Glassmaking on the island of Malta – colourful, inspirational art glass from Maltese craftsmen and British designers
For all the glass or porcelain making concerns that we’ve looked at,
the vast majority of them have one thing in common; their development
and sustained growth was – by and large – a result of felicitous
circumstance, coincidence, outrageous good fortune or just plain luck.
That said, for every Caughley or Bow, or Zechlin or Amen Corner there
were dozens more ventures which failed, leaving penniless investors, out
of work craftsmen, cold kilns and fireless furnaces as their only
legacy. It’s rare in the annals of antique glass and porcelain
manufacture that a business model comes first, before any chance
meeting, fortuitously-discovered cache of raw materials or other
serendipitous goings on might lead to a successful operation. New Hall
porcelain was one such contrivance – a consortium of Staffordshire
businessmen who set out to take advantage of licenses for the production
of hard paste porcelain sold on by Richard Champion (more usually in
cahoots with William Cooksworthy). Another such concern was today’s
subject matter – Mdina Glass – purposefully set up by the Maltese
government of all people, and now one of the most renowned glass
producing concerns still in business.
In the mid 1960’s the
island of Malta ended 150 years of Imperial rule from London by gaining
independence from the British Empire, having served its overlords well
by providing a vital naval port in the Mediterranean. Independence,
however, lead to the withdrawal of substantial funding and subsidy, and
the new state had to quickly generate its own income. To assist with
this development George Borg Olivier’s government granted extended tax
breaks to newly-established businesses and a number of other financial
inducements to attract investment. This caught the attention of a
London-based lecturer in industrial glass design, Michael Harris, and he
set off for Malta – in the company of co-conspirator Eric Dobson – with
the intention of creating a new glass manufacturing concern and hoping
to be able to escape what he perceived to be the conservative and
restrictive attitudes which pervaded glass production in the UK. The new
company – originally known as Maltese Glass Industries – hit the ground
running and was an almost instant success, exporting worldwide within
two years of the furnaces first being lit, and able to attract skilled
workmen from around the Mediterranean to become naturalised islanders,
thus establishing it as a truly Maltese concern, which had been the
exact intention of the government which underwrote its initial set up.
Harris was able to indulge his creative talents to the full, drawing on
the inspiration he had taken from an American designer, Sam Herman and
creating a range of highly-coloured designs, free from the strictures of
convention. The name of the company was then changed to Mdina Glass to
better reflect the history of the island – this being the name of a
medieval Arabian settlement on the already 1700 year old site of Malta’s
then capital city (formerly known as Maleth and Melite – Mdina is
simply an Arabic name for a walled town or city; this also leads us to
an extraordinary toponymical coincidence, in which we shall luxuriate in
good time…). The almost free-form nature of the Mdina outturn was in no
small way down to the company’s recruitment procedure, which saw pretty
much anyone taken on and given a chance; encouraged to “do their own
thing”, employees who were seen to be innovative and creative were free
to finish their own designs, as long as they could be sold on to the
tourists who formed the vast majority of the firm’s early clientele.
Although it was apparent that the nascent company was on course to be a
resounding success, Michael Harris returned to the UK in the early
1970’s, leaving Dobson at the helm. One of the original trainee
craftsmen, Joseph Said, stepped up to the plate in Harris’s absence,
taking on the role of Production Manager and proving to be an astute
businessman, innovative designer and skilled creator of glasswares; he
assumed overall control when Dobson then headed back to Blighty in the
mid 1980’s. International recognition for the quality of the material
produced at Mdina grew, new export markets opened up in the Far East and
thus far unconquered corners of Europe and the company continued to go
from strength to strength. Today it remains under the Said family’s
control and is a proud example of Maltese acumen and creativity.
Michael Harris, the first of Mdina’s founding fathers to head home was,
of course, an accomplished glass craftsman in his own right and having
left Malta he set up his own business on the Isle of Wight. His son –
still involved in running the business today – intimated that the only
reason for the chosen location was that Michael had developed a taste
for island life while on Malta and simply looked for a similar
environment in which to settle when he returned home (as a result of the
political situation on Malta becoming increasingly unstable); he was
steered towards the Isle of Wight by his wife, who had holidayed there
as a young girl. It seems to be no more than completely coincidental
that a company producing such extravagantly-coloured glassware should
set up shop on an island renowned for the quality of sand which can be
found there; Alum Bay is a source of both a brilliant white silicate
which has long been known to rival the very best Lynn sand as a raw
material for glass makers, and of the many colourful sands that are used
to create pictures but which are not involved in the manufacture of the
coloured glassware (which starts off clear and has its colours imparted
by processing with coarsely ground or more finely-powdered,
chemically-coloured glass fragments). The real fortuity of it all, as
mentioned earlier, is down to place names. We’ve already learned that
Maltese Mdina takes its name from the ancient Arabic word for a walled
town or city and although none of the settlements on the Isle of Wight
are renowned for their soaring fortifications or imposing towers and
turrets, two of them – Cowes and Newport – sit directly on the course of
a river which flows south to north straight down the middle of the
island; the River Medina. This name, however, comes from the Old English
“medune” meaning “middle way”, so two entirely different linguistic
stems which end up with very similar names for different features on
islands hundreds of miles apart, both of which are writ large in the
story of late 20th century art/studio glass – what’s not to love about
that !
However, leaving my own peculiar foibles to one side (it’s
best to do just that, trust me) what of the glass itself ? Well, it’s
worth remembering that as a state-sponsored commercial enterprise, Mdina
was expected to more than hold its own in the marketplace as an example
of Maltese success; the early designs of Michael Harris, therefore,
form the basis of the pattern book, as once they had proved to be
commercially viable there was seen to be little point in straying too
far from these guidelines. In itself, this apparently narrow
product-range can help the collector to find a stand out example, as
rare pieces will be easily discernible from what is a readily
identifiable catalogue of standard items. That’s not to say that
Harris’s staple fare – the styles which underscored the company’s
success – are without value, particularly if they happen to carry his
(rarely used) signature. The Mdina fish vases (their creator never
referred to them as “axeheads”), attenuated bottles, minaret or onion
bottles and Japanese-style examples are all sought after in their own
right. Unusual colour combinations can enhance the value of a standard
form, so it’s worth perusing some of the many on-line catalogues to get a
feel of what might be out of the ordinary – as good a place to start as
any being our own website listings, which shows many examples, some of
which are elusive and really quite valuable; link below:
site search results for Mdina items
for more articles about European glass and porcelain, check the following links:
European Art Glass (part one)
European Art Glass (part two)
Italian Porcelain
German Porcelain
French Porcelain
Meissen Porcelain
