A former public school art master turned to forgery after taking early retirement because of ill-health.

Jeremy Broadway, who had taught at Bryanston, a leading school in Dorset, was able to fool the experts with ceramics that he created in his garden shed.

Broadway, 52, made thousands of pounds selling the copies of studio pottery by Bernard Leach and Lucie Rie, two of Britain’s most sought-after 20th-century potters.

His works were sold through auction houses to collectors across Europe but the master forger was caught when one of the art experts that he had duped realised his mistake and turned detective.

Ben Williams, former head of contemporary ceramics at Bonhams, sold two fake Leach vases and a Rie pot for £8,900. His suspicions were aroused when he noticed that three similar pieces were also being offered by Christie’s with an estimated value of £17,000.

Mr Williams said: “When I went to Christie’s they just looked wrong and were clearly fake. One bowl in particular had a very odd feature about it.

“On Lucie Rie bowls there are thin, scratchy blue lines but on these the lines were thicker and more precise. I realised I had made a mistake and had been fooled.”

Mr Williams began contacting galleries and other auction houses. He also tracked down the buyers of the three pieces sold by Bonhams and made sure that they were refunded.

He said: “It is a bit embarrassing really. I could have ignored it but it was a mistake I made that needed to be sorted out.

“The worst thing would be to have let it continue, which would have undermined the market. If people start to get worried that there are fakes out there that nobody can identify then that undermines confidence.

“Leach and Rie work is very high-value. I am sure Broadway felt that he could copy them quite competently and it is clear that he could because he got one over on a few people.”

Broadway, who had taught art for more than 20 years, claimed originally that he was selling the pots on behalf of a “little old lady”. He told police that he had inherited the pots and vases from his late father-in-law and thought they were genuine.

In fact, he was using his skills to create the copies, which he then marked with the potters’ initials using fake stamps. When his £500,000 home in the Dorset village of Child Okeford was raided, police found dozens of other pots in his studio.

Detective Constable Jon Bayliff, of Weymouth CID, thanked Mr Williams for exposing the scam. He said: “The amount of time this deception went on for, and the number of people duped, is staggering. It is thanks to the close community of art dealers in London that this deception didn’t spread much farther.”

As well as Mr Williams, police used John Leach, one of Bernard Leach’s grandsons and a renowned potter in his own right, to examine some of the vases.

Two pieces that were sold for £2,000 through Galerie Besson, one of London’s leading ceramics dealers, were recovered from Copenhagen. A “Leach” vase sold to a collector in Portsmouth on eBay for £900 was also seized, as was another vase sold to a woman in Oxford for £2,505.

A man from Liverpool who had bought a “Rie” potato pot from Bonhams for £494 was also traced and the item recovered. Numerous unexplained credits on Broadway’s bank account are believed to be from the sale of fakes that have not been traced.

Broadway, who is thought to have made at least £20,000 from the forgeries, was given a 12-month supervision order after Bournemouth Crown Court was told that he was unfit to plead under the Mental Health Act. The case against him was found to be proven in his absence.

His wife, Catherine Broadway, was charged with obtaining property by deception but the case was dropped after no evidence was offered.

Forging a lucrative career

— The work of the forger Tom Keating became valuable in its own right after he admitted churning out at least 2,000 fake Old Masters in the 1970s. Collectors warmed to the cockney artist, who referred to his works in rhyming slang as “Sexton Blakes”

— Scotland Yard called the forgeries of John Myatt and John Drewe the biggest of the century. Between 1986 and 1994, the pair made hundreds of fake Surrealist and Cubist canvases, along with forged provenances, and sold them for thousands of pounds. Many are thought to remain undetected

— Christie’s and Bonhams both withdrew pictures advertised as being the work of the British artist Peter Howson after he insisted that he had not painted them. The forgeries were discovered in 2005, weeks after a genuine Howson sold for more than £100,000

— Elmyr de Hory was a brilliant artist who sold more than a thousand of his own pictures as the work of Modigliani, Picasso and others. He died in 1976, two years after Orson Welles dramatised his story in F is for Fake

Sources: FBI; www.crimelibrary.com; Times archive

Times Recommends

• Swine flu vaccine for all as drug rushed through
• Artificial sperm and the race to build a baby
• BBC jets out stars to tout for prizes