The weaver was Ethel Mairet, the potter was Edwin Beer Fishley and the philosopher was Dr Soetsu Yanagi of the Mingei or Folk Crafts movement of Japan. How were these three people, so widely separated in time and space, connected? A single plate of Edwin Beer Fishley's is now in Tokyo's Nihon Mingeikan, the Folk Crafts Museum of Japan, and Ethel Mairet and Dr Yanagi put it there. Ethel Mairet, described by the famous Japanese potter Shoji Hamada as 'the mother of English handweaving,' was born Ethel Mary Partridge, in Barnstaple in 1872. She was the eldest of three children and her father James was a chemist and druggist in the High Street. In 1912, she was staying at Saunton Sands where Michael Cardew's parents had a bungalow. Saunton was on the opposite shore of the River Taw from Fremington Pottery, founded by the great potter George Fishley a century before. It had remained in the family, but his grandson, Edwin Beer Fishley, had just died.
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