‘Harry should stop sulking and come to the Coronation’

The unofficial Queen of Pottery tells Judith Woods about building a British brand, surviving divorce and how she has just the souvenir mugs for a royal reconciliation

Emma Bridgewater is rifling through her dining room cupboards. As befits the country’s unofficial Queen of Pottery, they are jam-packed with ancient mismatched tableware: delicate teapots and hearty serving platters, whimsical milk jugs and intricately decorated bowls of every dimension.

“A lot of this came from my mother and grandmother,” she calls from the cavernous depths of a sideboard. “I always think I have my collector’s gene under control, but when something is beautiful, meaningful and you can drink tea from it, what’s not to love?”

She emerges, triumphant, with a random array of venerable cups and mugs marking House of Windsor milestones: the 1986 marriage of Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson; the 1969 investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales; the coronation of George VI in 1937.

“Literally hundreds of potteries made wares to commemorate the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953,” she says. “So far, my brand is the sole contender in 2023. The rest is on its way here in container ships from the Far East. How shaming is that for us as a nation?”

Cometh the royal event, cometh the commercial opportunity, so of course Emma Bridgewater, one of the last remaining potteries in Stoke-on-trent has launched a range for the Coronation of Charles III. You can buy a “3 Cheers for King Charles” mug, tea towel or plate, a declamatory mug or plate with the King’s title and lions rampant, and much else besides, from biscuit tins to bunting.

Such perfectly judged pieces have become so much part of national life it’s hard to remember the brand is not an official supplier of memorabilia.

“The days of having to show the script of your play to the Lord Chancellor before you could mount a production in the West End are long gone,” Bridgewater says with a smile.

“If you want to be an official supplier then you have to jump through various hoops. It never crossed my mind to do that. It means we can do things differently, so our Coronation commemorative stuff doesn’t look like anyone else’s.”

And that, in essence, is the appeal; at once quirky and tasteful, these jaunty designs are destined for the most discerning of shelves. Why? Because, let’s be clear, Emma Bridgewater commemorative mugs are for people who don’t really “do” commemorative mugs but will make an exception for one of hers.

Such appeal has been key to the success of her brand, which started in 1985 by happenstance when – aged 23 – she approached a potter to make something original for her mother as a gift.

“She had always collected pottery and had a wonderful eye, so I wanted to get her a cup and saucer but I couldn’t find anything that was quite right.”

Instead of abandoning the idea in frustration, she drew four simple shapes – a mug, a bowl, a jug and a dish – and took her designs to Stoke-ontrent, where she had them made. Then she applied patterns with a cut sponge before glazing them.

The resulting pieces were such a charming blend of old and new that it prompted an idea. Bridgewater started selling her wares from a stall in Covent Garden and then at trade shows.

Buyers from Harrods and Selfridges, as well as garden centres and cookery shops, placed orders and, as the company grew, her husband, Matthew Rice, left his job as a bespoke furniture designer with Linley, run by David Linley, now the Earl of Snowdon and first cousin of the King.

A talented illustrator with a passion for birds in particular, he developed the designs which have become a signature style of the Emma Bridgewater brand. In 1991, they bought a small factory and started manufacturing. By 1996, they had acquired an abandoned Victorian-era pottery factory site, where every piece is still made.

Her unique home-and-hearth aesthetic, so redolent of tradition and the beauty of the British countryside, swiftly established Emma Bridgewater as an instantly recognisable UK plc heritage brand along with the likes of Cath Kidston and Johnnie Boden. The business now employs 500 people and produces more than 40,000 pieces a week.

Bridgewater attributes her success to being a “demonstratively British brand”. Twenty per cent of the business is in fact export – America loves Emma Bridgewater, and the Chinese can’t buy enough – although she admits to finding that complicated. “To my mind, taking a brand into the export market should involve shops and great big tables of displays, but that’s considered old-fashioned.

“The digital generation is quite accustomed to looking at one thing at a time on a screen. Their relationship with Emma Bridgewater, the brand, is purely through their phones. I find that so strange and remarkable.”

Remarkable perhaps, but a woman who single-handedly revived the country’s earthenware industry, breathing fresh life into a factory and a city, and gently revolutionised our tableware, will have no problem adapting to change.

