Dora Billington

Dora May Billington (1890–1968) was an English teacher of pottery, a writer and a studio potter. Her own work explored the possibilities of painting on pottery. As head of the pottery department at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London (later the Central School of Art and Design), she promoted the idea of clay as an artistic medium with boundless creative potential.

Life and career Dora Billington was born into a family of potters in Stoke-on-Trent, specifically Tunstall. From 1905 to 1910 she attended Tunstall School of Art and later Hanley School of Art, becoming a teacher assistant in her final year. She worked as a decorator for Bernard Moore, 1910–1912 and then studied at the Royal College of Art (RCA) 1912–1916 and the Slade School of Art. At the RCA she studied in the design department under W. R. Lethaby and was taught calligraphy by Edward Johnston, embroidery by Grace Christie and pottery by Richard Lunn. Billington remained an amateur embroiderer and an occasional writer on textiles. Lunn died in 1915 at the age of about 75 and Billington was asked to take over his class with John Adams (who later ran the Poole Pottery).

In 1938 she became head of department at the Central School, assisted by Gilbert Harding Green. Her teaching emphasised the importance of hand building as the first stage of working with clay but all students were expected to learn to throw on the wheel. She had an extensive knowledge of glaze technology and the history of ceramics. Among her students were Quentin Bell, William Newland, Gordon Baldwin, Ruth Duckworth, Alan Caiger-Smith, Margaret Hine, Kenneth Clark, Ann Wynn-Reeves, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, Stella Rebecca Crofts, Ursula Mommens, Ray Finch and Valentinos Charalambous. She retired from her post at the Central in 1955 when Gilbert Harding Green became Head of Department.

At the Paris Expo (the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts) in 1925 Billington was awarded Bronze for her stained glass ‘St Joan’. She also exhibited mosaic. The ceramics courses at the RCA and Central School also received awards. and the School became associated with brightly decorated tin-glazed earthenware made by her protégées Alan-Caiger Smith, William Newland, Margaret Hine, Ann Wynn-Reeves and Nicholas Vergette.

She was President of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from 1949 Jeffrey Jones suggests that she made an impact as head of the pottery department in the Central School by modeling "an extraordinary openness to the potential of clay as an artistic medium in its own right" with "no rules as to what could be made, nor any constraints on ways of making or firing."

Selected publications The Art of the Potter, Oxford, OUP, 1937 The Technique of Pottery, London, Batsford, 1962 , revised edition 1972