[Alison] This came into my house in about 1960 on a visit to Denmark. I was really visiting an extraordinary little opera singer called Greta, who has a husband called Jens Quistgaard who started a product design firm called Dansk Designs [Dansk only began in 1974 so the pepper pot must pre-date this connection]. We went to visit his factory and I was very impressed by his stuff and there are various objects in this house that have survived through thick and thin because his designs were good. He designed that glass which is based on a 17th Century danish pub glass, and various plates, but the object that has survived very well in our house is the pepper pot. It was a second, if I recall, and it was tossed into my hand in a very nonchalant way, but we have really enjoyed it and used it daily ever since that time, and actually never cleaned it until today when it looks very unusual with its shiny surface. I think the bottom is rather clumsy, and it doesn’t hold much peppercorns, but it is wonderfully satisfactory to hold and to deploy, so I’d say it is a beautiful pepper pot.
Greta we knew, because she was a wonderful little opera singer who admired my father’s piano technique, and father admired her astonishing little shrill voice, which was the highest soprano I’d every heard, and they used to make music together upstairs at Campden Hill Square because my father was a wonderful accompanist.
Jens was a very handsome gentleman with a large nordic beard I remember, and he had this very impressive factory which I was allowed to look round, and so it was that we got various things from his factory……
Liberty in London sold his stuff, and that’s when I got kind people, when I married George Stricevic, to give us wedding gifts, so in fact some of his china was wedding gifts.
[Mil had asked about the son of Jens, who was Alison’s boyfriend]. I think that’s why I was in Denmark. We went for an awkward bicycle trip together, because nobody had told me that he had dyslexia…. This young man who is terribly handsome and beautiful….. anyhow we bicycled together through Jutland looking into wonderful old churches – very old murals from the 14th and 15th centuries but this dear boy couldn’t read properly, so we had great trouble at crossroads. I remember saying, but look it says Jurgan?? to the left and he’d say, ‘no we’re going right Alison’ and so we’d go miles off course to the wrong village because this poor young man had to be in charge but actually couldn’t read the words. [Mil – and so did you know him from London?]. Yes he came to London because he was a very brilliant scholar of Chinese, and became a Chinese expert. His mother came through to see him and met my father somehow through mutual friends and they had this lovely piano voice partnership – real friendship.
The Royal Collection 