Pat’s first calendar tea towel was destined to serve for the year of that searingly hot summer, so perhaps the bleached dried-grass colour of the background was prescient. Even after the National Trust turned their back on the tea towel the linen calendar proved too popular to abandon and Pat provided designs for 43 consecutive years.
Pat died with resolute calm and decisive dignity in September 2017, a year after her beloved husband Peter. They were both 87. Two lives well-lived and loved were marked by obituaries in all the broadsheets and in Pat’s case a further obituary on BBC Radio 4(following on from her appearance on Desert Island Discs, broadcast in 2015). She was working until three days before her death and, a week before that, rolled up, wrapped around a tube and sent to the National Trust, her last tea towel. It is not her most important, perhaps not her best ever but it was the utterly professional signing-off of an undiminished career of nearly 70 years. She left behind an extraordinary legacy of work, collection, love and study. She lived long enough to enjoy the social media for which she and her work were ideally suited. This book shows just a small section of that oeuvre stretching from fashion and furnishing to books(she wrote several for grown-ups, children and an excellent textbook for students). Despite the intrinsic funniness of designing hundreds of tea towels, it is a part of her career about which she was in deadly earnest, and so they are a good and representative illustration of a life spent designing. She would be very pleased to be showing them to you.
Matthew, her son
