My father, Martin Pulver, who has died after suffering a stroke aged 82, was an inveterate lover of jokes, one-liners and funny stories; so much so that on some level he may have missed his calling as a Borscht Belt stand-up comedian.
SJ Perelman, James Thurber and Leo Rosten’s Hyman Kaplan were his favourites, but he didn’t discriminate on cultural grounds: Tony Hancock, Harry H Corbett, Dave Allen and PG Wodehouse all received due acclaim. But it wasn’t just jokes: his stories about his time in the RAF on national service – in which he invariably came off foolish or cowardly or both – were the source of amusement all through my childhood; it was with some surprise I later realised he had been stationed (after the war) as a radar operator at Bomber Command at RAF Bentley Priory.
He was an only child born in Hackney, north-east London, where he spent his early years in a small house backing on to the canal on the edge of Victoria Park, before the family moved to Cricklewood. He was educated at Kilburn grammar school, and won a place at King’s College London to study German, with a plan to become a lawyer.
Unfortunately, his father, Alf, died in 1953, and all thoughts of a university career had to go out of the window. He went to work to support his mother, Marie, and occupied a succession of jobs, one of which involved selling industrial materials in the USSR in the mid-1960s. (After his death I found a surreal, Kafkaesque report he had typed up for his boss, outlining the machinations of the various Soviet agencies he had to deal with.) Dad ended up joining his father-in-law’s family business, a menswear retailer in Marylebone, which evolved into a sports shop, and he stayed there until it closed in the early 90s.
But this was only a part of his story. Denied the academic education he dreamed of, he found an unlikely niche in the world of 18th- and 19th-century ceramics; what started out as hobby became a serious field of scholarship, and he became a well-known authority on British pottery. At different times he was chairman of the Spode Society, and founding member of the Friends of Blue, gave papers to the English Ceramic Circle, co-presented a radio show (with my mother, Rosalind) about antiques on LBC, and was a frequent lecturer on the Nadfas (National Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies) circuit. It was an amazing achievement and one about which he was incredibly modest.
He finally realised his ambition to earn a degree after he retired, graduating in history at Birkbeck, University of London.
He met Rosalind Collins at a Christmas Eve party in 1960, and they were married a year later, settling first in Kingsbury, then in Hendon, where they spent the bulk of their married life. He is survived by her, myself and my sister, Liz, and five grandchildren, Edward, Katie, Ellen, Lucy and Zoe.
