Main fabric designer - Pat Albeck

"I know I have a flat decorative style and I believe it is due in some way to the environment in which I lived as a young girl.  Hull is very flat and so are the surrounding approaches alongside the Humber." [1]

Hull born Pat Albeck was a freelance fashion designer who began her education at Hull High School for girls [2] before training for four years at Hull's School of Art and three years at the Royal College of Art. She then spent five years working for a Lancashire cotton firm Horrockses learning about the textile industry from within before finally going freelance.  [3]

Working freelance meant that she designed for several different companies at once.  "Sometimes they're all on the boil at once.  I tell myself 'if you can only get this and  that finished, next week might be quieter'."[1]  Her commissions at this time came from John Lewis's textile production department Cavendish Textiles as well as ceramics companies Spode, Minton, Masons and Royal Worcester. [4]  

A cotton board scholarship gave her the chance to visit Australia in 1962. [5]  The drawings from that trip inspired a lot of her work, resulting in an Australian exhibition in Manchester in 1963 which also included fabrics from Samuel Sherman.  Her collaboration with Samuel Sherman lasted right up until he emigrated to America in 1977.  For six of those years her fabrics were exclusively for the fashion house with a focus on the Dollyrockers label. [4]

Pat toured the United States, gaining inspiration from the shops, architecture and museums of New York and San Francisco, showing her designs and gaining a New York agent to sell her work. [4]  Travelling with her husband - stage designer Peter Rice - also gave her a great deal of inspiration.  "Last Summer we took a house in Chichester to be with him while he designed for four plays at the theatre, and I discovered lots of designs in the hedgerows.  We spent Christmas in Nassau where he was doing some interior design in a house, and that was marvellous for inspiration, such exotic flowers!"  Her family also took a holiday in Provence "I've been sold on Provencal designs ever since." [6]

Osman Fabrics sent her to Florence to design a Renaissance inspired collection, resulting in her hugely popular Primavera design.  Work with Marks and Spencers as a colour consultant as well as being a design consultant for both Fergusons and Heathcotes led to buying trips around France and Italy. [4] The success of the Italian range for Osman Fabrics resulted in the Minaret range the following year inspired by Spain. [7]

"After 5 years designing only for Horrockses Fashions, I designed freelance for another five years, during which time my dress fabrics were exclusively for Sam Sherman who made 'Sambo' dresses. He also made dresses for a much younger market, called 'DollyRockers'." [4]

Her style at this time was already full of the iconic abstract florals and geometric patterns that the 1960s would become known for, but with a very vibrant feminine style that perfectly suited everything the Dollyrockers label represented.  They "tend to be geometric rather than romantic, but she says 'not in any way Op-Art' and would describe them 'more as abstract swirls of colour'. Her fabric designs were informed and experimental thanks to her background in the cotton industry and her work as a colour consultant for several major firms.  This meant that she knew all about the latest fabrics and could design specifically with new fabric dyes in mind, staying ahead of the latest trends and making the best of vibrant modern colours for new easycare fabrics.  [5]

Cotton voile design 1-019 for Dollyrockers

In 1966, in addition to her assistant Heather she took on Liverpool School of Art graduate Mandy Airey who had already sold designs to ICI while a student, giving the small team even more insight into the latest fabrics and dyes. [8]

Pat's designs were flooding the interior design market as well as fashion during the 1960s, with her range of furnishing fabrics and wallpapers proving so popular that they had many imitators. "My style has influenced a lot of them.  Some of today's are absolute cribs!" [6]  

It was during this era that she began designing the item that truly became her own - the humble tea towel.  "The Tea Towel became a major part of my designing life in the mid sixties. I loved the fact that I was designing a picture on linen, although they were more decorative than pictorial." [4]  The plain white cloth with it's red border was transformed with her stylised flowers, elegant pictures, patterns of kitchen utensils and brightly coloured vegetables as early as 1960. 

"I know people tell me they cannot dry things with my tea-cloths - they feel they cannot use them so they frame them instead!  Or pin them up on walls.  But they are intended to be used." [9]  

By 1968 she found her work moving from stylised to abstract, "but I still design flowers.  People always like flowers in some guise or another.."  Her colour palette was also fading from the zingy bright shades to the more romantic softer tones.  "We're all tired of psychedelic florals and suddenly we can't bear to see bright colours anymore.  I never use orange for a tea towel design now.  The moment a colour becomes important you just have to abandon it." [6]

Pat focussed her remaining energy on inspiring the next generation of designers, touring art schools, giving lectures and acting as an external assessor for students taking their Diploma in Art and Design at Birmingham Polytechnic.  [10]  She also published a highly respected text book on printed textiles which is so popular that original copies still command high prices.  Published by the Oxford University Press for art students, it is named simply "Printed Textiles".

