Dancing the night away in London on 48-hour passes, she told friends as a cover story that her department was responsible for deciding who got medals, which apparently focused the minds of young officers. Her mother scraped together clothing coupons to buy her a dress for the 1941 debutantes’ ball, which she briefly attended but sneaked off to go to the Café de Paris. Minutes before she arrived, it was bombed, killing 80 people.
She had an ability to think fast in any situation. She related how once she was staying in a country house, putting her hair in curlers at her dressing table, when Lord Beaverbrook entered the room, wearing only his pyjama tops. “Oh good,” she said. “I needed a hand. Could you hold these for me please?” She passed him her curling papers, which he dutifully doled out to her, and then when she had finished and thanked him dismissively, he obediently padded out of the room.
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She loved bridge and horse-racing and was a steward at Folkestone racecourse. On one occasion as a minister she was being shown around a stud when a stallion demonstrated his masculinity, somewhat to the embarrassment of the staff. “It’s all right,” she reassured them. “I’m sure he just knows I used to be a mayor.” She chose the crown jewels as her luxury when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1991, in the hope it would enhance her chances of rescue.
Trumpington enjoyed the celebrity of her later years, which included a starring role in a television documentary on fashion for the elderly. She published a ghost-written autobiography, Coming Up Trumps, in 2014 and retired from the House of Lords when she was 95, in 2017. Two weeks before she died, in a ceremony at her Chelsea nursing home, she was invested with the Légion d’Honneur by the French ambassador, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, in recognition of her wartime service.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/27/lady-trumpington-obituary
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