Remembering Victor Margrie (1929-2022), the ceramicist who shaped the Crafts Council

The Crafts Council would not exist today without the vision and tenacity of Victor Margrie, its founding director from 1971 to 1984. His death last month at home in Dorset at the age of 92 was quiet, but in life his purposeful energy shaped a culture of craft in Britain.

His early life prepared him for this endeavour. A north London grammar-school boy whose father ran a dressmaking business, Margrie attended art school to study first painting, then ceramics. He went on to produce his own stoneware pots in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s made delicately carved porcelain pieces that were collected by the V&A and Ashmolean museums. From 1963, Margrie and fellow potter Michael Casson developed the studio pottery course at Harrow School of Art into an important training-ground for careers in ceramics.

Margrie’s experience as a maker, together with a gift for strategising and enabling, propelled him towards a national role in 1971. The timing was right: although the Arts Council had given the renowned potter Lucie Rie a retrospective exhibition in 1967, the organisation did not wish to formally expand its remit to embrace the crafts. Lord Eccles, a government minister and keen collector of craft, championed the idea in Parliament of awarding £55,000 towards a Crafts Advisory Committee (CAC), and Margrie was appointed secretary. (Eight years later, in 1979, the CAC became the Crafts Council, with Margrie as director.)

The timing was also fortunate as British art schools nationwide were running dynamic, well-resourced degree courses in craft. These pursued new directions, looking beyond the paths marked out by luminaries such as Bernard Leach, David Pye, Robert Goodden, Enid Marx, David Kindersley and Patrick Reyntiens.

Margrie, always keen to nurture the new – while respecting the established – turned the CAC into a craft hothouse. He discerningly focused on supporting makers with grants, advisory services, regional conferences and collecting work, while giving audiences the chance to appreciate new work and to engage with it critically in the pages of Crafts magazine, in exhibitions in the CC’s own central London gallery, across the UK and abroad, and in its shop at the V&A.

Margrie was also mindful of forging a nationwide collaborative infrastructure for crafts through regional arts associations and established craft societies. For a time, the conservation of craft was given resources, but Margrie leant more naturally towards grant-aiding opportunities for innovation; for example, in enabling glassblowing and ironwork to flourish in small-scale workshops rather than in industrial settings.

Margrie’s indefatigable enthusiasm and dedication, his knowledge, expectation of high standards and infectious laughter were all qualities that inspired his team. By 1984, when Margrie left with the honour of a CBE, he had created a sustainable Crafts Council which finally bridged the gap in the work of the Arts Council and Design Council and was admired by the crafts community internationally. Until the turn of the millennium, Margrie continued working as a visiting professor and external examiner in higher education and as a trustee and adviser for the V&A, the Gulbenkian Foundation and the British Council.

In latter years, he travelled with his wife Rosemary across the UK and Europe to see architecture, opera, gardens and arts exhibitions; he read poetry (Miroslav Holub’s The Door was his favourite), discussed politics, science and technology - curious, critical and creative to the end.

Anyone receiving his exquisitely handmade paper sculptures as Christmas greetings, which took months to evolve, recognised the fundamental reasons for Margrie’s success: a conviction that craft matters and a wish for people to thrive. Ever encouraging, Margrie would say ‘Keep going!’ In his memory, we will.