People often ask Ed Pascoe how he began in this business, and how he started selling Royal Doulton. The answer starts in Philadelphia in the late sixties and early seventies, when the city was the world center of Wedgwood collecting, and with an aunt who was a serious Wedgwood collector.

If the video does not load, it is here on YouTube.

A Wedgwood education

His aunt was a member of the Buten Museum of Wedgwood, and she invited him to meet its founder, Harry Buten. There were more than a hundred people at that first meeting. Ed was fourteen.

He was already the boy who read about Britain while his friends played sports. At ten he was reading a biography of Queen Victoria, and every week he took another book of British history out of the library. Wedgwood fit right in: a great British ceramic company founded in the eighteenth century, steeped in history, and Josiah Wedgwood one of the first great industrialists in Britain. Ed went to the lectures on eighteenth century life, art and history, and became fascinated with the world his aunt had opened for him.

After every meeting his aunt was invited to the home of one of the big collectors. At the end of the tour there was always a little room of pieces for sale. Ed watched his aunt buy a piece every month, watched the other collectors buy, and thought: this is a fun business.

Seventeen, and a ticket to London

At sixteen he got his driver's license and started buying Wedgwood at flea markets and auctions, then calling his aunt and her friends to sell the pieces to them. At seventeen he had saved enough money to ask his mother whether he could go to England on a buying trip. "Sure, if you have the money, you can go."

He bought the plane ticket, went to London, worked the markets at Portobello Road and Bermondsey and the shops around them, and came home with twenty or thirty pieces of Wedgwood, which he sold to the people he had met. Going into his senior year of high school, he was already doing markets and shows.

The character jugs, and the list

On those London markets he kept seeing Royal Doulton character jugs. He thought they were pretty, and the prices were reasonable, so he set himself a limit: a large character jug at eight pounds or less. There were no books then, only what was in the retail stores, so he had no way of knowing whether a jug was rare or discontinued.

Somehow he found a list of the pieces still in production and carried it with him. If a jug was not on the list, he bought it. He did not know what to charge, so he marked them all up the same amount. On a later trip he started buying Royal Doulton figurines, and kept buying and selling. By twenty, a junior in college, he had a big inventory. He spent his summers driving all over England, and sold through newspaper advertisements and summer shows to a group of loyal customers he called as soon as he got home.

A trained eye

He came to Royal Doulton before there were any books, but with an eye trained by the Wedgwood collectors. "I had trained my eye to look. Look at the painting, look at the beautiful colors. Look at how the piece is modeled. Look how beautifully the flowers are made." Meeting the biggest collectors so young, he says, put him on the fast track: he learned much quicker than he would have on his own.

Why the 1930s

Rosamund, the figure he holds in the film, was made in 1932, and Royal Doulton only made her for a very short time. The painting is exceptionally fine, and Ed explains why. The stock market crashed in October 1929, and the Depression that followed killed the demand for Royal Doulton's big prestige vases. The company did not lay off the painters who had decorated them. It moved them to painting figurines, because it did not want to lose the talent.

That is why, from 1930 to 1938, you see such beautiful faces: Priscilla, Margot in a very rare color, The Bride in an extremely rare light blue that is almost turquoise. In wartime figurines were not an essential industry, and many carry a date of 1939 at the latest. After that the backstamp changed, so the exact year a figurine was made can no longer be read.

Rosamund
Made in 1932
$2,500

Priscilla
Leslie Harradine
$1,200

Margot
A very rare color
$1,500

Bride
An extremely rare color
$1,750

All of them are here, with other Leslie Harradine ladies first made in that decade.

See the 1930s figures.