BISPM Search Tips and Blog

British and Irish Studio Pottery Marks

BP mark – Birkenhead or Brampton Pottery?

For several years a mystery B or BP mark has been attributed to Brampton Pottery or Presingoll Pottery, amongst others. The pots are a distinctive white stoneware decorated with brightly coloured glazes, especially dots. By tracking the marks and decoration – some of which also have a W stamp – I now believe it’s by […]

New Search Functions: Use – and * to replace unknown letters in a word

We’ve added a new search function, for searching on partial words, using – and *. A dash, or dashes, can be used to replace single letters in a word, eg, B-rry or B-r-y An asterix can be used to replace several letters in a word where you’re unsure how many there are, eg, Ba*y Although […]

Searching for Irish names that have an apostrophe

So today I discovered that I can’t search for names such as O’Gorman because the database doesn’t recognise the apostrophe. I thought it had been fixed when we discovered it was adding a ‘?’ in place of an apostrophe in the text but it seems to have broken again. I’m currently going through all the […]