Makers · Leigh-on-Sea
The woman putting the ducks back on the wall
Half the country grew up with three flying ducks over the fireplace, and most of them ended up in a skip. In a workshop on the Essex coast, Retha is making her own version, one set at a time.
Retha in her Leigh On Sea workshop.
Retha’s workshop is a treasure trove, and what it is full of, more than anything else, is love for the craft. There are ducks on every surface, cast and uncast, painted and waiting to be painted, and when she reaches past the pale unfinished ones and hands you a completed set, the first thing you notice is that it weighs almost nothing.
The ducks people remember were heavy. These are the ones that hung in front rooms and up staircases across Britain for thirty years, three mallards climbing a wall largest to smallest. However for Retha, they made no impression whatsoever. “They were just birds to me,” she says.
Ask what changed and she tells you about a client. He collected antiques, and he arrived one day terribly excited about a set he had just bought and couldn’t stop showing her photographs of it. “I couldn’t understand it at first. Why would anyone be that passionate about something hanging on a wall?” But then he told her the history behind them, and by the end she was as taken with the ducks as he was. Nothing came of it for years, though, until her partner asked the obvious question: why didn’t she make her own?
She’s unsentimental about the first attempt. Three ducks, modelled in clay, and “I was very proud of them, but they were ugly as hell.”
What worked better was buying old sets on eBay to learn from. They arrived broken, so Retha mended them, matched the colours back up by hand, and her partner noticed that if you can mend one, you can make a mould from it.
The moulds took a great many attempts, and even then the material was wrong. It was her Mother who suggested resin, and her Mother turned out to be right.
That’s why the sets Retha makes are so light. Every old one that was delivered had come apart in transit, and hers won’t. “Mine aren’t going to fall off the wall and shatter,” she says.
There are gold and chrome sets now alongside the traditional mallards, and she is, by her own account, still improving and still loving the process. “I can’t wait to get home and start a new set,” she says, and having stood in the workshop, you believe her.
See the ducks
Every set is cast and painted by hand, so no two leave the workshop the same.