Lady Biggs-davison
MP’S wife who had served as a Wren at Bletchley Park
LADY BIGGS-DAVISON, who has died aged 93, was a leading Wren at Bletchley Park during the war and later the ebullient and supportive wife of the long-serving Tory MP Sir John Biggs-davison who was, among other things, a prominent champion of Northern Ireland’s union with Great Britain.
She was born Pamela Mary Hodder-williams in Chelsea on April 2 1924. Her father, Ralph, was chairman of Hodder and Stoughton, the publishers, and had won an MC in the First World War. Her Canadian-born mother, Marjorie, was one of the first women to attend Toronto University.
When the Second World War broke out the family was at Duddings, the house in Somerset which her parents had bought after the First World War, where Pam spent most of her time riding her Exmoor pony, Topsy, escaping lessons with the governess.
Pam and her sister enjoyed hunting and were looked after in the field by Lady Munnings, wife of the fashionable equine artist Sir Alfred Munnings, who lived in nearby Wootton Courtenay.
On one occasion a German aircraft spotted Pam in a field by a river near Duddings and swooped down with its guns firing. Pam jumped into the river and hid under a bridge.
It was Admiral Cunningham, visiting friends in Somerset, who suggested she apply to join the Wrens, and arranged for her interview and medical at Exeter. She became a Leading Wren at Bletchley Park, based at Gayhurst Manor, one of the Park’s outstations, housing some of the “bombes” used to decode the Enigma messages.
Here Pam, who had been brought up as an Anglican, met and became firm friends with another Wren, Jeannette Hannah, a Roman Catholic, and was subsequently received into the Catholic Church.
Her cover story at Bletchley was that she was a radio engineer, though after the war ended she told everyone that she had driven lorries. Neither her parents, nor her husband, who died in 1988 before the Official Secrets Act allowed some of the information to become public knowledge, ever knew of her secret wartime work.
After the war she trained as an opera singer and was going to turn professional. Instead she married John Biggs-davison, who had fallen in love with her after seeing her photograph on the grand piano at the house of her sister and brother-inlaw, Anne and George Wyndham, in Delhi. They married at the Brompton Oratory in 1948.
In 1955 Biggs-davison was elected Conservative MP for Ongar and Chigwell (later Epping Forest), and for the next 33 years until her husband’s death, Pamela Biggs-davison was an active and busy MP’S wife and mother of six. She was president of the local Girl Guides and participated in many constituency activities.
The Biggs-davisons were not rich. Weekends were spent in a two up-two down cottage on the edge of the forest of Hainault, and holidays in Somerset, to which the family and a menagerie of pets would travel in a Morris 1100.
Luckily Pam was a jolly, carefree character who never worried too much about money or leaking roofs. She and her husband were perfectly matched and they entertained a shifting cast of friends and visitors, who would recall Pam’s many acts of kindness and her infectious laugh.
Pam Biggs-davison’s two youngest daughters were active in the West Somerset Pony Club, and Pam became district commissioner of the club. She was widowed at the early age of 64 and subsequently she lived permanently in Somerset, where, besides her involvement in the Pony Club, she looked after the parish priest at Minehead Catholic Church, and also taught local children their catechism.
She is survived by two sons and four daughters.
Lady Biggs-davison, born April 2 1924, died December 11 2017