March is International Women’s Month and this year we are looking at Lady Ranfurly. My thanks go to Keith Fletcher who personally interviewed Lady Ranfurly’s daughter Lady Caroline Simmonds about her mother’s remarkable life. Lady Caroline supplied much of the following with additions from Lady Ranfurly’s wartime diaries, which were published as “To War with Whitaker”.
Early Life
Lady Ranfurly lived in Pednor for over 50 years and contributed much to local life. She was born Hermione Llewellyn on November 13th, 1913 at Postlip Hall, a large house near Winchcombe that her father rented. She was born into a life of privilege but it was not one without struggles and tragedy. Her grandfather had inherited two estates in South Wales, Cwrt Colman, near Cardiff, and Baglan, halfway between Briton Ferry and Aberavon. Life was therefore comfortable but when she was 13 the family got into financial difficulties, her parents separated and her brother Owen was killed in a plane crash.
After moving to London, Hermione’s first job at 17 was selling cookers for the Gas, Light and Coke Company. She then joined the typing pool at the War Office where she became a proficient shorthand typist, before accepting a job to travel to Australia with Lord and Lady Wakehurst as his secretary. It was there that she met and fell in love with her future husband Daniel Knox, 6th Earl Ranfurly who was ADC to the Governor-General of Australia, and they married back in England in January 1939.
The War Years
At the start of the 2nd World War Dan was posted to Palestine and Hermione determined to join him. Ignoring regulations barring certain categories of civilian wives from joining soldiers on active duty, in March 1940 she travelled across France by rail, took ship at Marseilles for Cairo and then travelled by train again to Haifa. Whilst in Palestine (today’s Israel) she worked for the Red Crescent. In September 1940 the authorities tried to ship her back to England but she jumped ship at Cape Town and made her way back to Cairo by rail and flying boat. Dan was by now in the desert in North Africa and so the authorities grudgingly allowed her to stay in Cairo provided she “made herself useful”. This she did by getting a job with the Special Operations Executive in Cairo where she learned to code and decode secret messages.
In September 1941, Dan was captured by the Germans who turned him over to the Italian army and he was sent to a POW camp in Italy. In the meantime, Hermione was taken extremely ill and was unable to look after herself, so she convalesced with General and Lady Wavell. He wanted to know about her work at SOE and as a result, the entire SOE setup in the Middle East was revamped.
Hermione then took a job as Assistant Private Secretary to the High Commissioner to Palestine based in Jerusalem and after a year, moved to Baghdad where she became Secretary to General H Maitland Wilson, I/C Persia/Iraq Command. In February 1943, Gen. Wilson became C in C Middle East, and Hermione moved with him as his Private Secretary back to Cairo. In December 1943 Gen. Wilson was appointed Supreme Allied Commander, Mediterranean Theatre and moved his HQ (including Hermione) to Algiers. She was overjoyed in May 1944 when her husband Dan suddenly appeared in Algiers having been on the run in Italy for some considerable time after escaping from the POW camp.
In July 1944 Dan was posted to Yugoslavia to liaise with the partisans and Hermione went to Naples with Gen. Wilson when he moved his HQ there. Then in November 1944 Gen. Wilson was promoted to Field Marshal and appointed Head of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington DC, and Hermione’s time with him came to an end. She returned to England (via Bovingdon) but was back in Naples in January 1945 as ADC to Air Marshal Slessor, C in C, RAF Mediterranean & Middle East. Hermione worked for him until the end of the war. She mixed with the high and mighty of all nationalities and by the end of the war probably knew more secrets than any other civilian in Europe.
After the war, Lord Ranfurly worked in insurance in London and in 1947, after a day visiting this area, Lady Ranfurly picked up a local newspaper and saw a sale notice for Little Pednor House and Farm. After a short visit they fell in love with it and bought it.
Governor of the Bahamas
In 1953 Lord Ranfurly was appointed Governor of the Bahamas. Whilst in the islands Hermione was horrified to discover the scale of poverty and the lack of education, so she started asking friends and contacts to send her surplus books which she distributed to schools and missions. On returning to the UK in the early 1960s Lady Ranfurly was persuaded by the Colonial Secretary, Lord Boyd, to continue and expand the service to other parts of the developing world. Thus the Ranfurly Library Service began. Rotary International were tremendously helpful, and the service, now called Book Aid International, has supplied over 37 million books to at least 68 countries.
Whilst in the Bahamas a dreadful fire in Nassau had left many children as orphans. It was Lady Ranfurly who helped to raise funds and establish an orphanage. The foundation stone was laid by Hermione’s daughter Lady Caroline Simmonds who still lives near Chesham.
Later Life
After returning to the UK, in 1963 the family sold the farm and moved – but only just up the road to Great Pednor Manor. Lady Ranfurly continued to work tirelessly for good causes, was a great supporter of The Overseas League and became involved in local affairs. In 1970 she was appointed OBE and in 1987 she was awarded The Rotary International Prize for World Understanding. She wrote two autobiographical books in her eighties and liked old age because “you have so many memories”. She died in 2001.
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