How Thomas shaped his future

its world-class collection of studio ceramics, were cataloguing makers' marks to allow students to identify individual pieces.

It's a complex business, as many of those who threw pots and built great flamboyant slabwork pieces in the 1950s and 1960s ''signed'' them with squiggles, impressed monograms, and sometimes unreadable signatures. There was no difficulty at all, however, when it came to pondering pieces from the potter's wheel of Thomas Lochhead.

There for all to see, incised on the base, were the clearly-defined words: ''Lochhead KIRKUDBRIGHT''. He spelled his name out in lower-case letters and purposely kept his town up in capitals to help publicise the place far and wide. And there is no doubt that in that he succeeded.

The godfather of Scottish studio ceramics preferred to play down his considerable role when we met up for a chat to mark the fact that he is celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of his graduation from Edinburgh College of Art. But, asked to hazard a guess at exactly how many pieces had passed through his hands in a career which spanned close on 50 years, and how far some had travelled, there was no hesitation whatsoever.

''At a rough guess I reckon I sold around thirty-thousand different things over the years to people, from simple little dishes to big pots and platters,'' he said with a chuckle. They went all over the world.''

Admirers who can distinguish between mediocrity and knock-your-eyes-out work refer to him as the key figure of the Scottish crafts movement of the twentieth century. They are at a loss to understand why his contribution has not been recognised more widely.

Lochhead, who is 83 this year, was the first ''studio'' potter to set up north of the Border and was so influential he inspired many of those who followed in his footsteps.

As the country's first studio potter - that is an individual artist with his own kiln producing work on his own premises for sale to the public - his career began at the end of the Second World War and continued well into the 1980s.

He is recognised as an innovator and seen as the catalyst for the spread of local non-industrial crafts shops and potteries all over the country. Today, many of his contemporaries, such as Bernard Leach, Lucie Rie, and Hans Coper, are looked upon as giants of the medium. Work they produced during the

heyday of contemporary ceramics from the 1950s to the 1970s can fetch thousands of pounds at auction as serious collectors around the world snap up hard-to-source items in the salerooms of Sotheby's and Christie's.

Yet Lochhead, who is considered by some to be as good if not better, is only now beginning to get the recognition he deserves, with more extravagant pieces occasionally attracting keen interest, too, in the salerooms.

He is not, he says, too bothered about being a ''tail-end Charlie'' compared with the star names whose work have been commanding the high prices. ''There came a time when I decided not to sell any more of my work and we kept a good few pieces at home, so maybe, some day, the family will be glad we did,'' he says. I once met a lady who was a friend of Bernard Leach and she told me she thought I was a much better potter.

''The Queen Mother first saw my work in 1954 and commented that it was 'charming pottery', and, I have treasured those words ever since.

''From the start, I was determined to make things which people from all walks of life could enjoy. Little pieces such as egg cups and butter dishes sold for the price of a

packet of cigarettes.''

Born in 1917, near Milngavie, three years later he moved with his family to settle in Dumfriesshire, where he grew up and attended school at Mouswald and Dumfries Academy.

A classmate of the painter Robin Philipson, who went on to become head of drawing at painting at Edinburgh College of Art, where both studied together, he fell for working on the wheel ''hook, line, and sinker'' as soon as he experienced the thrill of raising his first two handfuls of wet clay.

He and Philipson went off to college in 1936, and after sharing digs in Marchmont they moved into a caravan which he had built from scratch at home on the farm. ''I built it in the summer holidays and we towed it by car to Edinburgh. It was much better and allowed us to stay on for longer periods at the college, attending night classes.

''It was quite handy as it was at Bonaly, close to the tram lines which took us straight into the city in the morning,'' he said.

The enthusiastic newcomer was first introduced to ceramics by the lecturer Alick Woffenden who had been a pupil of the distinguished potter William Staite Murray at London's Royal College of Art. The minute he first sat at the wheel, there was no looking back.

After graduating he left the college in 1941 following a post-diploma year and it was seven years later that he set up his first kiln at the Old Mill in Kirkcudbright, following the advice he'd been given by the leading figure of British studio ceramics Bernard Leach, whom he had visited at his studio in St Ives in 1946.

A conscientious objector during the

Second World War, from 1942-47 he had worked on the family farm at Mouswald and miraculously turned out some pots on a wheel he built from bits and pieces retrieved from an old car.

His first purpose-built studio was established after he bought the Old Mill in Kirkcudbright in 1945. The grounds contained an artist's studio which dated back to 1900 and was built by the American painter Charles Oppenheimer while he lived there.

The building was converted into a home where he and his wife Anne raised their five children. Son Wilson continues the tradition today and still produces stylish ceramics from the Old Mill Pottery started by his father.

Lochhead's other main contribution to the development of Scottish twentieth-century studio pottery was his considerable role as a teacher. He helped set up a summer school in the town which ran for almost 30 years from 1948 and attracted distinguished artists such as John Maxwell as tutors.

Lochhead was, of course, responsible for running the pottery classes and in the

process he inspired many to go on to follow a similar career.

The ceramics department at Gray's School in Aberdeen, for instance, was set up by one of his enthusiastic pupils.

Last year there were three retrospective exhibitions of his work at Huntly House Museum in Edinburgh, the Crawford Arts Centre in St Andrews, and the Tolbooth Art Centre in Kirkcudbright. Examples of his work are in the collections of Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, Paisley Museum, and the Queen Mother.

Some of the bigger showpieces he produced for the Society of Scottish Artists in the 1940s and 1950s are highly prized by a growing band of private collectors. Even smaller pieces are beginning to appear in specialist antiques shops, galleries, and at collectors' fairs.

Members of the public will get the chance to see the calibre of his work alongside that of his contemporaries when Paisley Museum and Art Galleries stage a long-overdue exhibition of the ceramics collection which attracts interest from students and enthusiasts around the world.

Some of the major pieces held, including the work of Lochhead, will go on display this month. The potter himself would love to come along for the opening night but isn't quite as mobile these days as he would like to be. ''If you had spoken to me in the 1980s you could have had a headline which proclaimed 'Old Potter Still Firing'. I don't get about much these days, but it's good to know that people haven't forgotten about me,'' he said.

His old school pal went on, of course, to be knighted. Did he ever feel a little peeved that there was never any honours conferred upon him? ''It must have been an oversight,'' he replied with tongue firmly in cheek.

And what does he see as his greatest achievement? ''I took an old artist's studio and single-handedly made it into a home in which we raised a family of five.

''You hear people talking about building their own home but in reality that involves getting an architect in and contractors to do the work. I am proud to say that I did it all myself with little more than a hammer and a saw. That episode with the caravan must have taught me more than I appreciated at the time.''