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Patsy Jellicoe ‘is the most erudite women I know’. Gore Vidal’s words described a woman who had recreated her life when her marriage fell apart in the mid-1950.

Raised Anglo-Irish, Patsy O’Kane grew up in the turbulent, fast-paced days of Shanghai’s 1920’s heyday. Her journeys back to Europe as a gifted student were interrupted by war and internment by the Japanese, released only in 1942 under a diplomatic exchange, she became, after a blindingly fast courtship, the Countess Jellicoe, the wife of the war hero son of Britain’s most famous First World War admiral, she became a diplomat’s partner, ready to travel to and take on the likes of London, Washington, Brussels and Baghdad.   

She was encouraged to dip her toe into new waters by two significant London figures, Ralph Pinder Wilson, As President of the Royal Asiatic Society and at one time Director of the British Museum and John Beckwith, the highly respected Byzantinist and curator of the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum. That. First lecture gave Patsy the courage to widen her scope and she became a recognised expert on an extraordinarily wide range of subjects: the civilisations of the Silk route, the philosophy and history of garden design and architecture from China, to the Courts of the Mughal emperors to the great houses of the West – in Britain, America and Europe. She understood how culture and ideas travelled the great silk routes and brought her deep knowledge into her famous lectures like The Rituals of Bathing, Ambassadresses I never knew, Kashgar, Edens of the East: Chinese Gardens, Wandering Tales: Layard and Nineveh, Mirrors of the Mughals: Reflections on Princely India, Some Sense and Nonsense: English Country Houses and British Gardens: London’s Greener Shades.  

Her regular drinks parties hosted some of the most interesting people of the times and were, in many ways, some of the last great salons in which great ideas are exchanged. Patsy Jellicoe was not the easiest of mothers but a person of formidable intellect, sometimes biting humour and a person with a gritty determination. A woman wanting to make her mark in the world.