Irma Grant obituary
My mother Irma Grant, who has died aged 94, was a milliner and tailor, teacher and administrator, homemaker and gardener. Throughout her long life she applied her ingenuity, creativity and talents to a wide range of activities.
In 1939, Irma was evacuated from London to Bedford as part of Operation Pied Piper. She lived with Dora and Harry Lynham. Years later the Lynhams attended Irma’s wedding, and Irma’s children spent school holidays with Auntie and Uncle Bedford.
Irma was born in London to Isabel (nee Philips), a book-keeper, and Micheal Ginsburg, a tailor who changed his name to Geen in 1941, and grew up in a non-Orthodox Jewish family over a shop in Baker Street; the family later moved to West Hampstead, where Irma went to Emmanuel primary school. After the second world war she went to Camden school for girls. She fondly remembered pre-war summer holidays at a beach hut in Westgate-on-Sea, Kent.
In 1941 Irma’s father was called up and worked as a unit tailor in the Royal Army Service Corps in Barry, south Wales. After the war he became a theatrical costumier, and Irma often helped out at his workshop/showroom behind Liberty’s in the West End. Irma enjoyed theatre, dance and art, and regularly went to the National Theatre and the Royal Academy. Through family connections she found work in the garment trade, with Albert Hart, “a posh furrier”, and with a series of independent clothing makers.
When she was 20, Irma met Richard Grant, a trainee architect, at a youth dance put on by the West London Synagogue. They married in 1953 and set up home among the bomb sites in Belsize Park, with two children, three elderly sitting tenants, and room enough for Richard to convert the ground floor for Irma’s parents. While her children were young, Irma worked at home, specialising in millinery. She made wedding hats, cricket caps, pillbox hats for female air crew and all the Russian fur hats for David Lean’s Dr Zhivago (1965).
In 1973, she began to study first fashion and then teacher training at Westminster College for her City & Guilds qualifications. She became a dressmaking tutor, then head of the department of fashion, and finally head of centre at the Stanhope base of Camden Adult Education Institute.
In retirement she joined the Chantraine School of Dance, attended the University of the Third Age (U3A), worked part-time for boutiques, volunteered as tutor for the European Computer Driving Licence course and as a tour guide for the National Trust at Ernő Goldfinger’s house in Hampstead.
In 2011, Richard and Irma moved to a retirement village in Hampshire, where she was a librarian for 10 years, ran a book group and did alterations for residents in return for donations to the Rosemary Foundation.
Irma is survived by Richard, their children, Deborah and me, her grandchildren, Jesse and Ashley, a great-granddaughter, Merryn, and a sister, Lesley.
