Pauline Clotworthy, who died at Christmas, founded the Grafton Academy of Dress Designing in 1939. Since then the academy trained and launched on their careers Ib Jorgensen, Lorcan Mullany, Neilli Mulcahy, Paul Costelloe, Louise Kennedy, Richard Lewis, Pat Crowley, Jacqueline Quinn, Cuan Hanley, and other fashion designers well known in Ireland, the US, Britain, Japan, and elsewhere.
The academy, still going strong, also trained thousands of women of all ages to design and make clothes for themselves and for the fashion industry - and to model their own clothes. In the 1930s in Ireland, she was a pioneer. She herself had trained at the British Institute of Dress Designing (Hardy Amies was a fellow student), and at the School of Art (now the National College of Art and Design). In the Grafton Academy the emphasis was always on pattern-cutting, drawing and fine sewing; students were encouraged to have their own imaginative ideas, but they were always taught the basic skills needed to realise their ideas to perfection. Fashion is art, but it depends on tailoring.
Throughout her long career she was closely supported by her husband Neil Clotworthy, who was first an Irish Army officer and finally the chief engineer in Irish Lights, the lighthouse authority. Himself a creative engineer with enormous intellectual curiosity, he helped with the academy's annual fashion shows of the students' creations, advised, fixed equipment, and provided unfailing, shrewd and good-humoured support. He also bore with amused equanimity Pauline's indulgence of a long series of mostly ill-disciplined dogs and cats, for which their house provided home comforts.
Pauline Keller was born in 1912. She was brought up in a large house in Glenageary, with several generations of the family around her, and in the countryside near Wexford. Throughout her life she had a very good memory, which she used to write short stories and cameos, and for reminiscences of old country ways which were fascinating to her children and grandchildren. At one time she had a regular fashion column in one of the Irish newspapers, with her own sketches.
She never sought publicity (it is not the Quaker style) but with her great energy, and her enormous interest in and enthusiasm for young people, she had the lasting and widespread influence that all good teachers have. She had the strength of character to surmount the deaths of her husband and son and to carry on, not merely indomitably, but unchanged and cheerful.
One of the first ways in which Irish national self-confidence was gradually built up after the second World War was through the success, now taken for granted, of a series of Irish fashion designers. Most of them had graduated from the Grafton Academy.
Pauline herself was a teacher rather than a designer, and by her teaching she provided many Irish women with jobs, satisfaction in their own handiwork, and pride in their appearance. A lifetime's achievement is not less because it is inconspicuous.
The Grafton Academy prospers, managed by Pauline's daughter, Suzanne Marr. Two of her grandchildren are graduates. They should be proud of the famous designers who are also graduates. But, even now when most clothes are so informal, they should also be proud of what Pauline over many years did so well for so many Irish women. L.