Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly

Hermione Knox, Countess of Ranfurly, (née Llewellyn; 13 November 1913 – 11 February 2001) was a British author and aristocrat who is best known for her war memoir To War With Whitaker: The Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, 1939–1945.

Childhood Hermione Llewellyn was born in Postlip, Gloucestershire, into a wealthy family of Welsh origin. She had an older brother, Griffith Owen (1912–1933), and two sisters, Cynthia (born 1916) and Daphne (born 1922); "I started life as a disappointment – because I wasn't a boy", she recalled. "I continued being a disappointment – because I was ugly. Instead of minding, I determined to ride better, run faster, be funnier and give more generous presents than the rest of the family." Their father, Griffith Robert Poyntz Llewellyn, was dashing, popular and extravagant; his lack of caution was to have disastrous consequences, and he lost the family fortune on horses and houses when Hermione was thirteen. "We became poor very quickly", she reported. Their mother, Emily Constance (née Elwes), became mentally ill during Hermione's childhood and was diagnosed with manic-depression. The family accompanied her to Switzerland for treatment. There was further family tragedy with Owen's death in an air crash.

Career In 1930 and impoverished, a 17-year-old Hermione moved to London to look for a job. It was the height of the Great Depression, and there were few available openings, but she managed to obtain a job selling gas appliances for the Gas Light and Coke Company. The exchange was to provide the title of Lady Ranfurly's war diaries, To War with Whitaker, which proved to be an unexpected publishing success in the 1990s. However, Hermione ignored the rules, and in February 1940 managed to obtain a passage to Egypt from a shady London travel agent, arriving in Palestine two weeks later.

Hermione thought that with her secretarial skills, she would easily find a job in the Middle East. It proved more difficult than expected, and in September 1940 a one-eyed brigadier ordered her forcible repatriation to Britain with other "illegal wives". she became the highly efficient secretary to George Pollock, the head of the SOE. At first pleased with her job, she quickly became concerned about the SOE's actions, intentions, and dubious security and finances,

In April 1941, Dan Ranfurly was reported missing after the Battle of Tobruk, and Hermione had no knowledge about whether he was living or dead until she received a letter from him five months later. He remained a prisoner of war in Italy for three years, escaping in 1944 following the Italian armistice.

Between 1941 and 1944, Hermione Ranfurly lived in Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Algiers, She dined with kings: Peter II of Yugoslavia, Farouk of Egypt and the future Paul of Greece. By the end of the war, she likely knew more secrets than any other civilian in the area. Hermione was well-positioned for more noteworthy encounters: she taught Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt to dance the Boomps-a-Daisy, and received Marshal Josip Broz Tito for tea: "he was short and stocky and dressed to kill" according to the hostess. With Dan Ranfurly in Rome, she managed to find a job working for Air Marshal John Slessor, first in Naples and later in London, where she celebrated VE Day by emptying five wastepaper baskets of Slessor's "more boring papers" out of the window.

Post war At the end of the war, Dan Ranfurly obtained a job in insurance at Lloyd's of London, and later farmed in Buckinghamshire, while Hermione attempted to put her wartime letters and diaries in order while seated on the sitting room floor. Hermione took a great interest in all aspects of Bahamian life, and was concerned by the lack of books in libraries and schools. She asked friends to send unwanted volumes, a project that was to become the Ranfurly Library Service in Nassau. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 1970 New Year Honours.

Lord Ranfurly died of cancer in 1988, and the Countess continued to work her diaries in Buckinghamshire. Her old friend and neighbour Lord Carrington read her work, and with his help To War with Whitaker was published in 1994.

Works To War With Whitaker: The Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, 1939–1945 (1994) The Ugly One: The Childhood Memoirs of Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, 1913–1939 (1998)