Toby Jugs

Dick Turpin

pen and ink

When I was a child, I recall my grandmother having a small collection of Toby Jugs.  I would be allowed to carefully examine them and to me, they were a world of characters that would help me create stories around.

I have acquired my own Toby Jugs now and this is a sketch of one of them that I did this afternoon, and is of Dick Turpin, the infamous highwayman. The jug was produced in the 1930s and shows Dick with his mask pushed up against his tricorner hat and his pistol forms the jug handle.

A feature of character jugs is their handle which often shows an elaborate diversity of applied decoration. However, this is a feature which has developed over the years. The first jugs generally had plain handles, with one or two exceptions, for some of the clown jugs had multi-coloured handles, Dick Turpin had a gun for a handle and the Cellerer a bunch of keys. It was during the 1950s that the handles achieved greater creative significance when Max Henk was involved in their production. His Long John Silver had a parrot handle and for the sake authenticity does not have an eye patch, sticking to Louis Stevenson's book ' Treasure Island'.