‘Come to Lawley's and Meet Miss Clarice Cliff,' the Daily Mail announced in June 1930. ‘To enable our many friends to see this female pottery artist,’ the advertisement continued, ‘we have arranged a special Pottery Painting Demonstration.’

A grainy black and white photograph shows Clarice Cliff examining the pattern on an ‘Inspiration’ vase. She is dressed in a white technician’s coat, with a dark skull cap pulled low on to her forehead. This was the ‘brilliant young girl artist’ who had come to the attention of the press two years earlier with a design of tableware whose patterns and colouring were as startling as their name. Each piece of ‘Bizarre’ was stamped with Clarice Cliff’s signature and found immediate favour with women who responded to the modern spirit of her work. Clarice Cliff’s work was different, at a time when women hoped their lives would be different too. Early sales of ‘Bizarre’ coincided with the achievement of universal female suffrage; Clarice Cliff spoke to the possibilities of that moment. ‘Colour combined with novel decorative designs made an instant appeal to the middle-class housewife,’ the Daily Sketch reported; Woman’s Life was all the more insistent: ‘Women simply clamoured for this new pottery.’

Now, the London branch of Lawley’s department store in Regent Street was opening its doors to a demonstration of the tableware responsible for Clarice Cliff’s success. From Monday to Saturday, ten-thirty am to five-thirty pm, members of the public watched Clarice Cliff and her young paintresses demonstrate the various stages of hand-decoration: saw enamel wisps of smoke rise from cottage chimneys, watched everlasting flowers bloom in tangerine and coral paint. Though not the first of Clarice Cliff's public demon­strations, the week at Lawley’s was significant. By now, her name was sufficiently well known that an invitation to meet her drew the public, while the central location of the London store attracted the national press. Noting that the event was ‘visited by a number of connoisseurs’, the Daily Telegraph observed that ‘its results certainly go far in ... enlivening the aspect of the modern table,’ but it was the Daily Mirror’s more emotional response which captured a major element of Clarice Cliff’s press appeal when she was introduced as ‘one of the romances of the pottery trade’. Here was a woman who ‘only a few years ago’ had been ‘a humble little gilder in a china factory’. Now ­she was a newsworthy designer. ‘No movie star can tell a more romantic story of “How I Was Discovered”.