Hermione Ranfurly, Countess of Ranfurly (1913–2001)

Hermione Ranfurly, née Llewellyn, was born in Postlip, Gloucestershire, to a family of Welsh origin. During her childhood, her father lost the family fortune and her mother became mentally ill. After completing her education at Southover Manor School in Sussex, 17-year-old Hermione moved to London to look for a job. It was the height of the Great Depression, and there were few opportunities, but she managed to obtain a job selling gas appliances for the Gas Light and Coke Company. Despite her near total of knowledge about cooking or kitchens, she was a success. She took a secretarial course and subsequently got a post in the War Office typing pool. In 1937, she went to Australia as secretary to Lord Wakehurst, who had been appointed as Governor of New South Wales. On a visit to Canberra, she met Daniel Knox, 6th Earl of Ranfurly, the Australian Governor-General's aide-de-camp. The couple married back in England in 1939. At the outbreak of World War II, while her husband was serving with the Sherwood Rangers in the Middle East, Lady Ranfurly defied regulations and managed to travel there to be with him. In September 1940, she was ordered to be repatriated to the UK with other "illegal wives," but jumped ship at Cape Town, South Africa, and succeeded in obtaining a plane ticket back to Egypt by implying that she was on a secret spy mission. Her ship, RMS Empress of Britain, was sunk shortly afterwards. On her arrival in Cairo, Lady Ranfurly stayed hidden in the apartment of friends, but gradually her return became known. Although her actions infuriated the British military authorities, her secretarial skills were in short supply, and she was soon recruited to work for the Special Operations Executive (SOE). In 1941, Daniel Ranfurly was reported missing after the Battle of Tobruk and Lady Ranfurly had no word of him for five months. She eventually learned he was a prisoner of war in Italy, where he remained for three years, escaping in 1944 following the Italian armistice. During this time, Lady Ranfurly worked as a personal assistant to Sir Harold MacMichael, the High Commissioner in British Palestine, and then for General Henry Maitland Wilson, the Supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean. She lived in Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Algiers, where she met many famous people, including Lady Diana Cooper, Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Sir Walter Monckton, and Noël Coward. She shared a house in Baghdad with Freya Stark, took Gen. George S. Patton shopping in Cairo, and dined with kings, including Peter II of Yugoslavia, Farouk of Egypt, and Paul of Greece. Gen. Wilson described her as having "outmanoeuvred every general in the Middle East" to achieve her goal of staying in the region against official opposition. She was reunited with her husband in Algiers in May 1944, and after a brief trip to England, resumed her work as Gen. Wilson's secretary in Algiers and Caserta, Italy.

With her husband in Rome, she got a job working for Air Marshal John Slessor, first in Naples and later in London, where she celebrated VE Day in 1945.

At the end of the war, her husband got a job in insurance at Lloyd's of London, and later farmed in Buckinghamshire. The couple's daughter was born in 1948. In 1953, Lord Ranfurly was appointed Governor of the Bahamas, where Hermione took a great interest in all aspects of life, especially the improvement of libraries and schools, and helped establish the Ranfurly Library Service in Nassau.

When the Ranfurlys returned to the UK, she extended the project to other developing countries that were short on English language books; the organization later changed its name to Book Aid International. Lord Ranfurly died of cancer in 1988, and Lady Ranfurly put together her wartime letters and diaries into a book called To War With Whitaker: The Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, 1939–1945, published in 1994. The book was a tremendous success and, encouraged by the acclaim, Lady Ranfurly then published a memoir of her childhood, The Ugly One: The Childhood Memoirs of Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, 1913–1939 (1998).