Laura Ashley

Laura Mountney was born in 1925 in Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil, in the South Wales valleys, and raised partly by her grandmother in a strict Baptist household. She left school at sixteen, served in the Women's Royal Naval Service during the war, and worked as a secretary in London. In 1949 she married Bernard Ashley, a soldier she had met at a youth club.

In 1953, pregnant and at home in a small flat in Pimlico, she went to a Women's Institute exhibition of traditional handicrafts and wanted to make patchwork, but could not find the small printed fabrics it needed. Bernard built a silkscreen frame from instructions in a library book, and they printed headscarves and tea towels on the kitchen table, with the oven for drying. A buyer at John Lewis ordered some. Audrey Hepburn wore a headscarf like theirs in Roman Holiday, and the orders became a business.

They moved to Kent, then in 1961 to Wales, taking over a disused social club in the village of Carno, because they wanted to raise their four children in the country and could give jobs where the mines and mills had gone. The first shop opened in Pelham Street, London, in 1968. Her long cotton dresses, printed with small flowers and cut from Victorian and Edwardian patterns, were exactly what the early 1970s wanted, and shops followed in Paris, Geneva, San Francisco and Tokyo.

She was shy, disliked the fashion world and kept out of the limelight. In September 1985, on a visit to her daughter for her sixtieth birthday, she fell down the stairs and died of a brain haemorrhage ten days later. The company floated on the stock market two months afterwards.