In 1965, 60 years ago, my father, John Hughes made his first sale and Groggs as a concept were born. Sadly, we can’t be sure what that piece was but it gave my father the confidence to carry on with his plan. He had decided in the early 60’s to stop commuting to Cardiff where he was working in City Hall as a clerk and start making things out of clay at home with the idea of becoming an artist. With no formal training and no previous experience, it was a shock to my mother and my grandparents, but my father was determined to lead a different life. It was something that in the 1960’s seemed possible and so our story began.
Our 60th anniversary Grogg of the month is designed to illustrate the complicated journey of the Groggs from their humble beginnings in my father’s shed to the figures we still make today. We will begin with a very unusual piece made by my father in the early sixties.
A slight cheat this month as there are two Groggs of the Month but I’ve done it to illustrate the way we, as children, literally learned at our fathers feet how to make things out of clay. All of us, my sisters Kim and Cathy and myself spent time in the shed with Dad when the sun wasn’t shining. When the weather was fine we were very lucky. We were allowed the freedom to roam the old disused Barry railway line, which ran behind our house on Llantwit Road, Treforest from a young age. Free from parental supervision we occasionally got into trouble …but mostly it was me! I was either falling out of trees or crashing into walls while riding bikes without brakes but I look back on my many scars as badges of honour. When we weren’t running wild in the ferns and streams we were allowed to share Dads studio space as I do now with my grandson Milo and Cathy’s grandson James. The difference then was we didn’t have the distraction of I pads and computers and those precious hours awakened something in us all. The jesters are a perfect example of this. I can see why the subject matter would have appealed to Dad.
The jester or fool played an important role historically in the royal courts of Europe and developed from the medieval comedian or musician to become a person who could “speak truth to power” without sanction from the ruling party of the day. This would have touched a nerve with Dad who was never one to take authority figures too seriously!
His beautiful jester figure is hand modelled and highly glazed and bears, once again, a lovely hand painted signature and is dated 1965…. taking us right back to our founding date. I particularly love the way he has made the hair using tiny balls of clay.
My version has suffered a little more from the ravages of time but I’m glad it still exists despite him missing two of his three prongs on his jester’s hat! There’s an obvious correlation between the two pieces and they take me right back to that first shed. It’s apparent to me now that as a boy of six I was doing my best to impress my father who had given up work to become an artist and ended up sometimes babysitting his brood while my mother worked as a teacher to keep us fed and clothed. Both figures now sit, side by side, in pride of place in our museum. I look at them often and reflect on how we got where we are today…. sixty years on.
