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Life
She was the second of the three daughters of Hermann Stanham, a major in the Royal Field Artillery and his wife Olive Florence, néeColgate, daughter of a Lincolnshire farmer

They lived at Mitchen Hall "a grand but rather isolated house of peach-coloured brick" page 8 Her Brilliant Career. Her father's moods dominated family life "I have listened to other people's accounts of their happy childhoods with sadness mingled with disbelief.' wrote Patience "I recognised mine as a snuffing out every spontaneous impulse to the point where one might have been said to be walking on tiptoe to avoid the detonations.'

Her father's poor business sense (his pig farm had failed) put strain on both the family finances and her parent's marriage and Patience was sent to live with her aunt and uncle in London where she attended Queen's College, Harley Street with her cousin. She was a very academic child and passed her University entrance exams at 16. Her father thought her too young to start university so she instead she spent a year in Bonn, Germany, studying first economics then switched to history of art where she lived in a "kind of prison" this was a Seventeenth century observatory in the Poppelsdorfer Allee where she lodged with a professor of astronomy and his wife and child. A desire to get out of her lodgings oppressive atmosphere led her out walking in the town where she discovered a love of Baroque architecture

In 1938 after graduating Patience travelled with her sister Tania to Eastern Europe. The trip was funded by a grant from the Society of Quakers, who wanted to promote friendships with the Romanians. .' The sisters were there when Queen Marie died in July (she was the grand daughter of Queen Victoria  )The lavishness of the funeral rites prompted Patience to writer her first piece of journalism, which appeared in a Bucharest paper. The paper's editor infatuated by PAteince laid siege to her, filling her hotel room with tuberoses, the scent of which, she said, always filled her with remembered horror. Tania and Patience escaped his attentions by fleeing to the Black Sea in a monoplane piloted by a Romanian prince. She returned to London in 1939 she took up a job at the Foreign office. When the Second World War broke out Patience was dismissed from her Foreign Office job she had only recently taken up for, she claimed, ‘having too many foreign contacts’ She got a job at the Arts Council and there met Thomas Gray. Although he was already married with two children she began an affair. She had two children, a son Nicholas and a daughter Miranda with Gray and took his name by public announcement in the London Gazette of 17 January 1941. .

Books

 * Jones, Margaret.E (1952) Gray, Patience, ed Indoor Plants and Gardens, Great Britain, Architectural Press 1952