De Trey, Marianne

Marianne de Trey was born in London in 1913 of Swiss parents. She studied textile design at the Royal College of Art and had little formal training in ceramics. She married Sam Haile in 1938 and moved with him to the USA where he taught her to pot. The couple returned to England in 1944. After the war they worked together at Bulmers Brickyard in Sudbury, Suffolk at the pottery built by Mary Gibson-Horrocks. In 1947 she and her husband Sam Haile established a pottery at Shinners’ Bridge, Dartington, Devon, in a pottery originally designed for Bernard Leach and where he wrote his influential text, A Potter’s Book . Sam Haile tragically died in 1948 in a car accident but Marianne de Trey continued to run the pottery until her retirement in 1985. She was one of the first people after the war to set up a well-organised workshop with an effective apprenticeship system. Later she was a founding director of the Dartington Pottery Training Workshop established in 1975. She has been active in the British pottery world throughout her career. In 2013 she celebrated her 100th birthday. Marianne passed away on October 18, 2016.

Pictures: 1978 Marianne de Trey (centre) at Shinners Bridge Pottery, to the right Babs Haenen (NL); portrait 2011 (source: Crafts Council org); portrait as a still (source: YouTube); bowl (source: Eastbourne Auctions Rooms); bowl and vase (coll. Capriolus).

Marianne de Trey first worked in slip decorated and tin glazed earthenware and then in stoneware making domestic pottery and tableware. In later years she has concentrated on more personal work using porcelain with lustre and celadon glazes (text: Aberystwyth University).