Coombe was set up by Paul & Tina Riley, Paul is a master watercolourist, both of his parents were professional painters. Tina, originally from Czechoslovakia, met Paul at art school. Tina is a jewellery designer and former fashion designer, her grandfather Milos Jiranek was a friend of Auguste Rodin (the B&W photo is Milos Jiranek and Rodin walking together) and an exceptional painter who’s work hangs in the National Gallery in Prague.

Pottery and ceramics have always played a part in Coombe’s history. Over the years we have run residential classes, evening classes, a Saturday kids club and the Coombe Futures Prize, supporting graduates from Plymouth College of Arts. Coombe Director Lara Lloyd first started making pots as a kid growing up at Coombe and went on to study it A Level, at a time when there was a thriving ceramics department at the local secondary school in Totnes. She went on to live in Vietnam working in village potteries. There is also a rich local pottery history beyond Coombe, notably at The Dartington Hall Trust from the early 1920s, when they first started consulting with Bernard Leach about the Dartington pottery, the pottery was then set up by Jane Fox-Strangways and in the years that followed Leach and many other notable potters came to the area, including Marianne De Trey (who went on to run the Dartington pottery) and the two great Japanese potters, Yanagi Sōetsu and Shōji Hamada. Many professional potters continue to live and work in the area, including our residential tutors Laurel Keeley and Tim Andrews, Richenda Macgregor set up the busy Potting Shed nearby and then went on to bring potters back to Dartington working together with Mel Chambers to set up an run Studio 45, which significantly supported 100s of potters in the area thorough weekly classes, specialist workshops and a members programme. We are lucky and hugely thankful to be able to build on all these histories and to incorporate their learning into Ceramics at Coombe.

Our beautiful Little John press was bought when we first opened in the 80s with a generous donation from Jaroslav Cisař. Jaroslav was Lara’s great grandfather, known to her as “Batuska”.

Batuska was a Czech astronomer, translator, journalist and diplomat. During the First World War he was active in foreign resistance and from 1918 to 1919 he worked as the personal secretary of Tomáš Masaryk. Masaryk was a Czech politician, statesman, sociologist, and philosopher who, as World War I ended in 1918 was responsible for co-founding Czechoslovakia and served as its first president. Following the establishment of the Czechoslovakia, my great grandfather worked for the Czechoslovak embassy in London before returning to his homeland in 1927 to work as the Director of the newspaper Lidové noviny “The People’s Newspaper”. After the German occupation, Batuska fled Prague and worked in London for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs until the political situation changed again in 1948. At that time he was released from the Ministry and started a new life employed as an astronomer at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Batuska finally returned to his homeland in 1980. As we pay attention to issues of migration, borders and the spread of information and mis-information by the Press, the time feels right to open up our Printworkshop and Batuska’s press for the wider to community to use and to create beautiful prints to uplift and inspire. "Do not look at stars as bright spots only. Try to take in the vastness of the universe." - Maria Mitchell, Astronomer