The Craftsman’s Review ✦

Stories of British Craft & Home

Advertorial · 2 days ago · By Philippa Dowson

“He stopped asking for soup because he was fed up of spilling it.” Why a 71-year-old Yorkshire potter is selling her last soup bowls at a special price

Rhoda Hebblethwaite has made dishes for other people’s tables for 49 years. The one she finally made for her husband became the piece everyone asked about at her market stall. The stall is packed away for the winter, and about 240 bowls are left from what was her last big firing. Her shoulder won’t allow another. She is selling them until the end of November.

By the first week of November the beeches along the River Ure are nearly bare, and Rhoda Hebblethwaite’s stall at the Saturday market in Masham is packed away for the year. Her folding table is back in the old stone byre behind her cottage. The byre hasn’t held a cow since the 1970s. Now it holds two potter’s wheels, a kiln and wooden shelves that run right up to the beams.

She lifts a bowl down from the top shelf. It is two dishes in one: a deep, round cup on one side, a curved plate wrapped around it on the other, and a flat loop handle on the outside of the cup. She ladles tomato soup into the cup, puts half a cheese toastie on the plate, hooks her thumb through the handle and walks the length of the byre with one hand.

The soup hardly moves. The toastie stays exactly where she put it. She sets the bowl down on the workbench without a sound.

“People always pick it up by the plate first. Then they try the handle, feel where the weight goes, and they go ever so quiet.”

Rhoda has been at the wheel since she was 22. Forty-nine years of mugs, pie dishes, casseroles and the odd wedding platter, most of them sold from the same folding table at the same Saturday market. By her own rough reckoning she has made more than twenty thousand pieces.

“I’ve made dishes for half the kitchens in Wensleydale,” she says. “And not once had I made one for the man I’m married to.”

The soup bowl began as exactly that: one bowl, for one man. Eight months on, it is the piece people stop her about in the queue at the post office. And with her stall packed away for the winter, this is the first time anyone can order one online.

What half a century at the wheel teaches you about a handle

Ask Rhoda about handles and you had better have a cup of tea to hand. “Everyone thinks the handle is the pretty bit,” she says. “It isn’t. The handle is where you tell the weight to go.” A good mug carries well because its handle sits right next to the heaviest thing in it, the tea. Put the handle in the wrong place and the mug tips towards your wrist every time you lift it.

Nobody ever did that for soup. Most soup bowls have no handle at all, or two little ears you pinch with your fingertips. The bread goes on a separate side plate. So lunch means two dishes, two hands and, more often than not, a tray to carry them on.

“And a tray just gives everything room to slide about,” she says.

Cyril Hebblethwaite is 74. He built and mended dry-stone walls up and down the Dales for 33 years, and on most of those days he ate his dinner sat on a half-finished wall, a flask of soup balanced on the coping stones. A few years ago his hands started to shake. Not badly, he says. Just enough.

This March, with sleet still blowing off the moor, Rhoda watched him make the trip from the Aga to his armchair with a bowl of chicken soup in one hand and a plate in the other. Halfway across the sitting room the soup went over the rim and onto his wrist. He didn’t say a word. He put the bowl down on the side, picked up his sandwich and said, “I’ll just have this.”

After that he stopped asking for soup.

“Forty-nine years I’d made dishes for other people’s tables. And my own husband had quietly given up on soup because he didn’t want me to see him spill it.”

She went out to the byre that same night. She threw a deep, round cup with a high wall, then a shallow plate that curves round one side of it like a crescent moon, and joined the two while the clay was still soft. Then the handle: a wide, flat loop on the outside of the cup, big enough for a thumb and two fingers, set right beside the soup so the heaviest part of lunch hangs straight below the hand.

It took her twelve attempts and most of April. On some the handle cracked off in the kiln. On others the cup was too shallow and the soup slopped about, or the plate was too flat and the bread slid off as soon as the bowl tilted. “Forty-nine years at this, and that bowl still sent me back to the wheel eleven times,” she says.

Cyril carried the twelfth one to his armchair the afternoon it came out of the kiln, thumb through the handle, the other hand free. He came back for seconds and carried those too. He calls it “the one-hander”. He hasn’t gone without soup since.

When her stall went back up in May, Rhoda put two at the end of the table, mostly to see what people would make of them. A woman bought both before nine o’clock and came back the following Saturday with her sister. By July there was a waiting list in a spiral-bound notebook.

Word got round the way it does in a town of 1,200. Walkers and day-trippers up from Leeds and York took bowls home and wrote asking for more, so Rhoda started posting a few parcels a week from the post office on the Market Place. There was no shop and no website. Just the folding table, the notebook and a biscuit tin full of addresses.

