YOU’VE SEEN them at countless car boot sales, and you’ve been embarrassed when you’ve  asked the stallholder how much he wants for the naff set of NatWest piggy banks, the SylvaC bunnies or the preserve pots shaped like onions modelled with faces on the sides.

Click here for a 20th Century Ceramics slideshow

But it’s okay. Help is at hand in the shape of the latest glossy hardback to come from the stable of the Antique Collectors’ Club, entitled "Starting to Collect 20th Century Ceramics". Author Andrew Casey is an acknowledged expert on the subject and his book has been produced specially with the novice collector in mind.

From the Lord of the Rings figures from the Middle Earth Series produced by Royal Doulton in 1980 to the Homemaker designs made in the 1950s for Woolworth’s by Ridgway Potteries, Mr Casey’s book is not just an exercise in "Do people really collect those?", but

also an excuse for the people who do to carry on regardless.

After all, no one was harmed in the process of calling objects made yesterday antiques and collectables (except of course the uninitiated). If you buy or sell 20th century pottery at antiques fairs, fleamarkets or car boot sales, then this book should be your bible.

For example, did you know that there are collectors who would kill for a rare piece of Roland Rat gift ware pottery? No, me neither.

To the purist, such as BBC Antiques Roadshow specialist and much loved character Henry Sandon, who wrote the foreword to the book, it is something of anathema to learn that 20th century ceramics are among the fastest growing field of collecting. But it’s true, and we’ll have to live with it.

Having watched a sale last week in which a collection of Beswick farm animals made eye-watering prices, it seems today’s collectors are more interested in kitsch than they are in fine Georgian silver or antique furniture.

As Mr Casey points out, the market for "collectables" — the preferred phrase for 20th century items rather than "antiques — has blossomed over the last 20 years, egged on by television programmes and Internet auctions.

Now, the stuff chucked out by our parents or blown to smithereens in the Blitz is the new Meissen, Chelsea and Bow.

Starting to Collect 20th Century Ceramics is a compendium of manufacturers in Britain, Europe and America. Many of the names are old favourites but there are plenty whom collectors have yet to focus and capitalise upon.

Take William Adams Ltd. The Adams family started manufacturing pottery in 1779 in Tunstall, Stoke-on-Trent. In the 20th century, the firm produced a wide variety of tea, coffee and dinner wares that are highly collectable.

Ironically however, despite a strong interest in Susie Cooper pottery, the Meadowlands and Inspiration patterns she designed for Adams in circa 1983-84 have yet to be recognised and as such might be useful investment.

Or Barretts of Staffordshire Ltd. A relatively unknown pottery, Barretts was once owned by Great Universal Stores but subsequently the subject of a management buy-out in 1986.

In 1992, Barretts purchased the Royal Stafford company in receivership and the following year the companies were amalgamated to become known as Royal Stafford Tableware, who produced exclusive high-end dinner services for such stores as Ralph Lauren. The products are another one to watch.

Pottery by John Beswick Ltd is already priced beyond the reach of most but in contrast, the firm of E. Brain and Co was formed in 1855 at the Foley Works in Fenton, Stoke-On-Trent.

Foley’s bone china was the tableware of choice for the upper middle classes, but Andrew Casey advises collectors to look out for the small range of Brain fancies such as dishes from the late 1950s decorated with a whimsical images by Maureen Tanner.

Several pages of the book concentrate on the aforementioned Susie Cooper wares and it is clear there is mileage in the old girl yet.

The author suggests collectors keep a lookout for her Curlew shapes, the Art Deco designs from the early 30s such as Seagull, Panorama and Homestead and her Leaping Deer and Angel Fish figural table centres reissued by Wedgwood in 2002.

The Bourne family established the famous pottery in Denby, Derbyshire, in 1809 when they produced salt-glaze stoneware.

In the 1960s, every trendy home had a Denby dinner service but Andrew Casey advises collectors to seek their kitchenware such as Cottage Blue and Manor Green designed by Donald Gilbert in the 1930s.

Collectors are apparently also particularly keen on the rare designs and patterns such as the Cheviot Wares from 1956.

Even Royal Crown Derby, one of this country’s most significant and enduring companies has its collectables.

Founded in 1876, Derby competed with some of the finest English and Continental porcelain manufacturers and in 1890 was awarded a Royal warrant by Queen Victoria.

Shunning the traditional, apparently today’s collectors are drawn to the animal and bird paperweights designed by Robert Jefferson in the 1980s and skilfully painted pieces by such artists as Albert Gregory and Cuthbert Gresley.

A.J. Wilkinson Limited is best known today for Clarice Cliff’s Bizarre ware and if you can afford it, you probably don’t need any help from Andrew Casey.

However, for the less well heeled, he recommends collectors should also look out for the less well-known designs by John Butler, whilst American collectors are apparently eager to purchase a traditional landscape printed dinnerware with the Royal Staffordshire mark known as Tonquin.

