Dora Billington was born in Tunstall, an outlying town in Stoke-on-Trent, into a family of potters. Her grandfather and father ran small businesses where pots were bought in and decorated. They worked at the risky end of the trade where under-capitalised firms tried to create a niche for themselves in a volatile market. Her father was not prosperous and went bankrupt in 1912. She left school at thirteen and, as was the practice at that date, went straight into teacher training.From 1905 to 1910 she attended Tunstall School of Art as a student and pupil teacher, indicating an early choice of profession. In 1910, she transferred to the larger art school at Hanley, where she studied for two years. In her final year there she worked as a teaching assistant, partly perhaps because of her father’s bankruptcy.
The Hanley curriculum consisted of drawing and painting, woodcarving, metalwork, pottery and the history and theory of design.Pottery teaching was perfunctory and the Stoke-on-Trent art schools did not offer anything like a thorough training for potters, whether industrial or artistic. That was the employers’ concern, not theirs. In 1919, government inspectors found pottery teaching at Hanley to be ‘deplorable’, lacking making machines of any kind, and training in pottery in the Stoke-on-Trent art schools to be wholly inadequate.
Billington received more practical instruction from Bernard Moore, for whom she worked two days a week while at Hanley. She judged her time with him to be valuable but limited. Moore, a renowned ceramic chemist, made art wares using reduced lustre and flambé glazes, which he had been experimenting with for some years before applying the results to his own work. His factory was, in effect, a studio with a small group of painters who decorated blanks made elsewhere. In addition to the permanent staff, he took on promising students, including John Adams (later of Poole Pottery), Reginald Tomlinson (later schools art inspector for the London County Council) and Dora Billington. Several of Billington’s pieces for Moore survive, and the Victoria and Albert Museum has a fine, tall vase (Fig. 2) whose decoration shows a well-judged arrangement of a dragon motif on a Chinese-inspired form, an assured handing of the brush and the beginnings of the calligraphic style of decoration that was to be a theme in her work.
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