Photo credit: Professor Pamela Howard OBE in her studio in Selsey, West Sussex, 2025. Photograph: Bill Bradshaw/Arts University Bournemouth
We are very sad to share the news that Professor Pamela Howard OBE, a patron of Chichester Women’s History Group, died on 26 October 2026, aged 87.
A determined beginning
Born in Newcastle in 1939, Pamela grew up in a family of Jewish émigrés from Belarus and Latvia. Her path into the arts was far from straightforward. She was expelled from grammar school for drawing a hotel during a maths exam. Undeterred, and without her parents’ help, she talked her way into a grant to study at Birmingham College of Art, and then won a place on the theatre design course at the Slade.
“Exactly the place I wanted to be”
In 1962, the newly opened Chichester Festival Theatre staged its first season under Laurence Olivier. A young Pamela was part of it, making headdresses for the opening productions. She later recalled it as new, exciting and exactly the place she wanted to be.
She came back to Chichester many times. In 1980 she designed Terra Nova, Ted Tally’s play about Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole. Her icy set was so convincing that, despite a summer heatwave, audiences abandoned the Pimm’s and queued for hot drinks at the interval. In 1984 she designed The Merchant of Venice, with Alec Guinness as Shylock, set among great peeling walls of the Venetian ghetto.
A life on the world’s stages
Between those Chichester chapters, Pamela built an extraordinary international career. She designed for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, and worked with leading French directors in Lyon and Paris. Her opera and theatre work took her from Thessaloniki and Brno to Toronto and Tokyo. She championed theatre made in unexpected places, from a Glasgow transport museum to village halls.
She was just as committed to teaching. She led the design course at Central School of Art and Design, held the international chair in drama at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, and was a guiding figure at the Prague Quadrennial. Her book What Is Scenography? remains a key text for students. “I teach what I practise, and I practise what I teach” she said.
Celebrating Chichester’s theatre
In 2012, to mark the Festival Theatre’s 50th anniversary, Pallant House Gallery invited Pamela to create The Art of Chichester Festival Theatre: A Celebration. She tracked down long-lost set models and sketches, some rescued from shoeboxes and private flats. She shaped the exhibition around the theatre’s parkland setting, complete with a golden oak tree hung with ribbons bearing critics’ verdicts from 1962.
A home by the sea
In 2003 Pamela moved from London to Selsey. She made her home in two converted railway carriages just yards from the beach, with a studio in the garden, surrounded by a lifetime of drawings, posters and design memorabilia. She was made OBE in 2008 and never stopped working. When she died, she had just returned from Romania, where she had received an honorary doctorate.
Our patron
Pamela became a patron of Chichester Women’s History Group in 2025. That year she gave two talks to our supporters. In January, Art Speaks Louder Than Words and In November, Life? or Theatre? Artist Charlotte Salomon explored the German-Jewish artist whose extraordinary life in paintings Pamela had brought to the stage in Toronto in 2017. Pamela’s talks were always fascinating, insightful and wholly engaging.
Pamela is survived by her daughters, Rebecca and Sophie, and three grandchildren, Benjamin, Lily and Dylan. Our thoughts are with them, and with everyone whose lives she touched.
