Glass articles - Scottish Glass People |
Frank in 2000 |
People are always asking me how I got involved in Scottish glass – so perhaps it is time to add my story.
I was born in London in 1951. My paternal great grandfather left Scotland looking for work with his brother. ‘Dad Andrews’, as he was known, stopped at Ely in Cambridgeshire and his brother ended up in Australia. The only other Frank Andrews in the family emigrated to Canada but died from appendicitis at age 26. I still have his engraved christening glass. I too suffered from a ruptured appendix at the age of 26; luckily hospitals were more reachable for me.
While my interest at school was very inclined in an arts direction, parental pressure pushed me into sciences. My father was a civil engineer and saw no value in arts. But I never lost the lust for arts and at age 21 got accepted by Hornsey Art College. Unfortunately, I was too old to get a grant and too immature to be creative enough to get by on my own. I had commenced an apprenticeship in electronics on leaving school but I really hated it. I dropped out after two years and moved to Cornwall at the height of the hippy era. I did actually make a few sculptures/pictures and even sold some of them!
This was great time in which I discovered horses and the coutryside as well as a more artistic community. But, a few years on, following a failed marriage, I returned to London and the family home. I settled back into electronics in the printing industry, where I acquired lots of useful skills in printing technology, graphics, artwork layout, etc. At the same time, I set up a photography and film-making studio with a partner. This waddled along for a few years until we both realised we did not understand the business side and gave up. My hobbies consisted of building computers from scratch and programming them, collecting stamps and reading. It was not until I was in my thirties that I started to come to terms with myself and where I fitted in to the world, slowly discovering politics and, through further studies and reading, a desire for greater satisfaction emerged.
Wedding 1995
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At the end of the 1970s, a girlfriend and I set up a bric-a-brac shop. She did not last long but I had at last found something that gave me a lot of pleasure. In a residential area not far from Highgate in North London, the customers ranged from the gentry to tramps who would bring odd bits they had found rummaging through dustbins. What was wonderful was that all of these people spoke to me as an equal. As I was barely surviving, I did a paid TOPS course in systems analysis and programming for IBM minicomputers. Then I entered the world of big business and unbelievable pay packets. But my passion was in the shop and the glass, I hired a woman to shop sit and did Portobello Market myself every Saturday. Sundays I was out hunting and buying for the shop and my growing collection.
One day, while running the shop, a house clearance lot I had bought at auction contained a pair of coloured glass vases, one blue and green, and the other pink and blue. I fell in love with them and popped them on a top shelf hoping to discover more about them from customers. A regular visiting dealer told me that they were Monart glass from Scotland and that he had a box of similar glass if I were interested. I was later to find out these two inspiring pieces were Whitefriars Cloudy! A week later, I had this full box unpacked in my small bedsitter and it was astonishing – the glass bug had bitten me. It included Monart (some labelled), Gray-Stan, Lalique, Schneider – the latter two were just emerging in the new market for Art Deco, so were easily identified, but much of the rest remained unknown then. I was convinced that the Monart was an unsung example of British Art Deco and set about researching and tracing more pieces. By the time I had accumulated 200 pieces, I knew it was time to do something about getting it onto the collecting map.
Some of my collection 2003
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I was also running a Saturday stall at Portobello Antiques Market, where I dealt in silver and miscellaneous antiques. I stripped this out painted it white, installed bright lighting and filled it with Monart and Vasart glass at high prices. None sold at first. but people were amazed: “Is it Ruskin high fired” they would ask. I also organised a collectors' club and quickly made contact with Ian Turner and the several other ‘in the know’ collectors. We eventually reached around 100 members. As time went on, I started to actually sell the glass, but the main impact of the stall was that other dealers found pieces and brought them to me. Eventually, I expanded to a triple unit and had an astounding display of 200 pieces, which I rotated about a dozen pieces each week to keep the display changing.
I set up a stall at the first London Art Deco fair and was not too surprised that only one of all the stands there was selling glass. All French – Lalique and Argy Rosseau mostly. The stall holders were impressed by the Monart and ended up buying a piece: they too became ardent collectors. At this time, the English glass dealers dealt in wine glasses and decanters and turned their noses up at anything less noble. The collectors' club newsletters and a growing band of collectors had created a market and when Michael Parkington (scroll down on link) started collecting Monart, the auction houses sat up and took notice… Scottish Glass had come to the fore!
After the book came out, I wound down the stall at Portobello; the shop had gone earlier, as I had started a publishing business on the side. But with the 1990 recession, my business effectively went bust. At the same time, my mother died and my world fell apart.
Lampwork menagerie |
I picked up the pieces of my life through the 1990s and by the late 1990s, after living first in Germany then the Netherlands, had remarried and was active on the Compuserve glass forum. Collectors tracked me down online and started questioning me, so I started the Ysartglass.com website to publish the seven club newsletters online. Well, it just all grew from there and for 10 years I spent almost all of my spare time researching. The computer work dried up after 9/11 leaving me high and dry in Amsterdam with a huge mortgage and a wonderful family. I spent almost all of my time researching and selling much of my collection on eBay. I used part of the proceeds to build up a large glass library. The 2005 conference in Perth happened at about the time Scotland’s Glass website was born and by then I was worrying about what would happen to all this knowledge after my death. This led to my library digitisation project Glass-Study.com and Glass-Catalogue.com and ultimately, since moving to rural France, the birth of a non-profit organisation to preserve glass websites for posterity: The Glass Study Association.
The Glass Message Board has been instrumental in my interest exploding beyond Scottish glass, although it has not lost its special place. My interest in glass figures also grew and led to me setting up the Glass Zoo website. I also published a half-finished book on the electric light bulbs history that I wrote in the 1980s: it ties in with my glass interests and one day I intend to further my research on the huge impact of the light bulb on the glass industry.
In 2005, I organised a conference in Perth that explored the impact of the Ysart family on Scottish glass – it was a very successful event. In 2008, I was asked if I could do another conference and decided against it, though I did realise that 2010 was going to be the 400th Anniversary of Scottish glass. I sent out a large mailing letting people know and suggesting that this should be celebrated in some way. Reactions were “great idea keep us informed” and just one person, Shiona Airlie, sent back an “I could help” email. So, it was decided to actually try and organise a conference celebrating all aspects of Scottish Glass. Over the following two years, we worked together to achieve this and the publication of a book for the anniversary. The 2010 conference held at Edinburgh College of Art turned out to be the largest glass conference ever held in the UK and was again a remarkable success. This despite that a month before the date we nearly cancelled when we realised that we were short of the money to pay expenses and neither of us could pay them from our own pockets. Luckily, a white knight helped us get the last bit of sponsorship that just covered the remaining expenses.
I do have an idea for an even grander glass event, but we need dreams too.
At 60 years of age, with 30 years involved with glass, I think I have been fairly useful in my life, and hope that I get enough time to bring my last projects to fruition. With the hard physical work of rebuilding our farmhouse, I am certainly fit enough.
H. A. Basterfield. 1911-1987 → |
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