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The Crest of the Central Pot Spotting Authority of Great Britain and Ireland. On this page: The history of chimney pot spotting as a leisure pursuit is shrouded in mystery. It is therefore not so much a history as a mythology. This mythology is expounded at length in the Pot Spotters Handbook. It concerns the story of a lost people - namely the chimney pot spotters of the once United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Like any mythology, it cannot be considered to be factual. The historical context within which the story of the pot spotters is placed is real enough but the interplay between history and chimney pot spotting falls squarely within the realm of the myth. The myth has it that the CPSA was founded in the 1880s by James McPhail, a vicar of Kingston upon Thames. One of the main purposes of the CPSA was to resolve disputes between Victorian pot spotting societies over the worth of different types of pot. Societies developed their own rules for pot spotting competitions but when competitions between societies were organised there were often disagreements over whose rules should be adopted. One such disagreement led to the fabled Brierley Hill incident in 1880 when the Presidents of the London Metropolitan pot spotting society and the Manchester Broughton Park society met in Birmingham and blew each other's heads off with Colt Peacemaker revolvers. McPhail is reputed to have employed a young member of the Whiteknights pot spotting society in Reading called Stephen Richards to devise a standard scoring scheme to which all societies could subscribe. When completed the scheme was adopted by the CPSA and became known as the Richards Standard Scoring Scheme (RSSS). Since different manufacturers and different spotters gave different names to the same types of pot, Richards also worked on a standard nomenclature for the CPSA. His intention was not to replace regional names for pots but to have an additional set of approved names which everyone would recognise so that all parties would know what they were talking about and confusion could be minimised. This work was never finished but the CPSA approved names for many of the more common types of pot are given in the Pot Spotter's Handbook. Chimney pot spotting as a leisure pursuit is said to have been at its height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the Victorian building boom resulted in a proliferation of chimney pots of many and varied designs. While train spotting developed as pastime for the masses, chimney pot spotting provided a pleasant diversion for the well to do. The demise of pot spotting was probably caused by the First World War from which so many pot spotting society members would have failed to return. Also the London headquarters of the CPSA where records were kept is supposed to have been razed to the ground during a Zeppelin raid in 1915. The CPSA was re-established in 1998 following the appearance of some paperwork attributed to Stephen Richards in a Victorian terrace in Reading. This paperwork gives details of the Standard Scoring Scheme for chimney pot spotting which is summarised below. Summary of
the Richards Standard Scoring Scheme The Standard Scoring Scheme is based on the following guiding principles. Any pot is worth 10 points. Ten points are awarded for each Different Variety (DV) of pot on a stack. Any metal pot or attachment is a Vile Addition (VA) and counts ten minus points. Television aerials, cowls and metal gas flue terminals are major Vile Additions while lead coverings and chicken wire are minor Vile Additions, but all are treated equally. When counting television aerials it is the number of supports attached to the stack which is significant. An aerial with several attachments which are not themselves affixed directly to the stack counts as one aerial. For a Vile Addition which does not appear on a stack but is itself a hybrid of a pot and a stack, the Stack Value (SV) is not applicable (N/A) and points are only deducted if the building total is being evaluated. A pot that is only different from its neighbour because it is damaged, painted, stained, set slightly higher or lower in the mortar on the stack or because it has a Vile Addition attached to it is not considered a different variety. A pot which is the same as its neighbour in all respects except for being a couple of inches different in size, or made from a different coloured material, is considered to be a different variety. A pot with an insert is considered to be a different variety from an identical pot without one. The value of a stack can be calculated in three simple steps:
To calculate the Building Value (BV) simply add the Stack Values together. A building with a single variety of pot on one stack and a different single variety on another stack does not score bonus points for having two different varieties of pot. One of the aims of pot spotters since spotting first became popular is to identify a stack which scores a "maximum". A maximum is the best possible score that can be accommodated by a stack. To achieve a maximum, a stack must have a full complement of pots (i.e. one pot for each flue in the stack), each pot must be a different variety, and there must be no Vile Additions present. The bigger a stack is the more unlikely it is to score a maximum since the more pots there are the more likely it is that two of them will be the same. A stack with one flue is bound to score a maximum unless it has a Vile Addition. Two flue stack maxima are commonplace. For a four flue stack to score a maximum is much less common, particularly since Vile Additions in the form of television aerials now abound. A maximum on a six flue or larger stack is most unusual and therefore of course greatly sought after. Contemporary pot spotters are welcome to E-mail the CPSA. The mail adress is:
News of interesting pots is always welcome and scanned photographs can be submitted for possible inclusion on this web site as Pot Shot of the month.
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