I am one of eight grandchildren of John Douglas Stone, and for all of our lives we have been surrounded by Denby Pottery – from little test glaze bottles with Doug's handwritten notes on them to our own sets of pottery. It was his life and his love – his desire to make the glazes ever safer by removing toxins such as lead, while also maintaining and enhancing the distinctive look and pushing the boundaries of what was possible.
Your article was beautifully written, but heartbreaking at the same time. I feel so connected to the pottery, but obviously not directly at all any more, so it's gut-wrenching to see it battered by global and corporate forces that pay no heed to the artisans and the workers who have dedicated their lives to their passion. Thank you for writing this.
Hi Steven. Thank you. This really resonates and means a lot. If you have time, I'd love to chat. Rather than do it here, could you drop me an email at richard@richardmerrick.co.uk and we'll pick up from there?
Thanks Amit. Good to hear from you; hope all well. Denby is more than a case study, it’s a model of an extractive culture. Not bad people, just compliant and with little connection to cause. I’m not sure how much we can change it where it’s embedded, but we can learn not to repeat it in the businesses we support.
In later posts I write about “starfish”. It’s something that tech can enable. I’m working on how. Happy to chat…..
Richard, this is one of the most precise accounts of what actually happens when the logic of financial instrumentalisation meets the logic of accumulated knowing. The distinction between the workmanship of certainty and the workmanship of risk sits at the heart of everything that is difficult to defend about these losses, precisely because the thing being lost never appears in the column that accountants look at.
I live around the corner from the pottery. The ripple through the immediate community is real and immediate in a way that is hard to convey from the outside. Denby isn’t background to life in this part of Derbyshire, it is threaded into it, in the most ordinary and continuous way, across generations.
I have been looking at the public record closely over the past few weeks, and I want to offer a hypothesis. The charges register suggests is this: the £72m written off in 2009 was a genuine structural repair, as you say. The lenders took the loss. But the MBO itself was financed through a Valco debenture that was placed on the business from day one of the Hilco era, and that charge is seems to be still outstanding today. Burleigh in 2010, Poole in 2012 - each appears to have added further obligations. Then in 2021, the business’s strongest trading year in the Hilco period, with £2.7m operating profit, the capital structure was actively refinanced: three new charges in the same year, a £13.8m Secure Trust Bank facility drawn in October. The PNC facility was discharged in February 2022.
The hypothesis that troubles me is this. The 2021 refinancing arrived at the precise moment when de-levering was most achievable. If that capital was used to invest forward (in the porcelain line, the solar array, the operational future) rather than to reduce the structural obligation, then the business entered the 2022 energy shock having reset its debt clock rather than shortened it. That would mean the £72m characterisation in 2026 might not be the ghost of the original liability but the accumulated consequence of each decision to finance expansion rather than retire obligation. The cause would not be a static inherited burden that nobody addressed. It would be something more active and more difficult to name: a consistent preference, across 17 years, for growth financed by debt over stability financed by surplus.
Which is, of course, precisely the logic you describe. The thing that cannot be measured; the tacit substrate, the kiln manager’s forty years, the glaze chemist’s attention - none of these were ever going to win an argument against a refinancing model that required growth to service itself. The conditions under which that kind of knowing develops are precisely the conditions that logic cannot afford to create.
I am one of eight grandchildren of John Douglas Stone, and for all of our lives we have been surrounded by Denby Pottery – from little test glaze bottles with Doug's handwritten notes on them to our own sets of pottery. It was his life and his love – his desire to make the glazes ever safer by removing toxins such as lead, while also maintaining and enhancing the distinctive look and pushing the boundaries of what was possible.
Your article was beautifully written, but heartbreaking at the same time. I feel so connected to the pottery, but obviously not directly at all any more, so it's gut-wrenching to see it battered by global and corporate forces that pay no heed to the artisans and the workers who have dedicated their lives to their passion. Thank you for writing this.
Hi Steven. Thank you. This really resonates and means a lot. If you have time, I'd love to chat. Rather than do it here, could you drop me an email at richard@richardmerrick.co.uk and we'll pick up from there?
Thanks Amit. Good to hear from you; hope all well. Denby is more than a case study, it’s a model of an extractive culture. Not bad people, just compliant and with little connection to cause. I’m not sure how much we can change it where it’s embedded, but we can learn not to repeat it in the businesses we support.
In later posts I write about “starfish”. It’s something that tech can enable. I’m working on how. Happy to chat…..
Richard, this is one of the most precise accounts of what actually happens when the logic of financial instrumentalisation meets the logic of accumulated knowing. The distinction between the workmanship of certainty and the workmanship of risk sits at the heart of everything that is difficult to defend about these losses, precisely because the thing being lost never appears in the column that accountants look at.
I live around the corner from the pottery. The ripple through the immediate community is real and immediate in a way that is hard to convey from the outside. Denby isn’t background to life in this part of Derbyshire, it is threaded into it, in the most ordinary and continuous way, across generations.
I have been looking at the public record closely over the past few weeks, and I want to offer a hypothesis. The charges register suggests is this: the £72m written off in 2009 was a genuine structural repair, as you say. The lenders took the loss. But the MBO itself was financed through a Valco debenture that was placed on the business from day one of the Hilco era, and that charge is seems to be still outstanding today. Burleigh in 2010, Poole in 2012 - each appears to have added further obligations. Then in 2021, the business’s strongest trading year in the Hilco period, with £2.7m operating profit, the capital structure was actively refinanced: three new charges in the same year, a £13.8m Secure Trust Bank facility drawn in October. The PNC facility was discharged in February 2022.
The hypothesis that troubles me is this. The 2021 refinancing arrived at the precise moment when de-levering was most achievable. If that capital was used to invest forward (in the porcelain line, the solar array, the operational future) rather than to reduce the structural obligation, then the business entered the 2022 energy shock having reset its debt clock rather than shortened it. That would mean the £72m characterisation in 2026 might not be the ghost of the original liability but the accumulated consequence of each decision to finance expansion rather than retire obligation. The cause would not be a static inherited burden that nobody addressed. It would be something more active and more difficult to name: a consistent preference, across 17 years, for growth financed by debt over stability financed by surplus.
Which is, of course, precisely the logic you describe. The thing that cannot be measured; the tacit substrate, the kiln manager’s forty years, the glaze chemist’s attention - none of these were ever going to win an argument against a refinancing model that required growth to service itself. The conditions under which that kind of knowing develops are precisely the conditions that logic cannot afford to create.