Bossons Company
Bossons is the name given to an extraordinary collection of character wall masks, figurines, shelf ornaments, animal studies, wall plaques, lamp bases, bookends, wall clocks, thermometers, barometers, pottery figures and mirrors that were produced by the W. H. Bossons Company of Congleton, England between 1948 and 1996. The brainchild of a talented father and son team, they have become highly sought after works of art all around the world, but especially in the USA and England. Both W. H Bossons and his son W. Ray Bossons studied pottery making in Stoke-on-Trent. When ill health forced Mr. Bossons Sr. to retire to Congleton in 1944, he started making lead soldiers and Christmas figurines out of metal and plaster as a hobby. Eventually, using a variety of technical skills including mold making, he decided to produce a range of wall plaques. His son, W. Ray Bossons was a talented artist and the two set up a business in 1946 at Brook Mills in Congleton. They trained half a dozen young ladies as paintresses, young men as molders and were soon making a set of high-relief pictorial wall plaques. These were illustrated in their first ever catalogue in 1948-49 under the title "Beautiful Britain Series". the first plaque created by Bossons was entitled "Village Scene" followed by "Little Moreton Hall", "Shakespeare's Birthplace" and "Ann Hathaway's Cottage". When W. H. Bossons Sr. died in 1951, Ray Bossons took over the company and in 1958 designed the first of the internationally recognized "Character Wall Masks". The first character was a 10" "Snake Charmer" followed by the "Mandolin Player", "Drummer", "Caspian Man" and "Caspian Woman".
The History of Bossons
It is important to note that the W. H. Bossons Company closed its doors and ceased all operations on December 6, 1996. However, the history of these companies is essentially the story of two men, trained in the craft of making pottery, who transformed their craft into a serious art form. It is also, to borrow a phrase from Dickens, a tale of two cities, or, to be more exact, a tale of two towns in England. One is Stoke-on_Trent, a manufacturing center in Staffordshire, where these two men were trained and is the recognized "Potteries" district in England. It was here, some 35-miles south of Manchester in northern England that Josiah Wedgwood of Wedgwood China fame introduced fine chinaware in the 1700's. Today, potteries still form the main industry in Stoke-on-Trent: Wedgwood, Spode and Staffordshire ware all come from this area. About eight miles from the northern border of Stoke-on Trent andapproximately 185 miles north of London, just inside the County of Cheshire, is the little township of Congleton, England. A very quaint and endearing town of about 25,000 people this was the home of the W. H. Bossons, Ltd. Company for a little over fifty years.
Ray Bossons was an extremely talented artist with an intuitive ability to anticipate market trends. He was a perfectionist with regard to the anatomical detail, artistic excellence and historical accuracy of each item of art the company created. He was the creative genius and without question, the designer extraordinaire of the W. H. Bossons companies following the death of his father, W. H. Bossons in 1951. The company's reputation spread within a comparatively short period of time to all the principal markets of the world. Most of the original ideas and basic concepts came from Ray Bossons fertile imagination. He would sketch the ideas for the wall masks and figurines after much research on each character to be portrayed and relied on his extensive library for research material. The original models were executed in clay by highly talented sculptors with no limit set on the time it took to create an original model. Ray Bossons would set the standard s for the pieces and then turn them over to the staff of painters to complete. Much to the chagrin of Bossons collectors worldwide, the company closed its doors and ceased all operation on December 6, 1996. Mr. W. Ray Bossons passed away on May 27, 1999 at age 80.
From the Guardian Series, first published Thursday 12th Dec 1996.
FORTY workers were made redundant on Friday when the curtain fell on half a century of ornament making in Congleton. Personal and business issues were cited among the reasons behind the decision to end production at WH Bossons at Brook Mills, Mountbatten Way. Despite the redundancies half of the workforce have found other jobs, while others have retired.
In addition the company met staff from the local Training and Enterprise Council and Job Centre to help find new jobs for the remaining workers. "We are a small business, and personal and business reasons came into the decision to cease production,'' said production director Jane Roberts. "In addition the Victorian mill we have operated from for the past 50 years is in need of renovation, and we have never fully occupied the whole of the building.''
The company was not being wound up, she said, and various options for the future were being considered. "We will not be manufacturing anything new, but we have very good archives and we hope to market the existing pieces we have for the collectors society,'' she said.
The firm made its workers aware of the situation in September, she added, because their future was one of Bossons' main concerns. "A lot of the workers had been with us for a long time, and we felt it was only fair that if they wanted to look for alternative jobs we would not stand in their way,'' said Mrs Roberts.
http://www.bossons.info/bossons_factory.htm
Upon its closing the Bosson family made it known that none of the names or molds to their products would ever be sold to another company for reproduction, nor are there any plans to ever resume production.
The formation of The International Bossons Collectors Society (IBCS) began with a request in 1980 by Mr. W. Ray Bossons for Dr. Robert Davis to consider creating a Bossons collectors club. It was in 1981 that Dr. Davis, after some consideration and having been assured of full support from the Bossons Co., accepted the invitation to form a society.