"Pat Buxton, who has died aged 103, served during the Second World War on the secretarial staff of the Special Operations Executive. Recruited in the autumn of 1940, she was posted to The Frythe (Station IX) at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, a secret SOE factory designing and making weapons as well as running agents and supplying details of resistance movements behind enemy lines. There she worked for Hugh Quentin Reeves, inventor of such devices as a Sten gun silencer and the “Welrod” – a pistol with a built-in silencer for use in assassinations. She was born Patricia Rosemary King on October 15 1921, the youngest of nine children of Canon Herbert King and his wife Lucy, and grew up at the Rectory in Holt, Norfolk. Both her parents had connections with the Secret Intelligence Service and in the early months of the Second World War Pat helped her parents provide cover for Louis T Stanley, the future chairman of the BRM Formula I team, who was positioned as an “ordinand” to her father, cycling along coastal paths while he took photographs of the coastline, then accompanying him to Sheringham to post them." Pat Buxton, resourceful secretary at wartime SOE whose catchphrase was “we’ll muddle through”