The trouble with soup and a sandwich

Most of us still eat soup the way our mums served it: a bowl, a side plate, a spoon and a careful walk to the table. For anyone whose hands aren’t as steady as they were, or who eats in the armchair rather than at the table, that walk is the hard part.

Trays don’t solve it. A tray needs two hands and gives the bowl room to slide. Standing the bowl on the plate is worse, because the bowl rides on the rim of the plate and tilts at the first wobble. A mug keeps the soup in, but there is nowhere to put the bread, and the crusts end up in your lap.

Rhoda’s bowl does what a good mug does, for a whole lunch. The cup and the plate are one piece, so nothing slides against anything else. The handle sits where the weight is, so the bowl hangs level instead of tipping towards you. The high wall of the cup keeps the soup on its own side, and the bread stays dry. And the wide, flat base sits still on a lap tray, a tray table or a side table.

“I didn’t invent soup and a sandwich,” she says. “Every tea room in the Dales has been serving it for as long as anyone can remember. I just put them on one dish, with a handle you can actually hold.”

That is also why the cheap copies you see online disappoint people, she says. “They copy the shape off a photograph. The cup’s too shallow, the handle is a little ring you can’t get your thumb into, or it’s on the wrong side and the whole thing pulls out of your hand.” Rhoda lifts every finished bowl by the handle before it goes in a box. If it doesn’t hang level, it goes on the seconds shelf.

She is just as straightforward about what it can’t do. “It won’t mend his hands,” she says. “Nothing I make will. It just means lunch is one trip again, and he carries it himself.”

And it is still a hot bowl of soup. “Fill it a finger’s width below the rim and carry it like you mean it,” she says. Like everything she makes, it goes in the microwave and the dishwasher.

The bowls come in four glazes, each one dipped by hand: Wensleydale Cream, a warm speckled white; Pillar-Box Red, the colour of the post box on the Market Place; River Ure Blue, deep and glossy with a pale rim; and Buttercup Yellow, the colour of the hay meadows in June. Every glaze runs a little in the kiln, so no two bowls come out quite the same.

The notes that came back to the market stall

Rhoda keeps the cards people leave her in an old shoebox under the workbench. She takes out one from September and reads it aloud.

“That one I keep on top of the pile,” Rhoda says. “That’s why I make them. Not for a shelf. For somebody’s lunch.”

What’s left after the September firing

Her last market of the year was the final Saturday in October. Rhoda fired one more big kiln load in September for the autumn visitors, and then the weather turned early. Two of the last Saturdays were rained off before the clocks had even gone back.

So most afternoons now go on packing. Each bowl comes down off the shelf, is lifted once by the handle and gets wrapped in brown paper. On the stone wall above the wedging table hangs a calendar with 30 November circled in red.

What’s left comes to about 240 bowls, and they are the last ones. Rhoda’s right shoulder has been bothering her for two years; forty-nine years of centring clay wears a joint down. In October her GP told her plainly: no more big firings and no more long days at the wheel.

“I could argue with her,” she says. “But it’s been worse every night since August. I’d rather these bowls went to people’s kitchens than sat on shelves I can’t fill again.”

So she has set one flat price for what’s left: £37 a bowl, down from the £67 they sold for at the market. “I’m not trying to get rich off this,” she says. “I want them in kitchens before Christmas. Half the people at my stall were buying them for their mums and dads.”

Her daughter Bethan is the one who put them online. “Mum makes the bowls,” she says. “I pack the parcels and answer the emails.”

She is selling what’s left until 30 November, or until the last bowl has gone, whichever comes first.

What customers say

Where to get one of Rhoda’s bowls

The bowls are only sold through Rhoda’s own shop. It is the one place to get the real ones from this September’s firing.

On sale until 30 November, while the September firing lasts

“This was my last big one,” Rhoda says. “My shoulder won’t give me another.” On 30 November, or sooner if the last bowl from September has gone, the shop closes.

Payment and delivery: the shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand and dispatched by Royal Mail within 1 to 2 working days, and every order comes with Rhoda’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

Cyril still carries his own lunch through to the armchair every day at noon. “He tells everyone at the pub he’s the reason I’m so busy,” Rhoda says. “He’s not wrong.”

DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please read the full returns policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. This bowl is a serving dish, not a medical or assistive device. Hot food can still spill or scald, so please take care when carrying it. Images are for illustration; because each piece is made and glazed by hand, the finished product may vary slightly.

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