Text 22

I. Can you guess what tragedy has happened with tableware.

II. Look at the pictures below. Read the text and find the names of the manufactures of this tableware.

А_______________ B______________ C________________

A tragedy in tableware

This morning, I was about to eat my breakfast cereal from a robust, plain blue bowl, a beautifully made and knowingly modest design, as it happens created in 1952 for the Finnish company Iittala by Kaj Franck. And then I heard on the radio that Waterford Wedgwood, makers of Britain's best-known ceramics, as well as Ireland's most famous crystal and glassware, was in the hands of receivers and, effectively, up for grabs.

When as long-established a company as Wedgwood – the legendary Staffordshire pottery merged with Waterford Crystal in 1987 – goes under, you know that the current recession is biting harder than I could ever do on my morning Weetabix. As a mark of respect, I put my Teema bowl back on the kitchen shelf and replaced it with one by Susie Cooper, one of Wedgwood's one-time star designers and, normally, kept for best.

Wedgwood ceramics, and especially its blue-and-white jasper ware and fine bone china ranges, have been part and parcel of British design, production and domestic culture for 250 years. Josiah Wedgwood set up production in 1759 and his Stoke-on-Trent factories were as much a part of the Industrial Revolution as the steam engines of James Watt. Wedgwood brought together his own talents with those of artists like John Flaxman, whose designs have remained in production until today, and married them to the might of mass industrial production. Very soon, English bone china was competing more than effectively with the original thing from China itself.

Although it's easy to think of Wedgwood as the maker solely of blue-and-white jasper ware hung on the walls of countless British homes, from the grandest to the most humble, and pretty bone-china tea-cups, the company has employed a wide range of designers and artists over the decades, and centuries, to keep it up to pace with emerging trends in the decorative arts, design and décor. If you can face the January sales, you'll find Wedgwood bargains galore designed by the likes of Jasper Conran, Kelly Hoppen and Martha "Living" Stewart.

Waterford Crystal, set up in 1947 by the Czech emigré Karel Bacik, became an astonishing success, pushed along by the design skills of his fellow countryman "Paddy" [Miroslav] Havel.

The fourth member of the Waterford Wedgwood stable is Royal Doulton, a pottery founded in Lambeth, south London, by John Doulton, Martha Jones and John Watts in 1815. The firm moved lock, stock and ceramic figurine to the Potteries in Staffordshire in 1956, where it has specialised in tableware and "collectables", the ceramic figures that have featured so prominently in weekend supplement ads in recent decades and which may or may not be to your taste.

All told, Waterford Wedgwood seemed to be an empire built on foundations much firmer than china and glass. But, from the 1980s, competition from low-cost foreign manufacturers and the rising cost of labour at home began to undermine such companies based in the British Isles. Cup by saucer, manufacturing was farmed out – to Indonesia in the case of Royal Doulton – and hundreds of years of Irish and English glass and ceramic making began to topple.

Will someone come to the rescue? From China, perhaps? The names of these companies alone – Wedgwood, Waterford, Rosenthal and Royal Doulton – are surely worth a fortune. Well, maybe. Perhaps now is the time to reach for altogether plainer tableware and glasses, for Kaj Frank bowls at one end of the price range, but more likely to Duralex tumblers at the other as we face a future of, as it were, porridge and tap water rather than the fine wines and dainty dishes it's hard not to associate with Waterford and Wedgwood.