Meet the couple who collected teapots and are now selling all 8,000

Meet the couple who went tea-potty collecting a vast army of novelty teapots… and are now selling all 8,000

Over the years, I’ve seen a fair few collections — everything from budgerigars to lovingly refurbished teddy bears; ferrets to Romanian Military uniforms — and met many a collector.

All share a visceral need to gather and protect — particularly former strong man Geoff Capes with his teeny budgies — and a great love and pride in their work.

But none, I feel, can touch Sue and Keith Blazye when it comes to unswerving dedication and passion for their vast army of novelty teapots.

‘They’re our world. They’re everything,’ says Keith, 69, of Yalding in Kent. ‘We’ve been collecting them for 40 years and I can’t imagine life without them.’

‘Some people call us Mr and Mrs Teapot!’ chips in Sue, 73. ‘They’ve become part of our identity.’

Sue and Keith Blazye (pictured) have 8,450 teapots, plus around another thousand duplicates in the loft, in their home in Yalding, Kent

‘They’re our world. They’re everything,’ says Keith, 69, who has more than 8,000 teapots 

Hardly surprising. For starters, they live on Teapot Island — which isn’t quite an island but, instead, a bit of land jutting into the river Medway — which hosts the ‘world’s best’ teapot museum and teashop.

Keith and their son Luke, 42, wear crisply ironed polo shirts embroidered with teapots. They even have a teapot car number plate — T84 POT — bought at auction.

‘It worked really well, with a couple of carefully placed screws in the ‘8’ [to make it look more like an ‘E’] — or it did until the police objected,’ says Keith.

And, naturally, they are surrounded by teapots. On every wall, shelf, table, counter.

Teapots shaped like squirrels, toads, lemons, spaceships, Horatio Nelson, Saddam Hussein, the Rovers’ Return and Mark Twain.

There’s one each of Blair, Brown and William Hague — though I can see none of Boris, Truss or Rishi. Some are flowers, others are snakes. With quite a few, it’s hard to see where the water goes in and the tea comes out. Far less, where you’d hold them, but they are all teapots.

The official tally is currently 8,450, plus another thousand or so duplicates in the loft, and a couple of really special ones kept back from public view — ‘We’ve only had them six months, so we’re not ready to display them yet,’ explains Sue.

‘It was our life’s ambition to run a teapot museum,’ says Keith. ‘We’ve been open since 2003 and we’re very proud.’

Quite right too, so what a crying shame that, with no one to take over the business — Luke was hoping to, but his wife is unwell after a nasty fall down the stairs a couple of years ago — they now need to sell up and everything must go. Not just their four-bedroom home, valued at £950,000, but the adjoining tea rooms, professional catering kitchen, shop and museum.

Jane Fryer (pictured) visits Teapot Island in Kent and takes photos with the pots 

The extensive grounds (also thrown in) are dominated by a giant six-foot teapot they transported on a flat-bed lorry from Germany — ‘That was quite an adventure,’ says Sue.

And, if they can find someone they like, trust, and has a spare £250,000, the entire teapot collection will be included, too.

Really — all the teapots — are they sure? The teapot modelled on an actual Chelsea Pensioner? Winston Churchill with a cigar for a spout? Charlie Chaplin. Princess Diana. The first Moon landing?

Sue goes rather quiet, but Keith says, firmly: ‘Yes, we need to get our lives back. We work here seven days a week. It’s too much for us. We need to live. We want a nice manageable bungalow and time to go off in our mobile home.’

READ MORE: Brew-tea-ful! Teapot fanatics put their whacky £250,000 collection of 8,500 pots up for sale – and they include quirky designs of Diana and Churchill

He has a point. For as long as they can remember, they’ve been making teas, taking lunch orders, manning the museum shop, taking the £2.50 entrance fee. And answering endless questions about teapots.

‘Which is our favourite? Do we drink much tea? What teabags do we use? Do they all have spouts? How did it all start?’ says Sue. ‘I should have done a little sheet with all the answers.’

To answer one of the above, the Blazyes’ teapot odyssey started in 1983, when Sue and Keith were newly married and running a car-repair and servicing garage in Sidcup, and her granny and aunt gave them a couple of attractive blue tea pots to perk up their sitting room cabinet.

A year later, Sue bought her first novelty pot, a Cardew Royal Albert, and something must have clicked. From that moment on, and despite never having collected anything before, they both became obsessed with novelty teapots.

Soon, their home in Sidcup was awash with them. In the kitchen, bathroom, hallway and sitting room, display shelves lined the walls. The loft was piled high with them. More than 3,500, leaving little Luke jostling for space.

