Pamela Cooper

Pamela Margaret Cooper (née Fletcher; 24 October 1910 – 13 July 2006), known as the Hon. Mrs Patrick Hore-Ruthven between 1939 and 1945, and as Viscountess Ruthven of Canberra between 1945 and 1952, was a British courtier, campaigner for refugees, and humanitarian.

Biography She was born in Chelsea, 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 her birth, the family moved to Merrow, Surrey, 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.

Cooper's elder son succeeded her father-in-law as the 2nd Earl of Gowrie in May 1955, and was later a minister in Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. Her younger son, Malise Ruthven, is an author. She wrote a memoir, A Cloud of Forgetting, in 1993.

Her granddaughter, Chloe Ruthvens filmed and released a personal documentary The Do-Gooders in 2012 where she revisited her grandmother's humanitarian work in Palestine & Jordan.

Humanitarian work The Coopers took up charitable activities. They gave aid to refugees who had escaped across the Danube from Hungary during the 1956 revolution, joining a Save the Children relief team at Andau in Austria.

They spent over a year in northern Jordan in 1960–1961, assisting Palestinian refugees in camps near Irbid. They joined a Save the Children relief effort again following the 1962 Buin Zahra earthquake on 1 September which killed around 12,000 people and rendered 22,000 homeless.

In the 1970s and 1980s, they repeatedly travelled to the Middle East to work in Palestinian refugee camps. They conducted a survey of the conditions of Palestine refugees for the International Committee for Palestine Human Rights in 1975. The Coopers worked for Oxfam in Beirut through the summer of 1982, while the city was besieged by Israeli troops. They established the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians in 1984.

Death Cooper died in Amesbury, Wiltshire, aged 95, on 13 July 2006. She was survived by her second husband, who died on 19 May 2007, and their children.