Jessie Tait A natural ceramic decorator

Jessie Tait was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, the youngest of three children.

At the age of 13, she began studies at the Burslem School of Art, in Stoke, where she remained for five years. Perhaps someone as evidently talented from a more privileged background would have ended up at the Royal College of Art; for Tait, the child of a working-class family, the route lay directly into the factories.

After a brief and unsatisfactory stint as assistant designer to Rhead, she joined the family firm of WR Midwinter in 1946. Like much of the pottery industry, Midwinter took time to find its feet in the immediate postwar period.

A turning point came when Roy Midwinter, the son of the boss, William, took a research trip to the west coast of America, where he observed the sales success of the new, fluid, modern forms by designers such as Eva Zeisel. Chintzy patterns and fussy florals were on the wane. The public wanted something more streamlined, stylish and in keeping with the fresh looks emerging in furniture and fabric design.

Roy designed a new set of shapes, called Stylecraft, with television-screen-shaped plates and neat, unfussy cups. The range was launched in 1953. Tait took to the new look immediately, creating such patterns as Homeweave, an all-over design resembling a gingham tablecloth laid over the ware, and Primavera, with an exuberant design of abstracted florals. Red Domino, its red rim dotted with white, became one of the most recognisable pottery designs of the 1950s. Innovative abstract designs included Fantasy, which had a central design of swirling lines and spirals recalling motifs by Joan Miró against a grey cross-hatched ground.

I loved her sensitive eye for nature and natural forms.

The next year a yet more radical shape, called Fashion, was introduced by Roy – it dispensed with the rather nugatory rim on the Stylecraft plate and was even more neat and streamlined. Tait’s skill at finding just the right design motif for a particular shape could now flourish – despite her initial fears that the new shape might be too radical. Festival nodded to the Festival of Britain, its all-over design reminiscent of cells seen under a microscope; Flower Mist is a neat, simple floral design recalling the textile designs of Lucienne Day. Zambesi is one of Tait’s most striking designs of the period: a chic zebra-stripe that on some shapes was enlivened by a splash of red. Aside from the commercial rigours of the mass-produced ware, Tait continued to attend evening classes during the 1950s, making her own tube-lined ware in terracotta and throwing pots. She also made work for the studio pottery Clayburn.

Tait continued to produce accomplished work for Midwinter on a range of new shapes introduced in the 1960s. The Fashion shape had begun to look outmoded: in its place came new, cylindrical forms with straight-sided cups. On the elegant, fine shape designed by the Marquess of Queensberry, Tait created chic striped patterns such as Mexicana and Sienna. Her Spanish Garden became a bestseller, its attractive design based on a pattern for a Liberty tie. Her last design for Midwinter was Nasturtium, a brightly orange floral pattern on the Stonehenge shape that was introduced in the 1970s – another range redolent of its time, it evoked a homespun, wholemeal feel.

Midwinter was taken over by Wedgwood in 1970. In the same year Tait married Albert Hazlehurst, a train driver. In 1974 Tait moved to Johnson Brothers, another division of the Wedgwood empire. The creative freedoms of the 1950s would never be replicated in the more corporate environment at Wedgwood, but she continued to produce extremely successful designs.

After her retirement in 1993 she worked as a freelance designer. A deeply modest, practical woman, she never lost the desire to make fresh work. The recognition given to her early designs – which included an exhibition at Richard Dennis Gallery in London in 1997, and Steven Jenkins’s book Midwinter Pottery: A Revolution in British Tableware – gave her great pleasure.

Credits for the text from Charlotte Higgins at the Guardian, and equally for the images from Rob Mc Rorie and Dee Beale.