Pat Albeck
Textile designer who delighted in ‘the small decorations of life’
PAT ALBECK, who has died aged 87, was a textile designer whose distinctive hand has brightened millions of homes since the 1950s.
Inspired by what she called “the small decorations of life”, she delighted in the colours and details of the world around her, all of which appeared in her patterns and illustrations for fashion and furnishing fabrics, on ranges of china, tin trays, children’s books and more than 300 tea towels, adorned with witty and meticulous renditions of everything from cats and lobsters to cathedrals, cottages, fruit and flowers.
Prolific and diligent, Pat Albeck embarked on her career while she was still at art school and continued to work up until days before her death. “Design,” she once said, “is my life.”
She was born in Hull on March 17 1930, the youngest of four daughters of Polish émigrés. Her father, Max, was a furrier and anarchist, although with an artistic bent; he designed and built his family’s mock Tudor house, and arranged for a local set designer to help decorate it.
Pat was the only one of her siblings who did not go to university after leaving school. Instead, her father enrolled her in the Hull College of Arts and Crafts, where her childhood love of designing and making things developed so successfully that she won a place at the Royal College of Art and left for London in 1950.
Pat’s talent was spotted by Jimmy Cleveland Bell, who commissioned her to work for the leading fashion label Horrockses. There she created cotton prints for their summer dresses, which were essential for all fashion-conscious women; even the Queen kept cool in dresses from Horrockses while on her Commonwealth tour. In between producing fashion fabrics Pat Albeck designed china decoration for Spode, Masons and Minton, wallpapers for Sandersons and formal dinner services for Royal Worcester.
In the early 1960s she became associated with a company called Dollyrocker whose proprietor Sam Sherman told her to see Les Parapluies de Cherbourg when the film came out, saying that the colours in the sets and costumes would speak to her. In return she created reams of irresistible fabric designs for the burgeoning market for fashionable ready-made clothes for young people.
Around the same time she began a significant working relationship with Cavendish Textiles, the John Lewis production department for whom she created the Daisy Chain design, which was to sell for 15 years.
In 1967 she was approached by the National Trust to design some tea towels. She rose to the request, seeing in the humble drying-up cloth an undeveloped opportunity for beautiful designs. Right up to the final year of her life she continued to produce designs for the Trust, branching out in the 1970s and 1980s into kitchenware, textiles and dinner services.
Most of her archive is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, where her sensitivity to the European folk art tradition is revealed in all her work, which is reminiscent of timeless village craft. Her instincts, however, were framed in a sophisticated aesthetic, her training was thorough and as well as encouraging and teaching the young assistants who worked with her throughout her career, she continued to hone her own skills every day of her life.
She met her husband, Peter Rice, while they were both at the Royal College of Art, where he studied theatre design. Like her he worked with passion, energy and commitment throughout a long and successful career – designing for many international operas, ballets and plays.
Peter Rice died in 2015. She is survived by their son Matthew Rice, also a designer, who is married to the ceramicist Emma Bridgewater.
Pat Albeck, born March 17 1930, died September 1 2017