Fwd: OBITUARY : Patricia Robins, romantic novelis and former wartime 'Filter Room' girl

Wednesday 21 December 2016

OBITUARY : Patricia Robins, romantic novelis
and former wartime 'Filter Room' girl
-------------------------------------

Patricia Robins, the bestselling romantic novelist, who has died aged
95, was also known to fans of historical fiction as Claire Lorrimer; in
later life it was revealed that she had also played a vital role during
the Second World War in helping to keep Hitler’s forces at bay.

Patricia Denise Robins was born on February 1 1921 at Hove, Sussex, the
second of three daughters of Denise Robins, herself a bestselling
novelist known as “the Queen of Romance”, whose tales of passion in
exotic locations outsold the more sugary offerings of Barbara Cartland.

  Her maternal grandmother, Kathleen Clarice Groom, was also a novelist
who kept herself afloat with her writing after she had scandalously
abandoned her first husband, Herman Klein, and eloped with an officer
and the family jewels. Patricia’s father, Arthur Robins, had been
invalided out of the Army after being seriously wounded in the First
World War, after which he became a corn broker on the Baltic Exchange.....


.....“My father … said no German was ever going to come across his
garden,” she recalled. “He went to the end of the lawn, dug a trench,
and got all his hunting shotguns and ammunition together. We would see
planes being shot down into fields but in a sense it was all rather
exciting.”

Patricia soon volunteered for duty in the WAAF and after basic training
was assigned to “Special Duties” and posted to RAF Fighter Command at
Rudloe Manor, near Bath, to work in a newly created “Filter Room”,
housed in a former cowshed but later relocated underground, where she
became involved in plotting the precise movements of aircraft – friend
or foe – across the country. “The officers thought we would faint or not
last the shift, but they quickly realised we were even more competent
than the men,” she recalled.

There and at Bentley Priory, near Harrow, she and her fellow WAAF Filter
Room girls became an integral part of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding’s
integrated defence system of radar, raid plotting and radio, helping to
follow the flightpaths of enemy aircraft as they crossed the Channel.

“I was part of the team standing around a big metal map table moving
magnetic arrows around to show where the planes were as they moved
rapidly in from different directions,” she said. “As radar signals came
in, my job was to filter the information to show precise positions so
that our planes could be scrambled to meet them. The Germans didn’t
realise we could do that.” She finished the war as a Flight Officer.

Their pioneering work would later be recognised by Winston Churchill as
a crucial factor in winning the war, but like their counterparts at
Bletchley Park, the Filter Room women had been made to sign the Official
Secrets Act, preventing them from discussing their service for 30 years
after the war.

In the periods when the Luftwaffe eased off, Patricia Robins wrote
fiction for magazines to earn petrol money, and published her first
romantic novel, To the Stars, in 1944.

Her writing career began in earnest after her marriage, in 1947, to
Donald Clark, a former RAF pilot and later air attaché at the Ministry
of Aviation, with whom she had three children. Like her mother, she
became a prolific author of light romantic fiction, their locales often
inspired by her husband’s postings abroad.....


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/12/21/patricia-robins-romantic-novelist-former-wartime-filter-room/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2016/12/20/lorrimerold-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqaxhR1vC4M3eHXTZuhDlJp36FKaxWhd3ByARPSkc-jRo.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2016/12/20/lorrimeryoung-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqH-B8iTnvHdMJgwP0InBQYVzt7SZsQQ7h3oKyATfgi0w.jpg

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/patricia-robins-vlddxwbsh

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2016/12/20/mavreen-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqbNORcyrSbseug0EJkwXpksEhha5fk1Vxcq4rOaZhHwU.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2016/12/20/lorrimerold-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqQ99bcywK3ovn70OLmYu7RvcGjdxbBaRy7TzoQO1nXvA.jpg