Certainly today, sitting in her eclectic, cosy, ceramic-strewn kitchen over strong cups of coffee – which Bridgewater serves in dainty Wedgwood teacups with saucers –

Bridgewater looks a decade younger than her 62 years. Her hair is expensively balayaged with highlights of flattering blonde and her hipster glasses would garner nods of approval in London’s private members’ clubs, never mind rural Norfolk, where we are meeting, and where she decamped after she and her husband and business partner split up in 2018 and then divorced.

Of the divorce, Bridgewater says there was no cataclysmic event or huge rift. More than anything else it was simply a corollary of empty-nest syndrome as the couple’s four children – who range in age from 23 to 33 – grew up and away.

“Around the time of my 40th birthday there was a rush of divorces in our social circle,” she says. “That typically tends to be the time when people want to split. And then, along the way, you would hear of couples divorcing in their fifties, and you think ‘Don’t you know there’s no point? Your life is over’, and then you get to 50 and you near 60 and you realise you’ve got a third of your life left; it’s up to you to give it meaning and make it worth something.”

Bridgewater craved solitude and contemplation. Rice was drawn to the polar opposite: sociability and lively gatherings. The decision was mutual. At the outset they vowed to get through the divorce – a process seldom conducive to cordial relations – and emerge as friends who “behaved like grown-ups” and always put the children first.

It seems to have worked. Rice, who in the divorce got the rambling Bampton Castle Farm in Oxfordshire that used to be the busy, buzzy family base, stayed over at Bridgewater’s 1930s Norfolk home recently to attend a wider family event. She regularly visits her eldest daughter, Lil (who is about to make Bridgewater a grandmother for the first time), who lives with her boyfriend alongside Rice at Bampton and stays for weeks on end, sleeping in the spare room she herself designed and decorated and working in the studio alongside her “wonderful” ex-husband. The pair still work closely across the brand and remain wedded to their shared endeavour, if not to each other anymore; she typically has the vision, he translates it into a design, and together they make it happen.

“Yes, divorce is awful, but you shouldn’t make a fuss about it. I remember we went for lunch not long after and there was a married couple there arguing at the table,” she recalls. “We paid up and left feeling gleeful and conspiratorial – literally laughing together in relief that we had avoided that fate.”

Matthew subsequently had an on-off relationship with Elon Musk’s ex-wife (they married and divorced twice), the 37-year-old English actress Talulah Riley, that ended. Bridgewater is not dating at present. True to her word, she is about to go on a contemplative 300-mile walk solo, along a British Pilgrimage Trust route from Offa’s Dyke to Oxford. Last year, she undertook 250 miles from Southampton to Canterbury. It was, she says, a “hugely rewarding” experience.

“When we were going through the divorce, I spent a month in India,” she says. “I don’t want great big Sunday lunches for 30 anymore. I enjoyed them at one point in my life, but now I want something else; quietude, the freedom to simply lock the front door and leave for as long as I like.”

More than 30,000 visitors take part in Emma Bridgewater factory tours annually, finishing off with afternoon tea and a little light retail. Every time a new block of £5 tickets is released, they sell out within minutes, such is the fierce loyalty of Bridgewater devotees.

“Because my name is above the door, I do feel a sense of responsibility. I understand the extraordinary relationship we have with our customers; it’s deep and personal, yet anonymous,” says Bridgewater.

The same could be said of the public’s bond with monarchy; complex, intense yet also experienced at a remove.

“Some people are crazy and throw themselves wholeheartedly into bunting mania and will buy anything that’s remotely red, white and blue you put in front of them,” says Bridgewater. “Others aren’t as demonstrative, but are glad that royalty exists.”

Certain keen-eyed collectors will only buy mugs – which continue to account for 60 per cent of business – that have been sponge-painted by the same person; each item is signed on the base. The bottom line is that commemorative mugs mean jobs. The company initially planned to make 5,000 mugs to commemorate the Queen’s funeral. In the event, they sold north of 40,000 and became Emma Bridgewater’s fastest-selling and most popular item ever produced.

The pottery has always had strong links with the Royal family, with Charles being a regular visitor. In 2017, the future King also unveiled a plaque in Stoke designed by Emma Bridgewater commemorating his visit to the Prince’s Trust there. When the future Princess of Wales visited in 2015, screaming crowds welcomed her.

“We’ve had quite a lot of royal visits to the factory,” says Bridgewater. “Politicians don’t want to come and be photographed in dirty old factories, but the royals come and when they do they bring elegance and glamour – and a fleet of outriders always helps.”

