The new Merrythought owners were John and Margaret Dixon, who moved from Cambridge, where Margaret had worked for, and was highly regarded by, Joshua Taylor, a small departmental store, where the Managing Director, Kenneth Taylor, was both a Rye Pottery stockist, as well as being a collector of Wally’s own studio pots. John Dixon had family connections with Hastings, so would have known Rye from his youth. He was delicate, often not well and had been a choral scholar at Kings College, so both of them already knew all about Rye and Rye Pottery. To begin with they lived in the tiny flat above the shop, but as they settled and prospered they bought a cottage in Northiam, commuted to work and used the flat as a stockroom. The use of the flat as a stockroom was an enormous bonus for Rye Pottery. The Merrythought had always had a problem with Rye Pottery stock, which was available in the winter, but unsaleable, and in short supply in the summer when visitors appeared again and trade was brisk. David Morris, who became manager at Rye Pottery in the early 1960s, persuaded the Dixons that it would be worthwhile to build up regular stocks in the winter to cover this loss of profitability. To encourage this he arranged to deliver their stock, something that the older generation had thought totally unnecessary. Sometimes there was so much stock there that it would have been almost impossible for even a mouse to spend the night in the flat.!

This was of course a great benefit to the Pottery, who always had a terrible period between Christmas and early summer, when they were only making for stock - trusting that orders would remove the stockpile - this produced a cash crisis in the Spring every single year. When Wally and Eileen told John and Margaret Dixon that they would probably have to close in the 1970s throughout the dreadful strike and powercut ridden years, which exacerbated the annual problems, the Dixons paid for unmade stock in advance to keep the pottery solvent.

Somehow, though, those in Ferry Road grudged The Merrythought the retail profit margin; an attitude that they had managed to communicate to all the pottery offshoots started by ex-employees. It seemed to the potters that all that happened after all the graft and sweat of manufacture was for the retailer to just put it on their shelves and double their money. Somehow the expense and expertise of running a retail shop was lost on them all. No allowance was ever made for capital tied up in prime retail positions, rents, wages, stock purchases and lines that didn’t sell, let alone a profit margin! The concession that the Pottery made for “this enormous favour” was to produce lines that were exclusive to The Merrythought. In particular bulk ‘Studio’ was regularly made in either bowl or vase mixed shapes, priced per dozen for a given size. These were a very mixed bag, some lovely and others very mundane, but they sold very well, so fulfilling their purpose. There were also lines made exclusively for them, such as the rather dull floral tableware pattern in Rye Yellow and Blue Green. Rye Pottery also produced special displays to fill the window from time to time with pieces not made for anyone else. An example of this was a display of one off signed pieces by Wally and Tarquin, and June Woolley for the Queen’s Visit to Rye in 1966. The junior Coles stopped these Studio lines as soon as they took over, because the standard was so uneven and uncontrollable. They were not as strapped for cash as the parents at that time, because Ceramic Consultants/ Rye Tiles had survived the appalling period in the 1970s more successfully due largely to the winning of a Design Award in 1974, with all the resultant publicity and orders. There is no doubt that without John and Margaret Dixon’s support, Rye Pottery would have ceased to exist before Biddy and Tarquin finally took over from the exhausted Wally and Eileen on Wally’s 65th birthday on 2lst January 1978.