My friend Glynn Hugo, who has died aged 89, created pottery he thought of as sculpture as much as tableware. His parents joked that he was making Plasticine pots in his pram. Whatever the shape and delicacy of his mugs, cups, vases, bowls and coffee pots, they were unmistakably Hugo-ish.
The only child of Mary (nee Lees) and Percy Hugo, he grew up in a working-class home in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire. The Hugos had traditionally been coopers and barrel-makers and his father worked in a local brewery, but after winning a scholarship to the town’s grammar school, Glynn moved in a different direction. At the Burton School of Art he took up ceramics and, after getting his NDD (National Diploma in Design) and a teaching certificate, he taught pottery there for over a decade.
In 1959 he married Josephine Banfield, a teacher. They lived modestly – some of the furniture in the house was made from tea chests. But with a pottery in his garden shed, he began to sell his work and to forge a career independent of teaching. His work was hand-thrown in stoneware, porcelain and basalt clays and, as a flyer put it, “fired in a propane kiln in a reducing atmosphere to a temperature of 1300 degrees centigrade after a previous biscuit firing”.
In 1972, he and Jo moved to Darsham in Suffolk, where they converted what had been a village shop into a home, studio and showroom. Success followed, with exhibitions in Japan, Germany, Hungary, South Africa and the US, a prestigious award in Italy, and the acquisition of one of his vases by the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York. His experience of running workshops in Poland led to darker pieces about oppression and suffering. He liked to work in an open-necked white shirt with music, preferably Wagner, playing in the background.
He and Jo did not have children but they delighted in other people’s, including mine. After Jo died in 2019, he did no more work in the studio. But Glynn remained great company, with an astonishing memory for names and dates. Football was a passion: he watched Ipswich with his friend the writer Tony Parker but his real support was for Burnley – I took him to Wembley to see them win the Championship playoff final in 2009.
He was a loyal Guardian reader (Marina Hyde was his favourite), and lived long enough to delight in this year’s general election result, when the Suffolk Coastal constituency became a Labour seat for the first time in its history.
Glynn is survived by a second cousin, Kevin.
