Cyril Shingler

Cyril Shingler was born in Stoke-on-Trent on January 10th 1902, the son of Philip Shingler and his wife Mary. Philip was an accounts clerk with the North Staffordshire Railway, and in 1921 Cyril, then 19, was an engineering pupil with the same company, living with his parents at 34 James Street, Stoke.

At the end of 1930 Cyril married Margaret Beardmore in Stoke. It was a marriage into a pottery family: Margaret’s father Frank had run the Sutherland Pottery in Fenton and spent his working life in the trade, and her uncle was the novelist Arnold Bennett, who made the Potteries famous as the ‘Five Towns’.

Cyril became a designer and worked for several Stoke factories, among them Mason’s, the makers of ‘Patent Ironstone China’. The firm had been founded by the Mason family in Lane Delph early in the nineteenth century, and by the 1930s it belonged to G. L. Ashworth & Bros of Hanley, who still used the famous Mason’s name and crowned mark.

King George V and Queen Mary celebrated their Silver Jubilee on May 6th 1935, twenty-five years after the King came to the throne, and the potteries produced souvenirs by the thousand. Cyril’s contribution was a limited-edition jug for Mason’s. Each side carries a moulded portrait in a laurel wreath, the King on one side and Queen Mary on the other, with their names on a ribbon above and the dates 1910–1935 below. The lion and unicorn of the royal arms rear up beneath the lip, and the handle is modelled as a lion.

The jug was also made with enamel colours.

Each jug was numbered: this one is No. 213. Another, No. 155, was sold at auction in Sheffield in 2018.

Cyril was a talented artist in other ways too, as shown by his portrait of his father-in-law Frank.

Cyril later moved to Royal Worcester, where he worked in the pattern room. The company had been bought in 1934 by Charles Dyson Perrins, of the Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce family, a great collector of Worcester porcelain. In 1946 Dyson Perrins set up a trust to bring his own collection together with the old factory museum, and Cyril was appointed curator. He prepared the new museum in the former company showrooms, and it was opened by Princess Elizabeth in June 1951, during Royal Worcester’s bicentenary celebrations.

Cyril remained curator until 1966, when he was succeeded by Henry Sandon, later well known as an expert on the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow. The collection then moved into the old St Peter’s School building next to the factory, where the Museum of Royal Worcester is today.

Margaret died in 1976; her death was registered in Bromyard. Cyril eventually retired to Davenham in Malvern, the house that had been Dyson Perrins’s own home and is now a home for the elderly. In 2001 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Royal Worcester for its 250th anniversary, fifty years after she had opened the museum as a princess, and Cyril, then 99, was presented to her.

Cyril celebrated his hundredth birthday in January 2002 and died in Malvern a few weeks later, on February 27th 2002. Many of the family photographs on this website were in his collection, and he passed them on to his nephew Richard shortly before his death.

Sources: the 1921 census; the General Register Office indexes of births, marriages and deaths; the Museum of Royal Worcester; Sheffield Auction Gallery, April 2018.