This year a 16in tall gently- tapering porcelain vase with narrow neck and blue glazing made pounds 748 Prices are generally around pounds

This year, a 16in tall gently- tapering porcelain vase with narrow neck and blue glazing, made pounds 748 Prices are generally around pounds 300.4 Rupert Spira, 38 Championed, while still unknown, by Frankel. Throws large stone-ware bowls, jars and plates in bold colours. Price range: pounds 100-pounds 500.The Janet Leach Collection, Wednesday 16 September (11am) Shoji Hamada, Master Potter, exhibition until 17 September Bonhams, Montpelier Street, London SW7 (0171-393 3900).. Rie met her at an exhibition of her work at the Gillian Jason gallery in London 10 years ago, and recommended her to Frankel. In the first of Frankel’s Bonhams sales 10 years ago, a 16in wide vessel of hers fetched pounds 374 Last year, a smaller one fetched pounds 690.2 Christine Jones, 42. Rie told Frankel: “Look at this girl’s beautiful forms.” The prices she got in the same inaugural sale, 10 years ago, were double what she had expected; a 15in diameter bowl made pounds 286. This year, a tapering 22in high blue vase with characteristic pitted surface made pounds 690.3 Abdo Nagi, 57.

But the number of specialist contemporary ceramics galleries in this country are still few.Whereas in Japan, pottery is considered a higher artform than painting, in this country even the Tate Gallery disdains it. However, both Japanese and American collectors have taken to buying at auction here. Prices are still low compared with the paintings market, though a Rie masterwork that cost pounds 6,000 10 years ago would probably sell for double that price nowadays.Here are four potters adopted by Frankel whose work has found favour with the friends of Lucie Rie and whose prices are rising Work by all except Nagi is in the Sainsbury Collection.1 Gabriele Koch German, aged 49. Young artists are traditionally promoted by galleries rather than by auctioneers, who lack the time and money to nurture them.A gallery that signs up potters, was launched in London this year by Tatjana Marsden, a former director of CAA. It remained in her studio for over 50 years, until Dame Lucie’s death in 1995. She willed it to Leach’s widow, Janet, who, bedridden in St Ives prior to her death last year, kept it at the foot of her bed and often gazed at it.The entire Janet Leach collection is on offer in the sale – 544 lots of Japanese pots, paintings and textiles, plus signed and annotated first editions of her husband’s books on the secrets of Japanese pottery.There are 34 lots of ceramics by Shoji Hamada, who helped Bernard Leach set up his pottery in St Ives in 1920. Bernard Leach, the father of British studio pottery, shipped it from Japan to London in 1943, where it had a brief but precarious existence during redecoration in the home of a friend in Hammersmith.
Leach wrote to his co-worker of future renown, Lucie Rie, begging her to rescue it.

Only four are known, including one in the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. But inquirers at Bonhams are being quoted a more conservative pounds 250,000

It has passed from master potter to master potter. It also means that unlike the Halifax, where interest on the loan is calculated annually, every monthly (or even weekly) payment made on on a First Direct mortgage will cut the size of your loan. It owes its place at the top table to the way in which thousands of new customers have been flocking to First Direct, its telephone banking subsidiary.At First Direct you can not only pick up a variable rate mortgage of 8.49 per cent, almost 0.5 per cent cheaper than the Halifax, but interest on the loan is calculated daily.This means not just a saving of about pounds 25 a month on a typical pounds 60,000 mortgage. We were told MIGs were essential to the smooth running of mortgage lenders’ business.

Today, virtually no lender charges a MIG on loans up to 90 per cent of a home’s value.. Could this be Britain’s first million-dollar pot? It is an 18in tall Japanese Imperial full-moon jar of the Choson Dynasty (17th-18th centuries) and is up for auction at Bonhams next Wednesday. Moreover, its current annual variable rate is even lower, at 8.19 per cent.The lesson, it seems to me, is that lenders wanting to attract new business need to move to fairer and more transparent forms of charging, such as those operated by First Direct, and Direct Line.Lenders will no doubt argue it is not possible to switch charging structures in this way. But then they claimed the same about mortgage indemnity guarantees (MIGs), which cost us up to pounds 1,500 each a year ago on top of a 95 per cent loan. In effect, your mortgage can be paid months, or years in advance of the normal 25- year period, saving thousands of pounds in interest payments.The picture is exactly the same at Direct Line in terms of daily interest calculations.

The lesson here is that if you undercut the opposition, while gaining sympathetic news coverage for your pro-mutual stance, you will do well. Simple.Northern Rock’s success is also due to keen pricing, particularly in the fixed and discounted market. This former building society has adopted another strategy, more recently copied by the Alliance & Leicester, that of targeting punters who want to peg their rates at the lowest price for at least two or three years The Rock’s success comes at a price though. It will be paid by borrowers tied in to expensive redemption penalties if they want to offload their mortgages and move elsewhere.It is perhaps the last two lenders named by Datamonitor – Midland and Direct Line – that are the most interesting, and by their success they offer a taste of the way forward for mortgage lending.Midland’s success is less to do with its own lending strategy, where the bank has hardly ranked among the most competitive. MORTGAGE LENDERS prepared to compete for new customers by consistently offering the best home loan deals on the market are among those who are attracting the most new business. This rather unstartling conclusion comes from a new survey by Datamonitor, the financial researchers, of the UK’s biggest lenders and their relative success in winning borrowers.
Datamonitor singles out Midland Bank, Northern Rock, Nationwide Building Society and Direct Line, the telephone-based financial subsidiary of Royal Bank of Scotland, as being among the biggest winners in 1997.Among the “losers”, relative to their existing market share, were Halifax, Abbey National, Alliance & Leicester and Woolwich, all former building societies.Datamonitor’s research points to some interesting conclusions. For instance, Nationwide’s ability to outpunch its normal market share and attract massive new numbers of borrowers is hardly surprising.