[1] Mawer attended Putney High School for Girls, where the aims were to educate and inspire the pupils and to help them find passions and achieve ambitions.

Census returns show live-in staff at the large family home, and newspaper reports describe participation in fashionable society weddings.

[1] Irene was accepted as a student of Elsie Fogerty at the Central School of Speech and Drama[6] where she also undertook the role of Pivot Club Social Secretary in 1915.

In 1916, while a student at Central School of Speech and Drama, Ruby Ginner's theatre company presented a mime play called 'Et Puis Bonsoir', with Mawer in the role of Harlequin.

She then put this together with Elsie Fogerty's Greek Chorus lessons on co-ordination of the rhythms of speech and movement and this led to her own technical basis for the teaching of mime.

[26] The same female focus was present in productions such as those held in Hyde Park, revealing an interesting and under-researched phenomenon of women in creative roles in theatre during this period.

The syllabus included mime, and Mawer taught this as part of her duties at the Central School of Speech and Drama[28] which was newly affiliated to the University of London.

Mawer's method contributed to the rapid changes in body training during the first four decades of the twentieth century[35] and the work of the Ginner-Mawer School can be said to form a link between Isadora Duncan and Rudolf Laban.

In 1917, Mawer married Robert Jacomb Norris Dale, who was killed in action during World War I, leaving her a widow after 10 months of marriage at the age of 24.

Dale had been talented at art, the law, and sport; his story is told in a book which pays tribute to some of the players from Rosslyn Park Rugby Club, where he had been a member.

[41] In 1930 Mawer married for a second time, to fellow Londoner and widower, Mark Edward Perugini (1876-1948), a theatre historian, journalist, author and great nephew by marriage of Charles Dickens.

[43][44] Notable students at the Ginner-Mawer School of Dance and Drama include: The Institute of Mime, which Mawer founded in 1933, had a substantial list of supporters on its council and as its patrons.