I could go on … and on, but space precludes it. I recommend you buy the book. It’s a good read and highly informative. It’s also well illustrated with a host of colour photographs which is a real boon to spotting the bargains at car boot sales.

For the ceramics collector interested in new antiques, it would make a cracking Christmas present. Just don’t be too hacked off remembering what was on your dinner table when you were a child.

Starting to Collect 20th Century Ceramics is priced at £14.95. Contact The Antique Collectors’ Club on 01394 389950.

LIKE thousands of other schoolboys my age, I was introduced to the gloriously idiosyncratic folly that is Portmeirion by the equally bizarre ITV series The Prisoner. Not only did I want to live there, I wanted a Lotus Super Seven as driven by the star of the series, Patrick McGoohan, and a Mini Moke for bobbing around the town.

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With the passage of time, we’re talking the 1960s here, not one but three cults have grown up: a fascination with the Shangri-La created by architect Clough Williams-Ellis; The Prisoner Appreciation Society, which still holds its annual meetings there; and for us collectors, the eponymous tableware of such distinctive style that is so popular, it is still being made and can be found in homes throughout the UK, US and Asia.

A new book*, published this week to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the opening Williams-Ellis’ holiday retreat for the upper classes, explores each of these cults and much more. But it is the chapter on Portmeirion Pottery, written by Mark Eastment,

that will most interest readers of this column, if only to dispel a few myths that have grown up around it.

For a start, the pottery isn’t made there. Whether it have been created had Portmeirion never been built, we can only speculate, but the fact is, we still have Williams-Ellis to thank for it.

Susan, his daughter, was born in Surrey in 1918, but spent most of her childhood summer holidays in North Wales. The family’s historic home was Plas Brondanw, near Caernarfon, and it was there that as an 11-year-old she bought her first antique, an 19th century pottery mug for 6d.

Academically gifted and with an artistic eye, Susan decided at that point that she wanted to do "something in art". She attended Dartington School where she was taught pottery by the great Bernard Leach and in 1936, she went to Chelsea Polytechnic where she studied under Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. She married in 1945, her husband Euan Cooper-Willis at the time working for the War Office.

His family owned Blackie’s, the Glasgow-based specialist printing and publishing company, and the couple moved there a year later. While he learned the intricacies of the business, Susan continued her career as a freelance artist contributing among other things designs for a set of tiles produced by Poole Pottery.

However, keen for her children to grow up in Wales, the couple moved to a cottage on Williams-Ellis’ estate near Portmeirion and in 1953, her father gave the couple control of Portmeirion’s general management.

Their goal was to generate income to further develop the village and Susan took over running a small shop in one of the Portmeirion buildings which sold tourist souvenirs including pottery produced in Stoke-on-Trent by A E Gray & Co Ltd.

Albert Gray shared Williams-Ellis’ interest in design and his company had once employed the pottery designer Susie Cooper. Susan’s graphics were used in a small range of pottery produced by Gray’s for the shop including some decorated with a pink lustre similar to that produced a century earlier in Sunderland.

A Portmeirion shop was opened in London in 1958 and following Albert Gray’s death, in 1961 Susan and her husband bought his company, followed by a second called Kirkhams, also in the Potteries, a year later, the combined companies being renamed The Portmeirion Potteries Ltd.

Echoing her father’s understanding of three-dimensional design, Susan set about producing radically different fresh shapes of tableware, notably an elegant coffee pot which was in effect a 12 inch long tube with a spout and handle. This was the perfect canvas for her bold, graphics which echoed the mood of the Swinging Sixties.

The first designs were Gold Diamond and Talisman introduced in 1963 followed by Tivoli and Magic City. Terence Conran was an early champion of Portmeirion in his Habitat stores.

Further designs and shapes tumbled from the business including a set of 12 zodiac tankards printed in gold on matt black and a new shape of coffee mug called Meridian.

Sarah’s signature Portmeirion ware — the Botanic Garden range of tableware — came from a chance purchase in a London antiquarian bookshop of Thomas Green’s The Universal Herbal, first published in around 1824.

The prints it contained inspired her to embrace new technology and reproduce the images on her pottery. The range was introduced in 1972 and is still highly popular today.

Additional books of botanic prints provided further illustrations and demand started to boom. The couple invested in major expansion and reconstruction of the Stoke factory, while at the same time undertaking worldwide travel selling the concept to retailers.

New patterns were developed including Birds of Britain, Summer Strawberry, Welsh Dresser and Harvest Blue, and even prints from Isaac Walton’s Compleat Angler found their way onto Portmeirion dinnerware.

With order books brimming, the company was floated on the stock market in 1988, at the same time buying the former Sylvac site in Longton.

The company received the Silver Jubilee Queen’s Award for Export in 1990 and in 1994, Portmeirion China was introduced to the range.

