Category:Wembley British Empire Exhibition

From Mystic Tea Room

Revision as of 16:56, 7 May 2020

This is a list of all pages which feature Cup of Knowledge tea leaf reading sets made in England that bear top-marks relating to the British Empire Exhibition of 1924-1925. The commemorative top-mark is only found in the saucers.

The manufacture, decoration, firing, and sale of British bone china at the Exhibition was conducted by a collaborative effort of six Stoke-on-Trent potteries, each of whom backstamped their products individually. This world's fair event was held at Wembley, and some cups were marked as souvenir items, with the Wembley location and year date -- but most of the sets were not thus marked, and not every cup design has been found in a Wembley variant. Regardless of the marking, the British Empire Exhibition cups are all small and rather vertical in form, because they were fired in a newly-built replica of a 19th century bottle kiln that had limited interior space.

Oddly enough, although the transfer on the Aynsley branded Cup of Knowledge sets carries a small design element identical to that found in the interior of all Cup of Knowledge cups, the transfer itself is the wrong size for the Wembley saucers and invariably hangs over the well and into the plate area of the saucers. Thus, when the cups are set upon the saucers, fragments of text can be seen, in a most awkward way, as shown.

I have a theory that may explain this, although i have no proof that it is true. Here is my idea:

When the six potteries agreed to join together to build the B.E.E. demonstration kiln and to manufacture tea cups on-site at Wembley, Aynsley commissioned a transfer pattern for the saucers that went with their standard sized tea cups and saucers -- that is, 6-inch saucers, equivalent to ones used with Aynsley's so-called Doris shape cup. However, after the transfers were prepared and the nostalgic bottle kiln was built, it was decided that smaller cups and saucers -- midway between standard and demitasse size -- would make more efficient use of the limited kiln space. A few Aynsley Doris cups and saucers marked for Wembley have been found over the years, but the vast majority are the small-sized shapes. Therefore, it seems to me that rather than throw away thousands of transfers, someone at Aynsley made the executive decision to use them anyway, even though they absolutely do not fit the small saucers. Despite this aesthetic error, the rarity of the Wembley-marked Cup of Knowledge sets is such that they are considered among the most collectible of tasseomantic items.