Pamela Cooper

Pamela Margaret Cooper (24 October 1910 – 13 July 2006) was a British courtier, campaigner for refugees, and humanitarian.

She was born in Chelsea in London, into an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Rev (later Canon) Arthur Henry Fletcher, was a scion of a family of Church of Ireland clergymen from County Waterford; her mother was the former Alice Hodgson. After Pamela's birth, the family all moved to Merrow, near Guildford, where her father became rector. He served as an Army chaplain in the France during the First World War. Her education at Guildford High School was interrupted when her father was sent to become a minister in Sanremo on the Italian Riviera, posted there for his health.

Although her family called her "Frog", she became a well-known beauty in London society in the 1930s. She met Patrick Hore-Ruthven during a stag hunt on Exmoor in 1932; he had been rusticated from Cambridge University due to a youthful indiscretion – he had bitten a policeman's nose. Their mutual lack of money delayed matters, but they were married at Westminster Abbey on 4 January 1939, with her father officiating. Their first son, Alexander Patrick Greysteil, was born on 26 November 1939.

Her husband was an officer in the Rifle Brigade, and was posted to Cairo after the outbreak of the Second World War. Leaving her infant son with her parents in Dublin, she followed her husband to Cairo, where she became friends with Freya Stark and Jacqueline Lampson, and worked in Intelligence with the Brotherhood of Freedom. She returned to Ireland in 1942, where she gave birth to their second son, Malise. Her husband, by then ranked Temporary Major and serving with the newly created SAS, died in an Italian hospital in north Africa on 24 December 1942, from wounds sustained in a raid against a fuel dump near Tripoli.

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