Petra Tegetmeier obituary

Unorthodox liaisons

Petra Tegetmeier, who has died at the age of 92, was the last surviving daughter of Eric Gill, the sculptor, engraver, typographer and writer.

A year after her birth, Gill moved with his family to Ditchling in Sussex, at first to a house in the village and then to Ditchling Common, where he was joined by artists and craftsmen and was the focus of a remarkable community, whose members nearly all became Catholics and joined the Third Order of St Dominic.

Petra Gill's upbringing was unorthodox. Gill had positive ideas about the role of men and women in society. Neither Petra nor her two sisters - Betty, born in 1905 and Joanna, born in 1910 - went to school. Eric Gill himself taught them arithmetic, drawing, elementary Latin, history and geography; their mother Mary Ethel taught them reading, writing, sewing and all the skills necessary for a full domestic life.

At Ditchling, Gill wrote a description of woman - 'mother, bed-companion, helpmate and comforter, housekeeper, baker and wine-maker, seamstress and embroidress, and very likely farm manager and dairywoman as well'. He did not add anything about her education and intellectual life. But the women in his household were far from ignorant; they grew up in a community of very talkative individuals, all pursuing social and religious ideals and convictions as well as many different arts and crafts. Petra was taught to weave.

The community revolved round the chapel where the Holy Office was recited four times a day. While there, Gill received his first major commission - the Stations of the Cross for the new Westminster Cathedral. After those superb and distinctive carvings and then through many other works as well as his writings, he became in effect a public figure. The households in which Petra grew up acquired a distinctive identity, with the noise of stone chipping as a constant background to talk and music.

Petra's childhood was happy and active. Some of Gill's best drawings and engravings are of her - Girl in Bath and The Plait, both of 1923. She was engaged for several years to David Jones who made some beautiful paintings of her, but married Denis Tegetmeier, letterer, engraver and cartoonist, in 1930.

The most extraordinary aspect of Gill's life was his attitude towards the opposite sex, and in particular to his own sisters and daughters. In the 40 volumes of diaries that he kept from the age of 15 to 58, he recorded day by day not only what he made and earned and spent, but also who he joined in bed and with whom he enjoyed sex. He introduced Betty and Petra to the mysteries of sex and recorded the occasions in his diaries.

A remarkable aspect of those liaisons with Petra is that she seems not only to have been undamaged by the experience, but to have become the most calm, reflective and straightforward wife and mother. When I asked her about it shortly before her 90th birthday, she assured me that she was not at all embarrassed - 'We just took it for granted'. She agreed that had she gone to school she might have learned how unconventional her father's behaviour was. He had, she explained, 'endless curiosity about sex'. His bed companions were not only family but domestic helpers and even (to my astonishment when I heard about it) the teacher who ran the school at Pigotts.

Pigotts was Gill's final home. He moved with his family and fellow workers from Ditchling to a deserted monastery at Capel-y-ffin in south Wales. From there, Denis Tegetmeier found them the quadrangular farm at Pigotts, 30 miles from London and far more convenient.

The Tegetmeiers occupied one wing of the quadrangle. Petra, whom I visited often, was always welcoming, unfussed and totally unpretentious. She seemed constantly to be moving around the open living-kitchen, from stove to scrubbed table: 'Whenever a man comes in, give him a cup of tea'. She had four beautiful daughters and two handsome sons. She was the very embodiment, the very image, of the ideal about which Gill wrote. She was in a real sense his creation, and herself made in her home the simple but richly creative society he believed in himself.

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