Anthony George Ray

The following obituary, written by our Fellow Huon Mallalieu, first appeared in The Times on  24 August 2009.

Anthony George Ray, an inspirational Eton schoolmaster and a renowned scholar in the fields of English delftware and Spanish maiolica, was born in 1926 at Darjeeling in the Himalayan foothills. His father, Reginald Ray, was the Commissioner of Police in Calcutta; his mother, Marion Huggan, was the daughter of a three-times Mayor of Pudsey in Leeds. Anthony followed his elder sister and brother “home” to be educated in England, attending Charterhouse where he became head boy. Holidays were spent with their grandfather in his retirement home at Scarborough, and after the death of their mother in 1936, with her brother’s family. Ray’s brother Christopher, who returned to teach at Charterhouse, said it was a somewhat loveless upbringing for a boy who grew to be a notably warm family man and an understanding housemaster.

Ray was commissioned in the Navy just in time to spend the last month of the war in a minesweeper, before going up to University College, Oxford, where he was a hockey blue. He intended to stay on for a PhD but in 1951 a chance meeting with Robert Birley, his old headmaster at Charterhouse and then the headmaster of Eton, led to the offer of a job. Ray taught languages at Eton for the next 38 years even though his only previous teaching experience came when he stood in for his brother for a fortnight at Lancing.

Ray was a fine linguist. He spoke French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch and Portuguese fluently, Swedish and Welsh more than passably, and would happily make jokes in Hindi and Croatian. His interests were by no means limited to his languages, however. Having taught himself photography, he set up the school photographic society, and also founded the art history slide library.

In 1956 he married Veronica Mary Slater. She was ten years his junior, and when he introduced her to Eton her striking looks had a dramatic effect on many senior boys, only a little younger than she was. She was a potter and painter who had studied at Guildford Art School, where Quentin Crisp stood for the life class in a pink posing pouch. Part of the courtship took place in the 100 Club, since they were keen jazz fans.

In 1966 Ray took over Penn House, thereafter known as Ray’s or AGR, at a point when it needed considerable attention. It was characterised by hearty sporty types and strong traditions of fagging, sports, leaving to join the army, and beatings by the house captain. A boy’s-eye account of Ray’s approach and success is typical of many: “His liberalism of outlook was treated with some suspicion, but he gradually won us over with his patient care and his lovely personality. His guitar house assemblies, talks on Piero della Francesca, and huge range of interests were inspiring.”

Eric Anderson, headmaster in Ray’s later years, called him “a gentleman schoolmaster of genius,” and noted how carefully he picked individualists as new boys to his house. Ray made it his business to attend any activity, sporting, musical, artistic or otherwise, that involved any of his boys. His interest in the art schools led to a close friendship between the Rays and Gordon Baldwin, the ceramic artist, who taught there for many years, and his wife, the painter Nancy Baldwin.

Among their shared enthusiasms was experimental music. A visit to a concert led to a friendship with the flautist Bob Downes, for whom Baldwin made two straight-blown clay flutes, with Ray calculating the positioning of the holes. Ray’s own instruments included piano and double bass and was noted for his skilled performances on Spanish guitar, and for satirical calypsos on senior boys he performed at the house Christmas dinners. The guitar featured in the songs with which he entertained his own children. Naturally enough, he was also a member of the Eton jazz band, playing washboard.

In 1973 the Rays bought a house in the Brecon Beacons from the Baldwins. It became their bolt-hole and spiritual home where they “lived a civilised life in the middle of a beautiful wilderness”, as Dora Thornton, FSA, of the British Museum put it. “Anthony carried a humane and urbane atmosphere with him wherever he went, even in the most unpromising circumstances. The quality of his talk, responsiveness and charm were undiminished whatever the conditions in which he found himself. A rare quality.” Ray had his studio, filled with books, his collection and hi-fi equipment, and a study in which to write.

In parallel to his teaching at Eton, Ray had a second life, which would have been career enough for anyone else, and which only intensified with official retirement. At an early age he was a keen stamp collector, and his acquisitive interests soon widened, taking in delftware, or tin-glazed earthenware, particularly tiles. As an undergraduate he met with a warm welcome at the Ashmolean, especially from the ceramics department, which housed the Robert Hall Warren collection of English delftware.

At that time it was accepted that pieces could be firmly attributed to particular factories, Bristol, Brislington, Lambeth and so on, and even to particular decorators. Building on the work of Professor F. H. Garner, who had scoured Lambeth bombsites for shards after the Blitz, Ray’s researches led him to the realisation that matters were rarely so clear-cut.

This generated some awkwardness with the family and others when he was invited to catalogue the Hall Warren Collection, and he questioned previously firm attributions. The resulting publication, English Delftware Pottery (1968) established him as the leading authority in the field. It was followed by English Delftware Tiles (1973) and Liverpool Printed Tiles (1994). The last was published by the specialist dealer Jonathan Horne, FSA, and in 2000 they produced an updated volume entitled English Delftware in the Ashmolean Museum.

Ray’s ceramic interests were by no means limited to England. He turned his attention to Dutch Delft (the town’s name, like similar English place names, signifies diggings or clay pits, and thus came to stand for earthenwares produced in other countries as well as Delft itself), Italian, and above all Spanish, maiolica — a cousinage of lead and tin-glaze pottery. His research had introduced him to the ceramic department of the Victoria & Albert Museum, which holds the Garner archive, and this resulted in his appointment to catalogue the museum’s Spanish pottery.

Ray combined learning with intuition and was willing to go back to first principles. The judicious balance of archaeological, documentary and stylistic evidence, together with his understanding of craft traditions and making, produced his magnum opus, Spanish Pottery 1298-1898, which Timothy Wilson, curator of Western Art at the Ashmolean called “the most definitive work of reference on the subject in any language, including Spanish”.

Michael Archer, who worked with Ray at the V&A, greatly admired his scholarship and enquiring mind, but came to be as wary as generations of Etonians of the phrase “You do realise the implications...”.

Ray was as well respected by his museum peers in Spain as in England, and he spent much time in Barcelona, Seville and Toledo, and he was made a member of the Academia de Toledo. At home he was elected to the Society of Antiquaries in 1995, and he was particularly proud to be awarded a DLitt by his old college in recognition of his services to the Ashmolean.

At the time that he fell ill he was working with Alfonso Pleguezelo on a book on Francisco Niculoso Pisano, the Italian who brought maiolica techniques from Italy to Spain at the end of the 15th century.

For some years Ray’s concern had been the care of his wife, who was suffering from a degenerative disease, but he continued to research, to write and to fill gaps in his collections, until a minor heart attack took him to hospital, where surgery was followed by a stroke.

On leaving hospital he joined his wife in a care home. Ray left his comprehensive English delftware collection to the Ashmolean.

Ray is survived by Veronica, his wife of 53 years, and by their two sons and two daughters.

Anthony Ray, teacher and ceramics historian, was born on September 14, 1926. He died on August 7, 2009, aged 82