Sister Mary Barbara Bailey

Creator of the original 'Bunnykins' nursery china

Barbara Vernon Bailey, artist, teacher and nun: born Woore, Shropshire 28 June 1910; professed a Canoness Regular of the Lateran (Augustinian) Order 1933, taking the name Sister Mary Barbara; died Haywards Heath, West Sussex 4 May 2003.

"It's high time I went 'upstairs'," Sister Mary Barbara used to joke as she moved into a ripe old age. She was confined to the convent infirmary and a wheelchair but she remained in her nineties youthful, witty and distinctly mischievous – as resilient as the "Bunnykins" range she had created for Royal Doulton nearly seven decades ago.

Things had changed since the late 1920s, when Barbara Bailey, aged 19, first entered religious life at her old school, the Priory, Haywards Heath, in Sussex. Visits then were rationed and controlled, and visitors spoke to the nuns through a close grille, specifically designed to prevent either party from looking the other full in the face.

No wonder Cuthbert Bailey, general manager of Royal Doulton's factory at Burslem, in Stoke-on-Trent, and not at that time a Roman Catholic, used to sit speechless when he went to see the second of his seven children. "He said nothing," Sister Barbara remembered. "Nothing at all."

Perhaps it was a desire that the convent should not entirely possess his daughter that led Bailey in 1934 to ask her a favour. Royal Doulton was keen to bring out a new line in nursery china, and Cuthbert Bailey invited Barbara to design what was to become the Bunnykins range. He had recognised in her, since she was a child, a talent for drawing. "It was just a little talent," she explained, "so he wouldn't allow me to have lessons or anything like that. He always said, 'If you try to teach a little talent, you snuff it out. If you leave it alone, it will grow.' "

He also knew that she had a particular sympathy for small children – one that was to remain with her for the rest of her life. She believed that one of the most beautiful things in the world was "the sight of a baby, still too young to speak, squirming with pleasure when he sees someone that he loves"; and it was she who insisted, remembering her younger siblings struggling with their porridge, that there should be a picture at the bottom of each Bunnykins bowl, a little reward for children who eat up well.

Finally she loved animals, and most especially rabbits: "I did, and I do!" she told me. "I watch them still from my bedroom window in the early morning."

There was little time available to her for private work: until the early 1970s the nuns ran a school – after the Priory at Haywards Heath was compulsorily purchased, they moved in 1978 to their present site at the Priory of Our Lady, Sayers Common – and, at the same time as observing the rigorous disciplines of monastic life, Sister Barbara was giving six history lessons a day (she is remembered by her pupils as an inspirational teacher, also offering history of art, fine art and Russian) and working her way through piles of marking every evening.

Her Reverend Mother, moreover, was discouraging about the Doulton venture, and demanded that Sister Barbara work at it in secret, and tell nobody about it. So she drew and painted very late at night, by candlelight – for the convent in those days had no electricity – alone in her cell.

The clear, crisp-lined watercolours she sent home to her father were full of wit and minute observation and, one can't help feeling, homesickness for the cosiness and hurly-burly of family life in Shropshire. She painted rabbits cooking, picnicking, fishing, dancing in the moonlight, playing golf, riding on dodgems, kissing under the mistletoe. The father rabbits, bespectacled and pipe-smoking, were often based on her own father: one particularly delightful design for a breakfast mug shows a large rabbit hauling on his braces in the morning just as she had watched Cuthbert Bailey do. The mothers she dressed in blue, "in honour of Our Lady".

Reverend Mother was unimpressed. With some lack of foresight, she insisted that the convent should not receive a penny in royalties from Doulton. But, outside the convent, the Bunnykins range was an instant, runaway success. Hot from the kiln, new designs were delivered straight to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret at Buckingham Palace, and Bunnykins china was soon on practically every nursery breakfast and tea table, not only in Britain but as far away as Australia and Japan.

Sister Barbara was under constant pressure to produce new paintings: "Couldn't I try some ducks?" she asked Doulton, when Bunnykins had been running for several years. No, the answer came back: what the children wanted were more rabbits.

By 1939 and the outbreak of the Second World War, with 66 designs in production, she felt she had done enough. But, under a succession of other artists and illustrators, Bunnykins china is still being made to this day: the only Royal Doulton range to have endured so long, although, with the closure last December of Doulton's Beswick factory in Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, production has now moved to China.

The original pieces, signed "Barbara Vernon" (her middle name: Cuthbert Bailey, who had succeeded his father, John Cuthbert, as general manager at Burslem, wanted the Bailey name kept out of the project), have become collectors' items, keenly sought by an international fraternity of Bunnykins fans, who exchange news of recent bids and offers in a regular newsletter, Cottontales. One American fan, on the occasion Sister Barbara and I met, was pressing for permission to produce a Sister Barbara Toby jug.

Her community shielded her from such excesses. But, protective of her privacy, they were also proud of her achievement. As four o'clock struck on the infirmary clock, a group of nuns appeared at the door with a tea- trolley laid out with Bunnykins china, piled high with biscuits and cakes.

While the rest of us drank tea from Bunnykins mugs, however, Sister Barbara firmly sipped instant coffee from a plain yellow mug. She smiled at our enthusiasm about her work, but seemed no longer herself much interested in it. In anyone else, this might have seemed sad: a sign of loss of heart, of failing appetite for life. But, in Sister Barbara, it was the opposite. She did not dwell on the past, one felt, because she was so fully taken up with the present and the future. She had her sights set on the journey "upstairs".

A programme featuring a rare interview with Sister Mary Barbara, The Bunnykins Business, goes out on BBC Radio 4 on 7 June.

Maggie Parham