Arthur Berry (7 February 1925 – 4 July 1994) was an English playwright, poet, teacher and artist, who was born in Smallthorne, Stoke-on-Trent. His individual creative work became deeply rooted in the culture, people and landscape of the industrial pottery town of Burslem.
Life
Berry was the son of a publican and grew up in the potteries city of Stoke-on-Trent during the Depression. He was born with a crippled arm; as he could not work as a miner or manual labourer, Berry was enrolled at the Burslem School of Art in the city. Despite a rebellious start there, he came under the care of Gordon Mitchell Forsyth (1879–1952), director of art education and a successful pottery designer.
Studies at Royal College of Art Berry gained a place at the Royal College of Art, as did a number of the more talented Burslem students.Andrew Casey, Elegance with Utility, The work of Susie Cooper (1902-1995) During his time at the Royal College the institution was evacuated from Kensington to Ambleside in the Lake District, to escape the German bombing of London during the Second World War.Leslie Duxbury (2008), Bohemians in Exile: The Royal College of Art in Ambleside, 1940-1945. "Bohemians in Exile" was also the title of a 2011 exhibition at the Armitt Museum.
Berry, who suffered from agoraphobia, did not find the rural surroundings of Ambleside particularly to his taste. However, he appreciated the intense autumn colours which are characteristic of the locality. He spent the last year of the course in London.
Teaching career After the war, Berry became an art teacher. He worked in London and Manchester, but as a teacher, he is best known for his long association with Burslem School of Art, where he had studied. Burslem School of Art was absorbed within Stoke-on-Trent College of Art, which in turn became part of North Staffordshire Polytechnic in 1971. Berry was a lecturer in painting at the Polytechnic until 1985. Berry's second wife, Cynthia, was one of his students. They married in 1966 and lived at Wolstanton, Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Writing Berry's first stage play was performed in 1976. His 1979 work Lament for the Lost Pubs of Burslem was awarded the Sony/Pye Award for the best radio monologue of 1979. It was also printed as a text in The Listener magazine (Christmas edition, 20–27 December 1979) and it starts with the lines:
"I sat down and wept when I remembered the lost pubs of Burslem, the demolished Star that stood where the Moonglow Ballroom stands now, on the corner of the street of the Preacher and the Tote office; it was a gaunt, dark building nicknamed the Star of Bethlehem, a grimey stuccoed star the colour of years of wet smoke. From outside it looked forbidding and empty, lit only by one or two naked electric light bulbs; its doors were difficult to find, its main door on the corner of the Square had been screwed down for some reason and on the inside covered with a piece of painted plywood. Only the side-doors would let you in and these were narrow and difficult to open. One was in Queen's Street and the other in William Clowes Street, opposite the Dolphin... for all its dreary appearance, the Star was the highest drinking temple in the town; nothing has been the same since it was knocked down. No pub has been more lamented."
Berry wrote an autobiography titled A Three and Sevenpence Halfpenny Man.
His other works include Dandelions (a volume of poems), and The Little Gold-Mine, a collection of stories about Potteries' life.
In 2018 a collection of unpublished poems by Arthur Berry were discovered in papers in the estate inside an envelope postdated 1972. All were typed and named. With the help of Barewall Art Gallery which works closely with the estate of Arthur Berry, a slim book of poetry by Arthur called On the Street was published.
Berry's paintings His paintings are held in numerous private and public collections. Berry has been referred to as 'the Lowry of the Potteries', being so described in the title of a 2007 exhibition of his work. The comparison was discussed in two related letters to The Sentinel:
Arthur Berry... was a good teacher and focus for art activity at the Burslem & Stoke Art School. I do not agree that he is for many the finest 20th century artist from Stoke - there are other candidates also. Mr Berry's work lies somewhere between painting and drawing - for me paint and its properties hold most attraction. Mr Berry's talent was spread over several areas - drawing, painting, writing, plays, poems and teaching. I do not think I am good enough myself to do several things well, so concentrate on one (painting). Mr Berry said he admired Lowry and once encountered him in a Manchester Gallery - said he was built and made for a particular task - as an artist recording the vanishing industrial scene of Manchester....Mr Berry was, I feel, a humorist whose interest was the people of the old working class of Stoke - a type of person who no longer exists. I mostly liked his landscapes. They seemed to convey that strange Stoke light which appeals to me and the old buildings and streets which were very much part of my own childhood and youth.Berry Helped me Value my Roots, letter, The Sentinel, 21 February 2007
The Arthur Berry exhibition of work at Ford Green Hall...is compact but conveys the flavour of what the local writer and poet was all about. There is an earthiness and a vitality about much of his work and though abstract painting is not everyone's cup of tea, there is a power about Berry's that is probably best conveyed if you look at the pieces collectively. The Sentinel's article called him the Lowry of the Potteries, though in my opinion, the paintings of Biddulph Moor-born C W Brown, sometimes known as "The Potteries' Primitive", stand comparison. Berry was a fan of Brown, incidentally.Exhibitions well worth a Visit, letter, The Sentinel, 10 March 2007
From July 2015 to January 2016 a major show titled Lowry and Berry: Observers of Urban Life, displaying works dating from the 1960s to 1994, was held at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent.
