Here, Potter became a protégé of Robert Baden-Powell, who encouraged him in his sculpture. He escaped after three years and gravitated into the scout movement, working at the international centre for training scoutmasters at Gilwell Park, Essex. His father sent him to work in a munitions factory in the north London suburbs, a place he looked back on as 'the nearest approach to prison I have ever known'. Potter himself had been brought up in a small village in Kent, leaving school at 14 after a family financial crisis. This was a longer association than that of any other pupil or apprentice, apart from Gill's anchor men, the famous brothers Cribb. No one seemed to notice when the time was up Potter stayed at Pigotts for the next six years, and then continued to work with Gill on a more ad hoc basis until his death in 1940.
Gill and Potter clambered down from the scaffolding and adjourned to a nearby café, where Gill offered to take the young man on for a six months' trial. On the day that Potter met him, Gill was putting his finishing touches to the figure of Ariel, dressed in his usual quasi-medieval working clothes of handwoven tunic with leather belt and woollen knee socks.
