Patience Gray

Patience Jean Gray (31 October 1917 – 10 March 2005) was a British cookery and travel writer of the mid-20th century. Her most popular books were Plats Du Jour (1957), written with Primrose Boyd about French cooking, and Honey From A Weed (1986), an account of the Mediterranean way of life.

Beginning life as Patience Jean Stanham at Shackleford, near Godalming, Surrey, she was the second of the three daughters of Hermann Stanham, a major in the Royal Field Artillery and his wife Olive Florence, née Colgate, daughter of a Lincolnshire farmer. She spent her childhood in Surrey and on the Sussex coast. As a teenager she lived with her uncle and aunt in London, attending Queen's College, a school for girls in Harley Street, a prelude to the London School of Economics and a degree under the tutelage of the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell.

Patience discovered late in life that her father, at various times a surgeon, a pig farmer, and finally a photographer, was the son of a Polish rabbi called Warschavski, who had arrived in England in 1861 and become a Unitarian minister. During her childhood at Mitchen Hall, "a grand but rather isolated house of peach-coloured brick", her father's moods dominated family life: "I have listened to other people's accounts of their happy childhoods with sadness mingled with disbelief," Patience wrote. "I recognised mine as a snuffing out of every spontaneous impulse, to the point where one might have been said to be walking on tiptoe to avoid the detonations."

Her father's poor business sense (his pig farm had failed) put strain on the family finances and her parent's marriage. Patience was sent to live with her aunt and uncle in London where she attended Queen's College, Harley Street with her cousin. She was an excellent student and passed her university entrance exams at the age of 16. However, her father thought she was too young to start university and she spent a year in Bonn, Germany, studying first economics, then switching to history of art, living in what she called a "kind of prison": a 17th-century observatory in the Poppelsdorfer Allee, with a professor of astronomy and his wife and child. A desire to escape the oppressive atmosphere of her lodgings led her out walking in the city, where she discovered a love of Baroque architecture."

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