Their spare time became dominated by everything ‘teapot’. There were trips to Teapot collector conventions in Stoke-on-Trent (the epicentre of all things teapot): ‘hundreds of us — we’d take over entire hotels!’

Also, brutal bidding wars on eBay and dawn raids on auctions and antique markets. ‘You have to have sharp elbows. You have to be ruthless, and we were!’ says Sue with a grin.

Because while Teapot Times (a monthly magazine) is sadly no longer in print, and the number of dedicated manufacturers has shrunk from dozens to about three, and teapots are no longer the eighth most popular item to collect, they are still very popular.

The teapots have unique and quirky designs, and are all different shapes and sizes 

So there’s an extremely active global community. And enthusiasts exchange tips, information and advice on how to secure rare pots and attend collector days where they are allowed to hold other people’s pots.

‘It’s an incredibly friendly world and we’ve got friends in virtually every country who are teapot collectors,’ says Sue.

They are not, however, on good terms with the Chinese township which swiped their Guinness World Record for most teapots, back in 2011.

Apparently, they’ve got more than 33,000, but while we have one in each shape and know every one of our pots and who made it, they have the same shape in a hundred colours. Which is not in the spirit of it, at all,’ says Sue.

‘It was gutting to lose it,’ adds Keith. ‘We’d worked really, really hard to get it. Always searching.’

Even on holiday, they were on red alert, bringing back new models in their suitcases, swaddled in clothes.

They opened their extraordinary museum in 2003. It has been a massive success, with up to 20,000 visitors a year — yes, really. Some are local regulars (a chap called Fraser who tells me table 8 in the café has the best teapots on display around it), others arrive in coach trips. And not all are women.

‘We have loads of men come in here thinking, ‘What would be more boring than teapots?’ and they come out saying. ‘I’ve had such a good time I can’t believe it!’ Keith assures me.

King Charles is seen admiring a royal teapot in 2014 with Keith, who owns Teapot Island 

Many come from farther afield. ‘Just last week we had visitors from Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand’ says Luke.

‘This week we had a Hungarian pop star — he’s going to be big, he’s just done a duet with Sting — who told us he was going to talk to the Hungarian president about buying the lot,’ says Sue.

There has also been a smattering of celebrity visitors — all proudly catalogued by Keith in a laminated folder. The Chase presenter Bradley Walsh. The late TV comic Victoria Wood — ‘It was for a TV show on tea, but sadly we got cut out’. The actor Timothy Spall, whose brother is apparently a big teapot collector.

Luke is still smarting, though, that TV presenter Denise van Outen has not been. ‘She’s local and I know she collects teapots — I can’t understand why she hasn’t been.’

But forget Denise. Because back in 2013, when floods devastated the area and too many of the Blayzes’ precious teapots were left broken and bobbing in the murky water, Charles and Camilla were here — for over an hour.

‘They loved it! She bought a camel teapot, because it’s like her name,’ says Sue, who had thoughtfully moved the Diana pot out of view. ‘And they were very giggly as they went round. They laughed and laughed. Particularly over some of the ruder pots.’

These include a glossy Buddha sporting an erection. A pole dancer with her legs in the air. And three Kama Sutra teapots displayed, for some reason, right next to two of Bill Clinton.

There was, though, one visitor who still makes them angry. The author of ‘C**p Days Out’, who was not kind about Teapot Island in his 2016 write-up.

‘It was all lies,’ says Keith. ‘Our customers were very upset.’

‘He didn’t even come in and see the teapots, just stood at the fence!’ says Sue.

They can just about laugh it off now. But at the time, it hurt.

Because they love their teapots, very deeply. And why not?

‘We don’t smoke. We don’t drink. It’s our hobby so, if we’ve got the money, we buy it,’ says Keith.

Not because of the aesthetics, or design ingenuity: the way a spout integrates and lifts the heart, or how a market stall or a dormouse can be turned into a teapot. ‘I only want it because I haven’t got it,’ says Sue. ‘Of course it’s an addiction! But now it’s quite sad because we’ve got pretty much all of them, it’s harder to find new ones.’

So there we go — a complete teapot collection. Second biggest in the world, available for sale for a quarter of a million pounds.

Someone, somewhere, must want it. But will they really be happy to see all of them go, even to the president of Hungary?

‘Well . . . maybe we’ll keep back 100,’ says Keith.

‘Or 500?’ says Sue. ‘Or perhaps we could not sell them at all and just lease them to the new owner?’

‘Or keep them all and buy a bit of land with a big barn and display them all in that?’ says Keith.

Suddenly, they both look a lot cheerier.

I know I’d bet my own teapot — plain, grey pottery, in case you’re interested — on them never parting with a single one.

But, for now, Sue is sensibly doing all she can to distract herself from the possibility — with a very fast-growing collection of tea towels.

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