On Monday 27 January 1964 Crown Lynn sponsored a pre-Olympics sports meeting at Western Springs stadium as a fundraiser for the Lynndale Club, where favourites such as Peter Snell, Murray Halberg and Marise Chamberlain trained. The meeting was a great success and raised £2000, the profits went straight back to the club.
“We were only too happy to do all we could to help” said Alan Topham, Sales Manager for Crown Lynn. “After all, the Lynndale Club caters for the young people of New Lynn, which is our home town, and our people live and work here.”

The money raised means that the Lynndale Club could complete their works and provide modern club rooms for the community “The main function of the hall, to our thinking,” club president Mervyn Dunn said, “will be to provide amenities for the young of the district, who have not, at the moment, the full facilities that they need for recreation. To say we are thrilled would be phrasing it mildly. We feel, too, that the revenue from the hall will give Lynndale the chance of sending athletes from the club overseas for experience.”

The club façade was constructed with clinker bricks produced by Crown Lynn’s parent company Amalgamated Brick & Pipe (AB&P); as well as the brick AB&P supplied cinders for their cinder track. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics also used a cinder track, which was the last time cinder tracks were officially used.

The name Lynndale is an amalgamation of ‘New Lynn’ and ‘Avondale’. The club sits on the border of these two Auckland suburbs.

The Lynndale range
In 1967 Crown Lynn released a new range of tableware called the Lynndale range. This range was ‘aimed specifically at young people’, and was advertised with the tag-line “When you get tired of it, go on outside and smash the lot – then pick up another set and keep it just as long.”

Large full colour adverts were run in the Weekly News.Sales promotion executive Barry Grant was interviewed in Crown Lynn’s in-house publication New Zealand Ceramics. Grant said that one of the main features of the new range was the variety of styles and decorations “The patterns include lithograph, underglaze print, screen print and slip-banded decorations, together with a range of accessories either decorated or in colourglaze to match the set,” he said. “By doing this we feel we have provided wholesalers with a particularly fine range of decorations.”

The first patterns in the range were
Rose Red, decorated with an overglaze lithograph featuring red roses; Sierra Pine, using the already known Pinewood decoration of pine cones on a branch, this is produced as an onglaze lithograph; Hacienda, decorated with slip banding in orange, brown and bronze and paired with brown colourglaze accessories; Stacatto, this pattern features tightly stylised X’s all over the surface, printed with the Murray Curvex machine, in bronze; and is paired with bronze colour glaze accessories; Capistrano, a stylised wheat pattern in greens and bronze, matched with bronze colourglaze accessories. The pattern is screen printed and applied as an onglaze decoration.

Rose Red and Sierra pine are imported lithographs, but the rest were designed by Crown Lynn's chief designer Dave Jenkin.

Sources
Lynndale gets £1400 from Crown Lynn athletics, Western Leader, 5 Feb 1964
New Zealand Ceramics, Five new stock patterns in range for wholesale trade, March 1967

Images all from Te Toi Uku Crown Lynn archive.