Her work continued to be published in children's picture books, starting with "Tim Goes To The Seaside" in 1970, [11] and illustrated books for grown ups such as A Cat's Guide To England.  Her work for Samuel Sherman came to an end when the man himself retired at the end of 1977 [12] to emigrate to America.  But her commissions were still coming in thick and fast via The National Trust.  

She was first called upon to design a few tea towels for them when it wasn't yet the norm to 'exit through the gift shop' of any museum or stately home.  Before long they were also wanting table linens, kitchen textiles and ceramics, and rather than designing something generic Pat was catering to each individual property.

"I was designing things that people might be tempted to buy at the end of a visit to a National Trust house or garden. This influenced my style. I was using line drawing as my work became more representational and my colour became more muted, to go with the historic houses. Also it meant that I really had to learn to draw buildings accurately. Many of my designs were for specific properties, which I always visited, so I got to know a lot about the English countryside... I had a pretty free hand as far as ideas went with The National Trust; a general theme was chosen, sometimes by me, sometimes by them... I designed a number of paper products, wrapping paper, folders and covered books. It seemed that if I was happy with my ideas on paper, then so were they. We produced very large ranges of co-ordinating products. It was important to get the colour matching right on the very different surfaces of cloth, pottery, tin and paper... I also designed for The National Trust for Scotland and visited wonderful Scottish Castles and Gardens" [4]

Soon the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the future King Charles III were commissioning work for their gift shops too.  Meanwhile her son Mathew, whose nursery growing up had been a testing ground for her children's homeware designs, followed his parents example and attended art school to design theatre sets like his father.  He set up his own paper company designing most of the stationary himself , but commissioned his mother to do "flowery things and cats, neither of which he particularly liked drawing." [4]  He married Emma Bridgewater who had her own ceramics company, and soon Pat was designing for her daughter-in-law too.

The new millennium would be filled with retrospectives of her work from the vast array of companies she had worked for over the decades.  Celebrated by Sandersons and Horrockses at the Fashion and Textile Museum as well as John Lewis during their 150th Anniversary.  Their best selling design for 15 years had been Pat's Daisy Chain, initially commissioned in the 1960s as a William Morris inspired piece which was nothing like the company expected but took on a life of it's own when the public fell in love with it.  The re-issue in 2014 was still popular with the public decades later.

Sadly she passed away aged 87 in 2017, leaving behind a wealth of designs that still fill our houses, wardrobes and tea towel drawers.  The true design Queen of the middle class British home whose designs overflowed with quaint cats and pretty English wild flowers was in fact descended from Polish immigrants, her father a private supporter of the anarchist cause and son of a Warsaw rabbi. [13]  She took inspiration from the whole world as well as the very theatrical home her father had created for her to grow up in, and made it all look so quintessentially British.

A small sample of Pat's amazing career can be found at her official website: https://pat-albeck.co.uk/

[1] London, J. (1969) 'Pat has designs on Christmas', London Evening News, 20 November, p. 4.

[2] Humber, Miss. (1966) 'Tea Towel Brought Fame', Hull Daily Mail, 21 October, p. 10.

[3] Harrow Observer (1966) 'Young designers work in studios at home', Harrow Observer and Gazette, 13 January, p. 29.
[4] Albeck, P. (no date) 'Pat Albeck Designs and Paintings'.  Available at: https://pat-albeck.co.uk/ (Accessed: 26 April 2026)

[5]Weston, J. (1966) 'Cotton pickin' for 1967', The Scotsman Week-End Magazine, 2 April, p. 6.

[6] Anderson, E. (1968) 'How Pat brought art to the kitchen sink', Newcastle Journal, 19 March, p. 4.

[7] Collins, M. (1973) 'Olé! Pat designs a new winner', Daily Express, 19 June, p. 11.

[8] Tomlinson, V. (1966) 'At the Liverpool collections', Liverpool Daily Post, 28 June, p. 12.

[9] Humber, Miss. (1968) 'Designs dolly dress fabric', Hull Daily Mail, 12 July, p. 10.

[10] Birmingham Daily Post (1972) 'Homes with the Botticelli look', Birmingham Daily Post, 9 March, p. 8.

[11] London Evening News (1970) 'Children's Books for Christmas', London Evening News, 10 December, p. 6.

[12] The Scotsman (1977) 'Talk of the city', The Scotsman, 14 December, p. 3.

[13] Harrod, T. (2017) 'Pat Albeck obituary', The Guardian, September 15.