Other designers were brought in to supplement production but even today, Botanic Garden still accounts for around half of Portmeirion’s total turnover.

Looking to the future, a collaboration with Sophie Conran, daughter of Terence, has resulted in a new fresh look for the years ahead.

*Portmeirion is the collective work of Jan Morris, Alwyn W. Turner, Mark Eastment, Stephen Lacey and Robin Llewellyn, with a foreword by jazz pianist Jools Holland. It is published by the Antique Collectors’ Club and is priced at £25. Copies can be obtained at Portmeirion Village. The images published here are courtesy of Portmeirion Potteries.

No, it’s how he and I both started to get interested in antiques and collecting: down a hole in a Victorian rubbish dump.

For me, it was the discovery that an area of my home town, romantically called Fol Hollow, was actually a derivation of Foul Hollow, because a century or more ago that was where the residents dumped all their waste.

Alerted to the story as a young reporter on the local newspaper, I was amazed to see the clay pipes, pot lids, ginger beer bottles and other collectables being unearthed by the wheelbarrow load.

Until then, I thought all stuff that dated from the 1800s was in museums.

So it was for Mr Collins. In his amusing little coffee table book “Eccentric Contraptions*”, he writes: “It all started down a five-foot trench in an old rubbish dump in Sittingbourne in Kent.

“My son Paul, then aged 12, pulled from the side wall of the ‘dig’ a pointed bottle that had an embossed surface.

“We both looked at this peculiar container, unable to fathom its use. A few minutes later; another embossed bottle emerged, this time with a marble in its neck – and that was the beginning of my interest in everyday, labour-saving and plain weird contraptions from the past.”

Mr Collins did some research, and found that in the early 1800s fizzy drinks manufacturers had a problem stopping gas escaping from their products.

In I814, in a patent application for a bottle-filling machine, William Hamilton sketched a bottle with a pointed bottom that had to lie on its side, ensuring that the cork always remained wet and didn’t shrink, allowing the gas to escape.

This remained the common method of bottling until 1875, when Hiram Codd patented the marble stopper; which had to be hit into a recess in the bottle to allow the contents to be poured or drunk – hence the phrase “a load of codswallop”.

So the mystery of the bottles in the rubbish dump was solved.

He writes: “Thus began a 30-year passion for finding quirky, everyday gadgets used by people in the past; the more eccentric and unusual the better; the more effort for less reward, the more satisfying; the more ingenuity used to solve the simplest problems – often in the hope of making a fortune – the more exciting.”

The result is a collection of more than 400 weird and wonderful objects, many of which are featured in Eccentric Contraptions and Amazing Gadgets, Gizmos and Thingamabobs, published by David & Charles, Brunel House, Newton Abbot, Devon, TQ12 4ZZ, price £9.99.

antiques@chris-proudlove.co.uk

Maurice Collins was awarded the OBE in 2002 for a lifetime of work with the disabled.

In 1969, he and his wife Doreen and another family member founded the charity Kith and Kids, an organisation which provides services to families with children who have disabilities, and he remains a trustee

He lives in Haringey, South London, and is a former chairman of both the local and London branch of Mencap.

A business marketing expert, he runs workshops and seminars across the country in return for donations to disability organisations and all royalties from Eccentric Contraptions will be donated to Kith and Kids.

He said: “I have used the gadgets to great effect helping young entrepreneurs to brainstorm new products and potential business ideas.

“There are probably thousands of weird gadgets still out there. Don’t throw them away – there will be someone just around the corner waiting to see them and put them on show so that everyone can enjoy the ingenuity of the human race in its unceasing search for a problem-free life.”

Pictures show

Michael Collins’ book, the cover of which is decorated with a Victorian teasmade

A Victorian cherry pipper that did speed up a tedious process. Place cherries in the hopper and the twin spikes pierce a pair at a time, which were then pushed off automatically minus their stones

Reynolds of Chicago patented this envelope sealer in the late 19th century. As the lever is cranked, a roller drives an open envelope through a wetting process and a second roller seals it

The guide was written by dealer and TV antiques expert Fiona Shoop, who will be known to fans of such UK TV shows as Cash in the Attic, Everything Must Go and Boot Sale Challenge.

Fiona draws on her 23 years of experience in the trade to teach people how it’s done, highlighting the tricks of the trade and listing some of the common and costly mistakes that newcomers make.

Buying and selling antiques is an increasingly popular pastime, the book says, particularly with the rise of online dealing and many people find it can develop into viable business opportunity.

Divided into easy-to-use segments, the book is an easy but informative read, full of facts and a surprising amount of humour.

It covers:

* What to buy and sell
* Where to buy and how much to pay
* Where and how to sell
* Using the internet
* Doing it properly – the paperwork and the payback

How to Buy and Sell Antiques is published by How To Books Ltd. and is available at £14.99 in major bookshops and online retailers.