From October 16 2025 to January 19 2026 there was an exhibition at Keele University called "Canals, Kilns and Characters" featuring the work of Arthur Berry and, fellow Burslem resident, Maurice Wade.
Stoke-on-Trent life Berry recalls the artistic inspiration he obtained from... "the streets of my early childhood, the moorland landscape, pit villages, public houses, chip shops, night town and later avenue life."Arthur Berry, Dandelions: poems, 1993 Lamenting change, he bemoans that, "the old wooden mangle rollers were replaced by rubber wringers, the iron range grate by little fancy tiled affairs, the elegant, slim paper packets of five Woodbines disappeared..." He felt he had been born into a tightly cohesive society, but "the values that had held the working class together began to slowly be eroded." He loved a world that was filled with, "a line of shunted coal waggons...wreaths of steam and a smell of gas...youths playing cards at the back of the old knackers yard...old men cough in the betting shops and huge fat women queue in the Co-op...the chain row and pit-head gear." This was a "place of empty chapels and aborted kilns", "the window cleaner with wild eyes and a mania for gambling", or indeed "an effeminate man who wears a ginger wig...muttering to himself all day, he pushes an old pram with a bird cage in it." Touchingly, he noticed the habits of the people: "at weekends when you are flush and filled with drink or the prospect of drink", and when one might feel "as dry as a lime-burner's clog." He loved "the sunken bricks of his garden path." and even a visit to the gents could become an inspiring revelation: "as I stand piddling in the crazed urinal stall I can see the red and green tail lights of some night plane moving across this area of infinite velvet over the darkened hoop of the world."
Berry's love of north Staffordshire was deep and permanent; he indulged in an incurable addiction to the place. He "had an inexplicable attraction to the place and...was attached to the area by "an invisible umbilical cord", which could never be cut."Jonathan Pimm, "Thinker of the Working Class: Arthur Berry" Obituary, Evening Sentinel, Stoke-on-Trent, 6 July 1994, p.12 He said of his childhood "every house seemed to have an old woman, a drunken man, a gang of kids and a snarling dog." Certainly then he was, "a thinker of the working class who developed a love of middle class pursuits." He said he had "always worked out of one world, the working class world of which I am part", while declaring, "I am a man of habit and pattern." He "became a cult figure following many television appearances in the Midlands." His attachment to the place was a legend. For example, "when he obtained work as a teacher in Chelsea College of Art he commuted every day and night from Biddulph Moor."Arthur Berry Obituary, Biddulph Chronicle, 15 July 1994, p.1 And indeed "propping up the bar at his local public house...is where he felt most comfortable."Arthur Berry Obituary, The Times, 8 July 1994 Yet it was during the 1950s that the, "crushing black agoraphobia descended on him, virtually imprisoning him in North Staffordshire for the rest of his life."Peter Cheeseman, Rich Dark Portraits of Pits and Potteries, Arthur Berry Obituary, The Guardian, 7 July 1994 But as a man, poet, playwright and artist he came into his own. Peter Cheeseman (Director, for thirty-five years, of the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent and, latterly, the New Victoria Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme), recalls the many animated conversations they had enjoyed, and "the swift gestures of his good left arm, banging at the elbow of his useless right...and the rich talk that pours out of him." He was "eloquent in every way...a vigorous and expressive poet...a writer of stories, a dramatist...grotesquely hilarious...[and] an inspiring teacher of art, loved and admired by his students." He was "a large, ungainly and glum man, tall and remote, cloth cap sitting permanently over his expressionless face." He seemed to have something of a love-hate relationship with his art, for "he once sent a groaning van-load off to Stoke tip: a great weight lifted off me." He was really "a painter and poet of the cluttered and dying landscape of pits and ironworks...he writes of that world with unexpected imagery and a great roaring sense of humour, sometimes wry, often grotesque." As a painter, he strained "to paint a world he loved passionately for its vigour and its energy and its richness before the bulldozer scraped it away." He felt his paintings to be "the most eloquent utterances, portraits of a world seen from the bottom of my rut." This was indeed "a world filled with images of people and landscape that have been twisted and worn into strange shapes by hard work and poverty. My Parthenon is an allotment hut knocked together out of bits of rubbish. It is the richness of poor things that I am drawn to." As he told Peter Cheeseman, "everything I have ever drawn, every house, every man, every face has its roots in those few streets [of Smallthorne] All the things I have written, or hope to write, I am sure will have the same roots."