Leach Pottery in St Ives, Cornwall, and the two began to produce simple, ``honest pots'', as Leach described them, seemingly as a revolutionary stand against the highly decorative products of the Edwardian era.

A number of other young potters found themselves drawn to St Ives, where Leach's influence produced a ``school'' of gifted potters. Among them were Michael Cardew, who later went off to make pots in Africa; Katharine Playdell Bouverie, who went ``back to nature'' with her experiments to colour pots using ash from wood and plants, and later Leach's own son, David.