Last updated 15:23, Tuesday, 17 June 2008

The sudden death of Angela Lee, well known in the county as a textile artist, clog and step dancer and teacher, has shocked and saddened her family and many friends.

Angela Mary Lee, who was 63, was brought up, as Angela Murchie at the Steppings farm at Bewcastle, where her lifelong interest in flowers, birds and the countryside was first kindled. This was to become the inspiration for much of her superb artwork.

After attending Eden School in Carlisle, where she became head girl, she studied fine art in Carlisle and Sunderland before undertaking an art teacher’s diploma in 1967 at Leicester College of Art, where she met her future husband Frank.

Angela’s first teaching job was at Redditch in Worcestershire, but within a year she moved back north and married Frank in Kirklinton Church in August 1969.

They set up home in a cottage in Cragside, Rothbury, in Northumberland, where they stayed for three years before moving to work in Cumbria where Angela took up a post as art teacher at Caldew School, Dalston.

From the mid-1980s she was head of art in Brampton, first at The White House School and later William Howard School, where her pupils’ work was described by an examiner as ‘beyond degree level’.

Angela always specialised in textile arts – from weaving and spinning to embroidery, printing and latterly painting on silk.

Since her recent retirement she had been able to spend time in her studio, producing works of the highest quality.

She recently had a very successful exhibition of silk paintings in Carlisle, and her untimely death means that she will not see her work featured in the next issue of the journal of the International Guild of Silk Painters this September.

However it is probably in the area of clog and step dancing that she is most widely known. Angela had always enjoyed English country dancing, but began learning and performing step and morris dances with the Throstles Nest team in 1978, and later with the Carlisle Sword, Morris and Clog Dancers and with Hexhamshire Lasses – usually with husband Frank as musician.

She developed her own steps, expanding her repertoire by learning styles of dance from Scotland, Northumberland and even Canada.
A brilliant teacher of dance, she was in demand to run workshops at folk festivals such as Whitby and Sidmouth for many years, and performed in Canada, the USA, most European countries, Russia, and even Japan.

As well as being a consummate dancer and teacher, Angela also played duet concertina, and more recently took great pleasure in learning and performing traditional folk songs.

Angela’s funeral at Lanercost Priory was a joyous celebration of her life, attended by hundreds of people including dancers from all over the country in colourful costume. A piper led the funeral procession from the church to the grave, where Angela was buried near members of her family, only yards from her place of conception at the Abbey Farm.

Afterwards, the clog and morris dancing, singing, playing and reminiscing went on into the night – as Angela would have wanted.

Frank and her many friends worldwide will miss not only Angela’s dancing, singing and her art, but also her warm and bubbly personality, infectious laugh, kindness and generosity of spirit.