As far as the future of the monarchy is concerned, Bridgewater believes it is in the safest of hands. “I think Charles will make a brilliant king,” she predicts. “The most pressing issue for all of us is the survival of the environment and restoring our biodiversity and he has been a torch bearer for that for decades, which is wonderful. Through the Prince’s Trust he’s done a huge amount of good; there are hundreds of little businesses that might never have been or survived without its backing.”

As far as her own business is concerned, the impulse to expand continues, far beyond the current extensive range that includes cutlery, laundry bags, toasters (yes, really), kitchen shelves and cushions.

There is no shortage of new designs and plans, but what is noticeably lacking is an obvious successor to an empire that has just notched up

£33 million in sales – a staggering 25 per cent increase on the previous year. There had been talk of 80 redundancies last year; in the event, there were only three.

“My greatest sadness now is that I can’t see any newcomer snapping at my heels. Being terribly English, Matthew and I insisted on encouraging our children to follow their dreams rather than join the family firm,” says Bridgewater with an indulgent shrug. “As a result, none of them wants to take it on.”

Admittedly, the couple’s illustrator daughter Kitty has drawn some designs for the business, but Margaret, a classics graduate, is training to be a primary school teacher and Michael is a musician who also works in specialist green oak construction. Then there’s Lil, a singer, acrobat and circus impresario who has taken over the running of the charming, old-fashioned Giffords Circus, in Gloucestershire.

Giffords was the brainchild of Bridgewater’s half-sister Nell Gifford, who tragically died in 2019 of breast cancer. She was 46 and left twins – a boy and a girl – aged nine. The gaping hole left by her absence is still keenly felt.

“Having Nell as a sister was like having an Egyptian goddess for a sibling,” says Bridgewater. “She was utterly amazing – someone who loved life, art and beauty without compromise. Her very way of being was a challenge, in the sense that she could wrest the joy out of any situation.

“Nell would take [the children] to the theatre and open them up to new ideas and guide them towards being creative

‘Hundreds of potteries made wares for 1953. My brand is the sole contender in 2023’

‘People say there’s no point divorcing in your 50s – but you’ve got a third of your life left’

without comparing themselves to anyone else. It was incredibly hard watching her suffer.”

But even then, Nell fought back; when doctors broke the news that her cancer had spread and she had a year to live, she continued running between the hospital and the circus ring, performing in the summer show on a white horse, with a long, blonde wig hiding her cropped hair. Later she started painting, and a retrospective exhibition was a sell-out. After her death, there was a commemorative Emma Bridgewater mug in her honour, featuring stars, swallows, bunting and a banner reading “Long Live Giffords Circus”.

“When you think about it, families at their best are one big circus; full of fun and challenge and love,” Bridgewater observes. “There’s room for everyone and a place for their creativity.”

Certainly that was the case for Bridgewater herself – growing up in Oxford the eldest of three, her parents divorced when she was young. Both remarried and went on to have more children; a loving, chaotic tribe of independent spirits resulted.

“I did a lot of nappy changing and parties and games with my much younger new siblings and it was so lovely to see them doing the same with my children,” she says.

Tragedy struck when their mother, Charlotte, incurred catastrophic brain damage from a riding accident in 1991, aged just 52. She survived for 22 years but was unable to communicate or look after herself.

When she finally died in 2013, Bridgewater matter-of-factly declared it was “a huge relief ”: to be free of the grinding grief, the constant state of alert, to know her mother was no longer an agitated, unhappy stranger who didn’t recognise her own children or grandchildren.

“For a long time, everything I made was by way of a tribute to her,” says Bridgewater. “It was her kitchen dresser that first inspired me, instilled in me a love of home and an appreciation of craftsmanship. But now I look to my own kitchen, my daughters’ kitchens; that’s where I feel contentment.”

The future of the business may be uncertain, but it’s clear that Bridgewater has no real regrets. Family and the legacy of family remain dearest to her heart. In her spare time, her creativity sees her making personalised quilts for those she loves; she has already started sewing one for her new grandson, featuring a heartwarming Beatrix Potter quotation. Norfolk feels miles away from the growing Coronation excitement and the will-they-won’tthey guestlist.

Bridgewater claims to be on both Team Kate and Team Meghan. “I do hope Harry and Meghan come for the Coronation,” she says briskly. “All families have spats and then they get over it – and get over themselves. So my advice to them is to turn up; there’s no point sulking somewhere else. Just sitting down with everyone over a nice cup of tea can often do the trick.”

And, by way of coincidence, Emma Bridgewater has just the mugs for a right royal reconciliation.