David John White – the Constantine would come later – came into the world in April 1948 and grew up in Halifax, West Yorkshire, a place he remembered with little fondness as ‘a town with a black wedding cake of a town hall and grubby from industry’. Grubby it may have been, but Halifax had prospered handsomely in the first half of the twentieth century through the mining of coal and clay, brick and pipe manufacture, iron and brass founding and engineering. David was born into the heart of that hard-grafting industrial tradition and it is where his interest in clay began.