Margaret MacGregor Angus was born in Chile in 1904. She was the eleventh of the 13 children of a Scottish railway engineer. In 1922 she went to the Royal College of Art, beginning in the painting school, but switching to the Design School, where her contemporaries and friends included Helen Binyon, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. After graduating, in 1926 she took a teaching certificate. On passing with distinction she wept, fearing that teaching would frustrate her development as an artist. For that reason she never taught full-time and instituted a part-time system in the art department at North London Collegiate School. Her radical political ideals were formed in the 1930s, when she played an active part in the Artists’ International Association. Her great respect for vernacular and folk art, together with a passionate belief in art’s social purpose, meant that much avant-garde artistic activity was dismissed by her as ‘scribbling to let off steam’. In 1933 while teaching at Eastbourne, she found and rented Furlongs, a long, low shepherd’s cottage at the foot of the Sussex Downs. There she created an interior as curious and as beautiful as that of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell’s house at Charleston, and filled it with paintings of the Sussex countryside by herself and her contemporaries. Furlongs, she explained, was ‘the matrix of much strange and inventive creation’ and became the gathering-place of many artists – Eric Ravilious and his wife Tirzah, Edward and Charlotte Bawden, Percy Horton, Maurice de Saumarez, John and Myfanwy Piper, Olive Cook and Edwin Smith, as well as countless former pupils, colleagues and their children and grandchildren. Every year, on Midsummer Eve, Angus held a party in the hollow of the dewpond, just above Furlongs. Friends of all ages came together under the summer stars and Angus led the singing, revealing her extraordinary memory for arcane folk and revolutionary songs. She was intensely proud of her Scottish ancestry and was liable to break into anti-British ballads at the slightest encouragement. Furlongs became the centre of a Sussex creative community, but Angus was also an artistic force on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides, where she had a bothy, and in the streets of Camden, where she latterly rented a studio. In 1936 she married J M Richards and they had a daughter and a son, but the marriage was dissolved in 1948. At North London Collegiate School, where she taught from 1947 until 1970, for many years in collaboration with the painter Moy Keightley, she communicated her vision of ‘Art for Life’. Pupils learnt in teams, commencing with primitive pattern-making and graduating to ambitious co-operative mural schemes that emphasised the importance of context and what she called ‘creative patronage’. The list of pupils she inspired includes the architects Marina Adams, Judith Bottomley and Penny Richards, the painter Carolyn Trant, the potter Alison Britton and the designer Janet Kennedy. The art-department block at North London Collegiate stands as a memorial to Angus’s zeal and continues to be staffed only by practising artists. The architect F R S Yorke recognised her gift as a pattern designer and in the 1950s, she regularly worked with Carter of Poole, designing tiles to humanise the rather cold, unadorned interiors and exteriors of Yorke, Rosenberg & Mardall’s commissions throughout the 1950s. These included a striking two-storey wall of tiles for Susan Lawrence Primary School at Poplar, and collaborations at Warren Wood Secondary School for Girls and Merthyr Tydfil College of Further Education. In 1962 Yorke died and although she remained a consultant designer to Carter Tiles, she began to work in a more craft-based fashion. In the later 1950s, the painter Kenneth Rowntree suggested she adapt some of her designs for use as wallpapers. Clients were encouraged to have blocks specially cut and to participate in their design. In 1960 she won the Sanderson centenary competition for wallpaper design and her patterns were used by Cole and by Sanderson. But she designed few machine prints, preferring the less predictable effects of hand-printing, using small lino blocks and household emulsion. Over the years, Angus invented an extraordinary range of patterns. Many were abstract but others convey a vivid pastoral mood, making subtle use of oak leaves, heraldic dogs and birds, grapes and vines, corn stooks, suns and winds. Peggy Angus died in London on 28 October 1993.