During the final stages of Cown Lynn’s closure in 1989 many documents and materials from factory cupboards and drawers were incinerated in the kilns before the factory was demolished.  

However, thanks to the foresight of Crown Lynn employee Peter Grant a box of photographs and a reel of 16 mm footage of the Queen’s visit to the factory were saved before going up in flames. Since 1989, Peter, who after various roles at the factory became Head of Clay-processing and worked there for sixteen years, held onto this box until he and his wife Dorothy gifted it to Te Toi Uku in 2024.  

Dorothy came from Rarotonga in the 1970s to join her sister working in the factory. Dorothy is pictured in this 1974 photograph with her waist-long hair and back to the viewer. She is working in the “Semi-automatic cup department”, where cups came fast along a conveyor and the team had to quickly take the “green-ware” cups from their mould and attach the handles using brushes and ‘slip” (wet glue-like clay). If the supervisor was checking on production quotas, the girls would ask for the conveyor to go a bit slower that day! Dorothy worked at Crown Lynn for five years, during which romance blossomed between Peter and Dorothy; they married and had children.  

This treasure of images from the past is even more valuable for future generations because we are able to record Peter and Dorothy’s Crown Lynn story.  We’ve learnt so much about working in the factory at that time and Peter’s knowledge of clay processing at Crown Lynn has proven invaluable.