Sir John Everett Millais’s painting Christ in the House of His Parents, Charles Dickens blacksmith Joe Gargery and Oak in Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd are all examples of the Victorian trope of the essential goodness of simple traditional rural craft objects and their makers. There are also many examples of the opposing binary that urban, industrial manufacture is associated with moral decay, excess, ugliness and evil. Despite the descriptions of waggon making by George Sturt and scythe making by Thomas Hennell one would think that the subdivision of labour was a dastardly invention of mass production. In essays written in the 1920’s by the founder of the Mingei movement Soetsu Yanagi hand craft is described as bringing us closer to nature and thus to God. One would think from Yanagi’s account and others that everything produced in a factory was made by machine and thus ugly and fraudulent. Yanagi passionately believed that these debased products flooding the market were corrupting society as a whole. In ceramics even clay produced by industry was despised by true makers, Micheal Cardew describing it as “beastly”. There are a few examples of a less antagonistic relationship between the two traditions of making. Agnita Hoy’s studio at Bullers in Stoke and Daulton’s in Lambeth and Arabia in Finland. Until recently with the advent of complete automation in the making of many ceramic products there was little awareness that the industry once employed many skilled crafts men and women. These redundant “unknown craftsmen” have few advocates. Neil Brownsword is such a person.