Mahoney and Towner were fellow students at the RCA. Towner shows the 23 year old Mahoney seated in his studio. Perhaps deliberately, perhaps by chance, Mahoney’s eye defect (Mahoney had lost the sight in his eye in a childhood accident) seems emphasised in this portrait sketch.
Tirzah Garwood recounts several amusing anecdotes about Mahoney in Long Live Great Bardfield (Fleece Press):Charlie had a glass eye but I thought that on the whole it improved his appearance, giving an interesting and piratical look to a face that as nature intended it, might have belonged to a Sunday School superintendent or a postman‘ p. 100-101
Charles Mahoney at Pevensey circa 1958