Vintage Colclough Pink Rose Teacup And Saucer – Pale Mint Green Ground, Grey Leaves, Scalloped Gilt Rim, Bone China England 1950s

A Colclough teacup and saucer in bone china, the ground a pale mint green carried almost to the rim. Pink roses and buds run across both pieces on stems of grey rather than green leaves. Cup and saucer are moulded in soft wide flutes with a scalloped, gilded edge, and the inside of the cup is left white.

The leaves are the thing to look at. Almost every rose pattern of the period puts green foliage behind the flower; here the leaves are drawn in grey, and the pink comes forward because of it. Set this beside a green-leaved rose cup and the difference is immediate — it is the one decision that dates the pattern to the fifties.

The roses are a full-colour print rather than an outline filled in by hand: hold a leaf to the light and the fine dot screen shows. The mint ground went on before them and stops inside the gilded edge, so the scallops read clean. Gold came last, along the rim and down the handle.

The nineteen-fifties, near enough. The mark is Colclough in red script over Bone China · Made in England, with a small D1 beside it and a pattern number written in by hand. The firm was absorbed into Booths & Colcloughs in 1948 and bought by the Lawley group in 1953, so a mark still reading simply Colclough sits in that stretch.

Colclough of Longton, founded in 1897 and once billed as the largest maker of bone china teaware in Britain. That is why its cups turn up at all — and why one still paired with its own saucer, on a coloured ground rather than white, is the harder half. Pour into it and the roses sit at the rim, where whoever you hand it to is looking.