[1] At Chelsea School of Art, during the 1940s, her tutors included Graham Sutherland for painting and Henry Moore for sculpture, who helped to develop Susan's innate feeling for three-dimensional shape and form.
Williams-Ellis studied Fine Art at Chelsea Polytechnic, where her tutors included Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.
In an era when the idea of the "working woman" was an anathema, the entrepreneurial success of Susan Williams-Ellis, as a designer and a businesswoman (as well as wife and mother), was unusual.
Portmeirion was one of the first retail companies to fully understand and exploit the "lifestyle" consumer, creating a wide range of products including casual tableware, housewares and gifts for both women and men.
It was based on illustration plates discovered by Susan in an antique natural history book she found at an antiquarian bookseller's in London: Weldon & Wesley.
She bought some French encyclopaedias and, as she was leaving, the bookseller showed her a brightly hand-coloured 'herbal' book of 1817, illustrated with a large selection of plants and flowers.
An avid scuba-diver, she devised a technique of sketching fish and corals from life under the water by using tracing paper and marking crayons.
They are in the coffee-table art book Magic Gardens and can be seen in Susan's granddaughter, Rose Fulbright-Vickers', print design for the Tropical collection.
[citation needed] On 13 March 1944, her brother, Christopher (1923–1944), fell in action before Monte Cassino as a lieutenant in the Welsh Guards.
Anwyl and Menna are artists who had a close involvement with Portmeirion Pottery; Siân is a peace activist; Robin is a Welsh language author.
Her father wrote in his autobiography, Architect Errant, about his feelings: His [Clough's son Christopher's] roommate in the Gibbs building there, Euan Cooper-Willis, subsequently married our elder daughter Susan.