‘we’ll muddle through

[rickshaw]

Pat Buxton, resourceful secretary at wartime SOE whose catchphrase was 'we'll muddle through'

[Nick]

For those who can't see past the paywall....

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pat-buxton-resourceful-secretary-wartime-060800612.html

Pat Buxton, who has died aged 103, served during the Second World War on the secretarial staff of the Special Operations Executive.

Recruited in the autumn of 1940, she was posted to The Frythe (Station IX) at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, a secret SOE factory designing and making weapons as well as running agents and supplying details of resistance movements behind enemy lines. There, she worked for Hugh Quentin Reeves, inventor of such devices as a Sten gun silencer and the "Welrod" – a pistol with a built-in silencer for use in assassinations.

As well as taking minutes at meetings, her job involved acquiring equipment for Reeves's team, a difficult task during rationing. One notable coup was her acquisition of 25 miles of copper wire for his "Sleeping Beauty", a one-man "Motorised Submersible Canoe", or MSC, that would sabotage enemy ships without being discovered. Her response to requests for material – "we'll muddle through" led her becoming known as "Welmuddlethrough Patsy".

She was born Patricia Rosemary King on October 15 1921, the youngest of nine children of Canon Herbert King and his wife Lucy, and grew up at the Rectory in Holt, Norfolk. Both her parents had connections with the Secret Intelligence Service, and in the early months of the Second World War Pat helped her parents provide cover for Louis T Stanley, the future chairman of the BRM Formula One team, who was positioned as an "ordinand" to her father, cycling along coastal paths while he took photographs of the coastline, then accompanying him to Sheringham to post them.

At Christ's Hospital school, Hertford, Pat excelled in music, playing the violin and piano. After leaving she found a job as an assistant matron at Crofton Grange, a girls' finishing school near Puckeridge, where she was treated like a servant by girls younger than her and felt out of place: "They [asked] me whether I had 'come out', did I hunt, shoot or fish... It was pretty horrid."

Her talents did not go unnoticed, however, and the school's headmistress Marian Beard suggested to her friend Kathleen Pettigrew, the senior secretary in MI6 (the model for Miss Moneypenny), that Pat might be a suitable recruit.


In September 1938 she enrolled at St James's Secretarial College in London, where she learnt minute-taking and stenography. One of her earliest assignments was as a junior stenographer at the 1939 Round Table Conference on the future of British Mandate Palestine with Jewish and Arab leaders at St James's Palace. However, her father vetoed a proposal for her to work as a radio operator in Guernsey and secretary to Maj-Gen Telfer-Smollett, the island's governor, and she left the government secretarial service.

She found work at a solicitors in Tunbridge Wells, but found it boring and returned to Norfolk. In the summer of 1940 she went to work as PA to Lord (Edward) Cozens-Hardy, a consulting engineer and director of an electrical company, learning how to procure industrial materials – and some basic mechanics. Later that year Cozens-Hardy put her name forward for the SOE. Her interviewer recorded that she had "passed tests to high standard, [is] capable [and] would hold her own even though still young."

Pat had to leave SOE after marrying Captain Ray Buxton, adjutant of the Royal Scots Fusiliers and later of the 12th Army Photographic Intelligence, who arranged for her to work as part of the Royal Observer Corps based at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where she recorded and plotted the routes of planes and archived the work of the Aerial Photographic Intelligence Unit.

After the war the couple settled in St Albans where, to help family finances, she made leather gloves and golf club covers, alongside packing tights into boxes at the Ballito Hosiery Mill, where she rose to be export manager.

From 1980 to 1986 she worked as secretary to the headmaster of St Albans School, where former pupils recalled being greeted by a cloud of cigarette smoke as they entered her office to get her signature on "white slips" – the first-stage punishment for minor misdemeanours. She always asked what their crime was, often observing that they were silly for being caught and advising them to "be more covert" next time.

She used her retirement present to enjoy a flight around Everest, and later worked as a volunteer at St Albans Cathedral.

Pat Buxton is survived by two daughters and a son.

Pat Buxton, born October 15 1921, died January 16 2025

[Old Wombat]

Thanks for that, Nick!

And thanks, Brian, for posting the original link.

[The Rat]

Sounds like one great life.

There, she worked for Hugh Quentin Reeves, inventor of such devices as a Sten gun silencer...

I thought they just waited until it jammed.

Okay, I'll get me coat...

[Rick Lowe]

Interesting, thanks.