Jerome Abbo was born into a Jewish family (the son of Palestinian sculptor Jussuf Abbo), near Bremen in Germany in 1934; the family immigrated to England in 1935. Little is known of his training but in the mid 1970s he was appointed Head of Studio Pottery at Harrow College of Art. He also exhibited at Henry Rothschild's Primavera Gallery in London, wrote for the international magazine 'Ceramic Review' and was later a director of the Box Galleries in Brighton.
Potter and teacher Jerome Abbo was born in November 1934, near Bremen in Germany, the son of Palestinian-Jewish sculptor Jussuf Abbo and his German-Jewish fiancée Ruth Schulz, a fine art student; at the time of their son's birth, they were prevented from marrying and forced to wait temporarily in Germany for papers to enable their passage to England. After considerable difficulties, the family arrived in London in September 1935 and the couple were finally able to marry officially on 6 November 1936 at the Saint Pancras Registry Office in London. They lived first at 1 Grove Terrace, Parliament Hill in north London, then moved to Willington near Cheltenham, until January 1938, when they returned to north London. Their second son, Hussein, was born in 1936, followed by Claude in 1941; and from 1939 they lived in Newick in Sussex, where the children grew up.
Little is known of Jerome Abbo's early training but he is remembered by one pupil, Jenny Morten, as a 'fantastic technician', at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Holborn, as part of a staff led by Gilbert Harding Green including Gordon Baldwin, Dan Arbeid, John Colbeck, Ken Clarke and Bonnie Van de Wettering in the 1960s. By 1963 Abbo was sharing a large house in Wendens Ambo near Saffron Walden, Essex, with fellow potter Dan Arbeid and his family, and by the mid 1970s he had been appointed Head of the Studio Pottery Course (established in 1963 at Harrow College of Art, now part of the University of Westminster), led by Victor Margrie and Michael Casson, founder members, of the Craftsman’s Potters Association in the UK; other tutors included Gwyn Hanssen-Pigott, Walter Keeler, Michael Casson, Mo Jupp, Alison Britton and Richard Slee, with visiting tutors Bernard Leach, David Leach, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, Hans Coper, Walter Keeler and Gillian Lowndes (Mo Jupp, National Life Stories Collection, British Library). Abbo's students on the vocational course included Bobbie (Norriss) Jacobs (1976–78), Susie Botting and Prue Venables. He also wrote for the international magazine Ceramic Review and was later a director of the Box Galleries in Brighton. Abbo's was one of 12 potters whose work was included in the 1968 exhibition British Potters ‘68 at Qantas Gallery in London's Piccadilly, alongside Mohmed Abdalla, Dan Arbeid, Ian Auld, John Chalke, Hans Coper, Joanna Constantinidis, lan Godfrey, Alan Spencer Green, Bernard Leach, Janet Leach and Lucie Rie. Abbo also exhibited at Henry Rothschild's Primavera Gallery in London. He died in Brighton, East Sussex on 12 July 2016. An example of his stoneware is in the V&A Collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Jerome Abbo]
Publications related to [Jerome Abbo] in the Ben Uri Library