WOODY - WHAT IS NOW KNOWN
“The Sunshine Woody is the one without a backstamp . . . . .”
– absolutely correct, but equally as wrong!
A great amount of detail has come to light in the past months about the original Sunshine Woody and there are now enough facts to verify the truth. Thanks largely to the hard work and perseverance of Australian collector Kylie the real Sunshine Woody has been identified.
The true story of the Sunshine Ceramics Woody is now resolved, however another mystery is introduced!
It has generally been understood that Woodys without any markings on the base were made by Sunshine Ceramics and those made by Wade carried the backstamp “Wade England”. This has been proven to be incorrect because there is now a third Woody –
the real Sunshine version.
True, he has no backstamp (although he has been seen with an embossed letter "B" or "W"), but he is from a completely different mould and is a different shape, weight and size. The photographs to the right and below show the main differences; the most noticeable being the shape of the base and the waistband of the nappy under the nappy pin. The Sunshine Woody has a very distinct curve to the top of the nappy, whereas on the non-Sunshine pigs it is level and straight. It had always been known that Wade re-modelled the pigs when they took over production in order to remove sharper edges and features which had to be smoothed out to suit their faster production methods.
However it is now understood how significant some of the changes were.
December 2007 was the 25th anniversary of the original pigs and to mark the occasion a special Silver Anniversary limited edition set was produced by the Paul Cardew Pottery. These were made from the original moulds and it is quite obvious that the original Sunshine Woody has the same characteristics as the new Silver Anniversary limited edition pig. It is most noticeable how different the base is to the Wade model.
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Sunshine Woody |
Sunshine Silver Anniversary |
Wade Woody |
But now we have a far more difficult dilemma – who made the thousands of unmarked Woodys
which have a remarkable resemblance to the Wade Woody?
The only sensible possibility appears to be that a third pottery was involved. There was definitely a huge demand for Woody at that time and for Wade to produce the numbers initially required could have been difficult for them. It is possible that Wade sub-contracted some of the work, maybe to one of their subsidiary companies that they owned or part owned and that Wade would not permit their “Wade England” backstamp to be applied to items not produced in the Wade pottery.
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Sunshine Anniversary (L)
and Sunshine Original (R) |
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Wade (L) and
Sunshine (R) Woody |
All guesswork, but can anyone come up with a better solution,
or better still is there an ex-employee of Wade who might know
the full story? Any information would be much appreciated.
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It is believed that Sunshine Ceramics produced about 400 complete sets of the five pigs, which were pre-launched at various NatWest branches around the country and in addition they produced possibly up to 100,000 Woodys before ending production in 1983.
Paul Cardew subsequently became very well known for the famous teapots he produced at his Cardew Design pottery. 
