While polite guides may point out the Gainsborough and the Lawrence, the ormolu and the satinwood, it is invariably the kitchen that attracts the crowds. The ranges of copper pans and jelly molds and the jumbo chopping boards, the many pantries, larders and still rooms seem somehow to have an easy resonance. Pat was no exception and was always attracted to the scrubbed kitchen table or the stables. Her taste for the domestic was spiced up by the visual treats of country house quality and the variety of her designs was stimulated by these treasure houses. From the beginning of her career Pat, a passionate, lavish and reliably delicious cook, had used food as inspiration. The pepper and the aubergine, the salmon and the lobster – even the sausage was from time to time-pressed into service as a decorative motif.
One of an occasional series of recipe tea towels, the marmalade design was undertaken with huge care and much checking of the actual instructions. Pat was a good preserver 一 a skill learnt from her long-time housekeeper Mrs. Marshall (Maha) rather than from her own mother. Strangely enough, marmalade was not her specialty and designing this did not change that.
A more distant but loyal client was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for whom this cloth, inspired by nineteenth-century canning designs, was based. She was especially proud of her work here, perhaps because it looked less like her own.
Pat was a cook but not a baker and this design was a response to a request from the Trust rather than a heartfelt expression of personal scone-love. It did, however, hit the spot and was a commercial success, spawning a series of recipe tea towels over the next decade including a striking marmalade design(see page 38). They drew a little on a type of French picture postcard that Pat liked, with lurid photos of glistening food and a truncated recipe for cassoulet, Daube de Boeuf or Coquilles St Jacques.
This vegetable rack was Pats, sitting inside her cottage in Sussex. She was a productive vegetable gardener and this design is particularly personal. Marrows were a loved motif (and she was much given to stuffing them for supper).
Pat was allergic to shellfish, but she maintained that lobster was exempt from this classification (which occasionally made one doubt the whole ban on Crustacea…). Both they and crabs were good subjects to draw.
During the Second World War two of Pat’s sisters, Sheila and Gwen, were land girls in East Yorkshire. Pat longed to be asked to help but was firmly rebuffed as too small (she was born in 1930). In particular she wanted to pick strawberries and this came up repeatedly when, later in life, she would enthusiastically visit various pick-your-own fruit farms. So the romance of this strawberry cloth is particularly significant.
‘Table lay thyself’ was an idea that pleased Pat, and a lavish feast gave her great (visual) pleasure. Austerity had little appeal – in design or in life – perhaps a response to wartime rationing.
This was Pat’s favorite design. These tessellating jelly moulds, copper pans and rolling pins were in the kitchen at Lanhydrock. The stroke of visual genius that displayed them on a hot blue background sings strikingly with the orange-y browns and is one of the most graphically striking of all her towels； its strength derived from a combination of careful, detailed drawing, with utter simplicity of conception and design.
Pats kitchen was a combination of order – a carefully curated and profuse collection of pottery from Clarice Cliff to eighteenth-century Wedgwood – and the utter chaos of somebody for whom washing up was one task too many. This tidy dresser is redolent of many a 1970s country kitchen.
