Group Captain Alan Francis Britton

Frank Britton was born in 1908 in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire, and educated at Haileybury and Blundell's School. After a brief period in a stockbroker's office he joined the Royal Air Force in 1928, trained as a pilot (gaining a distinguished pass) and later specialized in mechanical and aeronautical engineering. He was promoted Wing Commander in 1938 and served in Canada, North Africa and Italy during the war. In 1954 he retired as Deputy Director of N.A.T.O. Affairs in the Department of the Assistant Chief of Air Staff with the rank of Group Captain, and joined the aero-engines division of Rolls Royce in a senior capacity. Britton had long been a collector of English delftware, and final retirement in the 1970s provided him with time to devote to what was much more than a hobby. When living in Filton, near Bristol, he had studied the superb collection in the City Museum and Art Gallery, numbering some eight hundred items and believed to be the largest such public collection in the world. Although founded at the beginning of the century, it had never been catalogued, and Britton spent some eight years on this task, resulting in the publication by Sothebys in 1982, on the recommendation of Frank Herrmann, F.S.A., of English Delftware in the Bristol Collection, a comprehensive survey of the styles and decoration employed in its production, and now widely regarded as a major reference work. Much research went into the background of each individual piece (Britton was a most patient researcher), and his genealogical studies enabled him to associate many pieces with specific individuals, places or professions. He then went on to study the delftware in the new Museum of London, formed by the amalgamation of the collections in the old London and Guildhall Museums. Again, his painstaking research revealed valuable information on the potters, the pot-houses in which they worked and the articles they made, thus combining social history, archaeology and ceramics and, with his customary diligence, Britton retrieved much information from the records in the Guildhall Library of the Hand in Hand Insurance Company, which held the policies of most of the eighteenth-century potters. London Delftware was published in association with the Museum of London in 1987 by Jonathan Horne, from whose shop in Kensington Church Street Britton had bought some of his own pieces and who became a staunch friend. Typically, for he was an essentially friendly man who loved to share his knowledge with others, Britton donated to the Museum of London his card index of over 450 eighteenth- century potters for the benefit of future researchers. He died on ll January 1996.