Patricia Rosemary Buxton (nee King) 15th October 1921 - 16th January 2025

Patricia (Pat) Buxton, a former member of staff of St Albans School, who worked as secretary to the headmasters Frank Kilvington and Simon Wilkinson, and mother to David Buxton OA, was associated with The School for over 40 years. She was seen as a fair and loved member of the St Albans School community. Through researching her life, it is her former work that has proved of interest and her working involvement with the secret operations during World War II. She was one of the many unknown women of the secretarial corps for the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E). The youngest of nine children of Canon Herbert and Lucy King, she grew up at the Rectory in Holt, Norfolk. Her father was a Cambridge graduate and alongside his ordained duties tutored Greek and Latin, whilst her mother Lucy, who had come from a ‘well-healed family’, attended to the duties as wife of a priest. Both had connections with the Special Intelligence Service, and were seen as suitable cover for agents to stay or to allow the passing of information to various government departments. It is this connection that led Pat to become part of the S.O.E network. Pat’s connection, like many other women, was that of secretary and minute taker - she formed part of the unknown female workforce that archived and collated information that would aid the war effort.

Pat’s early life had seen her boarding at Christ’s Hospital School in Hertford, where she excelled at Music, playing the violin and piano and, if coerced, singing in the choir. She matriculated, which surprised her Headmistress and her father. Graduating in 1938, with her father not knowing what to do with her, he asked her Headmistress to find her something that would occupy her and ‘get her head out of the clouds’. So, she was sent as Assistant Matron to Crofton Grange in Puckeridge (a finishing School for wealthy girls), where she found life hard and was seen as an under servant to the very young girls, saying “they did ask me where I had ‘come out’, did I hunt, shoot or fish…. It was pretty horrid”. Her hard work and dedication did not go unnoticed and the Crofton Grange Headmistress Marian G Beard–suggested to her friend Kathleen Pettigrew (the senior secretary in MI6 and inspiration for Ian Flemming’s James Bond character Miss Moneypenny) that Pat was someone who they needed to know about. Pat won a scholarship to St James Secretarial College, London in September 1938. One of Pat’s earliest assignments was as a junior stenographer at the 1939 British Government Round Table Conference with the Jewish and Arab leaders at St James, Whitehall. Her ability to minute take at speed and ‘stenotype precisely’ was seen as being exceptional. Unbeknown to Pat, it was requested that she be sent behind enemy lines to act a as a radio operator in Guernsey and secretary to Major Telfer-Smollett (Governor of Guernsey). Her father refused this request and she was removed from the governmental cascade of secretaires.

In 1940 she found work at a solicitors’ in Tunbridge Wells but found this boring and so returned to Norfolk. During the summer of 1940 she went to work as PA to Lord Edward Cozens Hardy, who through his engineering prowess was on the board of the Brush Electrical Engineering Company in Loughborough, and later Hatfield, Hertfordshire. It was here that she learnt the art of procurement for industrial goods and the basics of car mechanics. Lord Cozens-Hardy described her as ‘Miss Can Do’ and was obviously impressed enough that later that year he put her name forward as part of the formation of the S.O.E. Her ‘downtime’ saw her as part of the cover for the agent Louis T Stanley (who was positioned as an ordinand to her father), cycling along coastal paths whilst he took photographs of the Norfolk coastline, then accompanying him to Sheringham to post them. A proposal of marriage was refused by her father, and he was somewhat pleased when Stanley was sent to greet Rudolf Hess (a leading member of the Nazi Party) on his defection. Pat joined The Woman’s Royal Voluntary Service helping with teas and taking supplies to the Newfoundland Regiment and helping her father, who was Chaplin to the regiments billeted around Blakeney in Norfolk. It is through this connection that she met her future husband Ray Buxton, Adjutant of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

By the autumn of 1940, the Government were recruiting for the S.O.E. Pat underwent a strict interview which showed her secretarial skills and demeanour; she was listed as ‘passed tests to high standard, capable…. would hold her own even though still young, [….] organised and an excellent choice for Q’. She was duly sent to work at The Frythe (Station IX) in Welwyn, Hertfordshire. Station IX was responsible for running agents and supplying details of resistance movements behind enemy lines in both the European and Pacific theatres of war. It was home to the real-life ‘Q branch’, creating innovative, secret weapons that Bond himself would have been proud of, including the sleeve gun, WEL rod, silencer and STEN submachine gun, as well as organising transport systems for agents that enabled them to go unnoticed into enemy territory. Here she was under-secretary to Hugh Quentin Reeves, an inventor and engineer, and her job was to record all his meetings and to acquire equipment for his team, which was a difficult task given rationing. Her response to Reeves requests was ‘we’ll muddle through this’ and led her to becalled Welmuddlethrough Patsy. She achieved the acquisition of 25 miles of copper wire for his new project The Sleeping Beauty (a one-man submarine that would place a landmine on the bottom of an enemy ship without being discovered).

In 1943 she was proposed to by Ray Buxton OA on a crowded train from London, leaving the passengers in suspense as she needed a month to think about marrying him, but this time her father approved of her suitor. His reference from her father’s friend William T Marsh (Headmaster) had sealed the deal. Marriage and secret working at The Frythe were not conducive to each other. Ray helped her find work as part of the Royal Observer Corps based at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and here she recorded and plotted the routes of planes and archived the work of the Aerial Photographic Intelligence Unit. In 1945 Ray returned from the war and family life began; to make ends meet she undertook making leather gloves and golf club covers, alongside packing tights into boxes, at Ballito Hosiery Company. Before long, her secretarial skills were found out and she ended up becoming the Export Manager for the company.

In 1980 she joined St Albans School, these she declared were her halcyon days, wishing she had joined the school much earlier. Accounts of her time there, were of ‘being greeted by a plume of cigarette smoke, as you entered her office’. Boys attended her office to gain the important signature for The White Slip (a first stage punishment for a minor miss demeanour) She always asked what their crime was and often declared that they were silly for being caught and were told to ‘next time be more covert’. She hated cooking and couldn’t see the point of putting effort into something you would only enjoy fleetingly, she stocked up on the School’s meals, taking home the remnants of the day. If there was sticky toffee pudding on the menu, she had one of her pupil scouts go fetch her another dish. She acted as public relations officer for many of The School’s drama and choral activities, ensuring programmes and seating allocations were arranged. In 1983 she formed part of the School’s Orchestra for The Chamber Concert at the Cathedral playing the solo typewriter in Freyhan’s ‘Toy Symphony’.  Upon her retirement in 1986, her gift from the school was used to enjoy a flight around the top of Everest. She continued to work until the age of 71, before volunteering at the St Albans Cathedral.

As Archivist to The School, her work stands out, neat, orderly and often with her initials in the top left- hand corner of the paperwork. This a throw -back to her earlier time as an S.O.E secretary, where all correspondence and minutes were marked with the minute takers hand.

Sue Gregory Archivist