Bernard Martyn Watney, M.A., M.B., B.Chir., M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.

Bernard Watney was born in Cape Town on 6 September 1922, the son of medical missionaries who ran a mission at Khaba Hill, Zambia, though his forebears were founders of Watney’s Brewery. The family returned to England when Watney was eight and settled in Sevenoaks. After Monkton Combe School, he studied medicine at Trinity College, Cambridge, and qualified as a doctor at the old St George’s Hospital at Hyde Park Corner. Watney’s subsequent appointment as resident medical officer at The Grove Hospital, St George’s fever branch in Tooting, was more felicitous than it sounds since it led to his life-long research into English ceramics. The Grove’s medical superintendent collected eighteenth-century porcelain and communicated his enthusiasm to Watney who quickly outstripped his mentor in expertise. The short-sightedness for which he had been rejected for military service during the war was compensated by almost microscopic vision – a great advantage in judging the paste and glaze characteristics of porcelain. This infallible eye, a photographic memory and a natural flair ensured Watney’s pre-eminence as an authority on English ceramics. In 1953 he left Tooting and joined the medical department of British Rail, based at Paddington. His `practice’ was the territory covered by the Great Western Railway which, in pre-Beeching days, included not only large towns and cities with well-known antiques shops but out-of-the-way places where he could browse among junk searching for English blue-and-white porcelain which in the 1950s was under-researched, largely un-collected and therefore cheap. The items he bought were always for research purposes; their aesthetic appeal and potential value were secondary considerations. While still at Tooting, Watney discovered a cache of documents in a cellar off Bond Street relating to a mid-seventeenth-century factory at Longton Hall, Staffordshire, which produced porcelain imitating the Chinese technique.With his colleague, Dr Geoffrey Blake, Watney identified the site of the factory near Stoke on Trent and excavated it. The result was his first book, Longton Hall Porcelain, published by Faber in 1957. His reputation grew; he was often asked by auction houses to adjudicate on problem pieces and in 1963 he published his major work, English Blue and White Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century in which he examined the difference between oriental hard-paste and early English soft-paste porcelains. A revised and expanded edition was published in 1973 and this remains the standard reference work on the subject. In 1970 Watney joined Arthur Guinness & Sons as medical adviser at the Park Royal Brewery and researched into the effects of alcoholism on industry. Unlike his teetotal parents, Watney appreciated fine wine. He built up a connoisseur’s cellar at his house in Hampstead and was a pillar of the Wine Society. He wrote its tasting manual; had a hand in designing its Screwpull devices and with Homer Babbidge wrote the much translated Corkscrews for Collectors (1981). Watney was elected a liveryman of the Mercers Company in 1945 and, after retirement from Guinness, he devoted much of his time to its almshouse committee, extending and managing the sheltered accommodation. Like many members of his family since 1793, including his father and grandfather, Watney served as Master of the Mercers in 1988-9. He designed five tapestries for the post-war Hall, based on illuminated manuscripts and other medieval works of art but, sadly, he did not live to see the completion of the fifth tapestry depicting the Mercers’ greatest treasure, the silver-gilt Leigh cup. For half a century Watney was a devotee of the Portobello market, as much at home in his Norfolk jacket with its poacher’s pockets among the dealers as he was in white tie and tails at a City banquet. He was president of the English Ceramic Circle continuously from 1974 until his death and his last book, Liverpool Porcelain of the Eighteenth Century, in which, for the first time, he was able to identify the city’s individual factories, appeared in 1997. He died on 28 September 1998.